Kelly Duncan was lying quietly in her hospital bed.

 

One week ago she was carelessly partying with her friends; drinking her way through the Florida Keys. Now, she was in intensive care at George Washington University Medical Center with a broken wrist, a broken ankle, and a 6” gash in her left thigh.

 

At age 22, she was the only surviving crew member and one of only five passengers alive after the flight she was attending clipped the 14th Street Bridge in Washington D.C. and nose-dived into the frigid waters of the Potomac River.

 

Her physical injuries paled in comparison to the emotional trauma she was experiencing.

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“Guilt…” she confessed to her nurses, “I am overwhelmed with intense feelings of guilt.”

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Her thoughts of the crash were confusing to her. She could not decipher which memories were real and which ones were planted in her brain from the continuous media coverage she had been watching. But her recollections of the people who were seated around her were all too clear. She remembered being annoyed by them. It was a stewardess’s job to provide comfort to passengers and the best she could do was tolerate them.

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The 74 passengers, including one experienced pilot, all seemed very worried about the safety of their flight from Washington to Fort Lauderdale that day. Their departure time was delayed by almost 2 hours due to weather conditions. Kelly could not have known just how precarious their situation truly was. She trusted the experts. She presumed the pilots knew what they were doing. She was counting on those who were responsible for facilitating proper de-icing procedures.

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Still, she knew enough about proper procedures to know where she should be seated for takeoff; although this only added to her guilt. She felt she should have insisted her colleagues Donna, Kelly, and Marilyn be seated according to procedures as well. Now they, along with 76 others were dead. Their flight had been airborne less than one minute.

 

She had waited in the wreckage for nearly a half hour to be rescued, all the while hearing the screams and taking in the chaos; but the flashbacks that haunted her came from those fleeting seconds prior to the crash.

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In her pain and confusion, Kelly did something that day she had never done before; she prayed. She would claim later her life was changed, not as a result of the crash but as a result of those prayers. Her guilt would be lifted from her. She would find faith and purpose. Those who study the behavior of survivors say this is common. Generally, religious feelings come in waves and then pass. With Kelly, they eventually stuck and it made all the difference in the world for her.

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Questions to consider:

After her dramatic rescue, Duncan often considered the possibility that God spared her life because he was mad at her. Why do you suppose she felt that way?

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Two of the other survivors from this plane crash were rescued by a bystander who jumped into the icy cold water to help bring them to shore. After he rescued them, he went back for another victim and drowned. Why do you think God allowed that to happen?

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Who were the decision makers throughout these harrowing hours and what powers did they have?