PODCAST
A heartbreaking first-person account of the hours and days after the crash of Swissair Flight 111. When news breaks that a plane from New York to Geneva has gone down off Nova Scotia, a family is thrown into shock, uncertainty, and desperate hope for survivors. The narrative follows their frantic search for information, the crushing confirmation of loss, and the extraordinary compassion they encounter—from friends, community members, airline support staff, and spiritual caregivers in Halifax and at Peggy’s Cove. A moving story about grief, faith, human solidarity, and the “involuntary brotherhood” formed through shared tragedy.
Compiled and translated from David Wilkins, United by Tragedy. A Father’s Story, Pacific Press Publishing Association.
The Call
Have you seen the news?”
“No, I haven’t seen any television…”
“A plane has gone down,” Dan said. “We want to be sure it wasn’t Monte’s. What was his flight number?“
Janet and I had barely arrived at the home of Jack and Nadine Irvine in Maple Valley, Washington, when the phone rang. The phone call was from our son-in-law Dan Fiorello in San Jose, California.
“What are you talking about?” I felt as if a shot had gone through my body.
“A plane has gone down on its way from New York to either Zurich or Geneva. The time and point of departure matches Monte’s itinerary. Darren saw it on the news and called us because he didn’t know where you were. Was that Monte’s plane?“
Unbelief and shock struggled inside me.
“Jack!” I yelled at our host. “Turn on CNN!” As he moved toward the television set, I asked Janet, “What flight was Monte on?”
“It was Swissair en route from New York to Geneva, Switzerland.” She remembered that the evening before she notified the college in Collonges-sous-Saleve, the school he planned to attend in France, that he would be arriving on one of Swissair’s flights.
I turned back to the phone. “We haven’t seen the news and we don’t know his flight number,” I said. “It may have been Monte’s plane.” The calmness of my voice surprised me, because the turmoil inside made me feel as if I wanted to explode. “Do you think it is?“
“I don’t know, Dad. I just heard on the news that there was a Swissair flight number 111 that was taking off from New York at 8:18 p.m., New York time. It was on its way to Europe and went down in the ocean off Nova Scotia, somewhere near Halifax. Impact time with the water was 10:31 Nova Scotia time.“
“Oh, no,” I groaned. I breathed deeply and called to my wife, “Janet, what was Monte’s flight number?“
She couldn’t remember. Monte had three different flights from Southern California to Geneva. I waited for Janet to think about the flight number.
“We faxed a form to the school last evening and gave his flight information,” she said. She closed her eyes, as if trying to see the number on the paper. “It had two ones in it. I remember that much.“
My heart sank. If there had been two, maybe there were three ones. “Could… could it have been Flight 111?“
Again the seconds ticked by. Finally, Janet nodded. “Yes, yes, I think so – 111 sounds like it.“
My wife obviously had been listening only to my side of the conversation, but she sensed that something was terribly wrong. Initially, she thought something bad had happened in San Jose, because she knew I was talking to Dan who lived there.
Just then a commercial ended on CNN and the announcer said, “There has been a crash of Swissair Flight 111 on its way to Zurich from New York. It went down off the coast of Nova Scotia at 10:31 p.m., Nova Scotia time.“
Later, the spokesperson corrected his statement: Geneva, not Zurich, had actually been the flight destination.
Please don’t let it be true!
We stared at the screen.
My first thought was that it couldn’t be true! I was his father and very close to my son. Hadn’t God warned me, made me feel that something was going to happen? Janet hadn’t received any warning either.
The CNN announcer continued speaking. They said there were survivors! Hope began to grow within us, despite the shock that had paralyzed me for the last 10 minutes.
Our friends Randy and Loralyn Horning were there and experienced this moment with us.
“I think we should pray,” Janet said.
First, we all hugged each other. Tears ran down our cheeks; no one tried to be brave. We were all acting purely on emotion.
We knelt down to pray. Inside, I cried out to God that none of this was true! Let it be a mistake! Each of us prayed silently, and then, one by one, we expressed our pain and fear.
When we stood up, I didn’t feel any better. Janet was surrounded by a calmness that I couldn’t share.
Family assistance
We went back to the television and continued watching. CNN showed an 800 family assistance number that close family members could call.
I called the number and after waiting for what seemed like an eternity, someone answered the phone. “Yes, Swissair 111 has crashed,” was the first response.
“Are there any survivors? Our son Monte Wilkins was on that flight and…”
“I’m sorry, but we can’t say anything at this time. If you leave us your name and phone number, we’ll call you back.”
“But our son…” ”
“I’m sorry, but we don’t have any further information.” The person acted professionally, as they had been instructed to do, but right now I needed the answer to one question: Is Monte still alive?
I called our son Darren and his wife Yvette, who lived in Loma Linda, California, and told them that the family liaison could not say anything about survivors.
Our daughter Marci
Next, I had to tell our younger daughter Marci. It seemed important to me that Marci not receive the information while she was alone. Before I could call her and make sure she wasn’t alone, Dan’s mother called her and told her that they were praying for us. However, Dan’s mother immediately noticed that Marci didn’t know what had happened. She resorted to some awkward small talk and hung up without mentioning the crash. Shortly after, I called Marci and cautiously asked if anyone was with her. She was alone. I didn’t want to tell her, but she started to guess. She wouldn’t take no for an answer and wanted to know what was going on. The great distance between us was unbearable, even agonizing.
“Monte’s plane crashed.” I still remember that, but the rest is lost in a fog. Marci screamed as if someone had struck her cruelly. As a father, I felt completely helpless with so many miles between us.
As I learned a little later, a few minutes after my call, some friends from our church came to her house. They hugged her and tried to comfort her. Some of them stayed with her until Janet and I returned from California.
Now our children knew as much as we did—the only information: Flight 111 had crashed into the sea off Nova Scotia.
The nightmare had begun.
Survivors
We sat in front of the television and waited for new information. The minutes seemed endless until finally a video was shown with a series of emergency vehicles and preparations for medical care for survivors. Several times they used the one word that gave us hope: survivors.
“Survivors,” one of us repeated.
I called the family support service again. Although someone else answered my call, the information—or rather, the lack of information—was the same. They would call us as soon as they knew more.
“Maybe he missed his flight,” I said.
We dared to consider the possibility that he might have missed his flight, but deep down, Janet and I knew that couldn’t be the case. It was highly unlikely that a capable, responsible young man on a missionary adventure would miss his flight. If he had, he would surely have called his sister Marci at our house in Southern California.
“I need a flight to Halifax! I’m flying there! I’m going to find Monte!” I said. I started calling airlines and demanding a flight to Halifax. Part of me knew I was being unreasonable, but I had a deep sense that I had to act now—act somehow. I had to do something, get involved, just do something—anything within my power. I was willing to pull my son out of the North Atlantic myself if necessary! The main thing was that I was there—with our 19-year-old son. He would die of hypothermia if I didn’t save him!
As I tried to find flights, I saw our youngest son in my mind’s eye, swimming around on pieces of debris, freezing and screaming for help. And I was five and a half thousand kilometers away! I had to get to him!
Before I could book a flight to Halifax, more information trickled in, and every detail gave us more headaches. It became obvious that all the earlier reporters were wrong: there were no survivors.
The impact with the water must have been so devastating that the plane was completely torn apart.
Helpless
I am a physician; for a time, I headed the Department of Ophthalmology (eye care) and specialist training at Loma Linda University. I was used to making decisions about people’s lives, solving problems, organizing people, and resolving terrible situations. Without realizing it, I now slipped into the role of Dr. Efficiency. Looking back, it was my way of dealing with the reality of loss and protecting myself from it.
I have no idea how many times I dialed the family support number. It may sound crazy, but I kept telling myself that if only I had all the answers—if I knew for sure that Monte was on the plane and that he hadn’t survived—I would be able to cope better with reality. I thought that not knowing was the cause of my anxiety.
But in reality, I was struggling to accept the truth that I didn’t want to accept. Whenever the pain threatened to overwhelm me again, I picked up the phone and called the family support hotline. Every time, I got the same answer. Then I hung up and called Swissair. I couldn’t just sit there and do nothing.
“We won’t find out anything more tonight,” I finally said, playing the reasonable one. We had been told that there had been 229 people on board, including the crew. But they didn’t want to make any statements about individuals until they could say with certainty that each of them had actually been on board. We understood that. They were doing their best.
We just had to wait.
Waiting
But waiting seemed impossible; we were waiting anyway. So we decided to return immediately to our home in Yucaipa, California. After booking a flight with Alaska Airlines, I asked the family support staff to pass on any information to Darren while we were away. They assured us they would do so.
Finally, Janet and I went to bed at 3 a.m. Exhausted, frustrated, and weary with grief, we tried to sleep. But pain and a thousand thoughts kept us awake.
All my thoughts were on Monte and my loss. The little word “why” began to creep in. Why had we let him take that flight? Why hadn’t God protected him? I also wondered if we had done something wrong to deserve such a terrible tragedy. Was this punishment for some sin—Monte’s or ours?
Slowly, I fell asleep, but less than an hour later, the alarm clock rang.
At 7 a.m. on September 3, 1998, our flight home took off. While we were in the air, Darren received confirmation from Swissair that Monte had been on the plane, but he had no way of informing us.
Friends
I felt very uneasy about flying back to California from Seattle, or anywhere for that matter. We had just lost our son in a plane crash, but we knew we had to go home. Being with our family was more important to us than anything else at that moment.
As our plane descended into the clouds, I thought, “If only someone could sit next to us and comfort us, just anyone.” I was sure we would feel better. Was that a conscious prayer? I don’t know, but God answered it immediately.
After the plane reached cruising altitude, the captain turned off the seat belt signs. Some people got up to walk around, and Janet saw a woman stand up and open the overhead compartment. We were sitting nine rows behind her. “Look, isn’t that Peggy McNeill?” Janet whispered to me.
She had her back to us and sat down again. I don’t know why, but I didn’t have the emotional strength to go forward and take a closer look.
Just a few minutes later, Jim, Peggy’s husband, got up and walked down the aisle to the restroom. When he reached our row, he saw us, stopped, and smiled warmly at us: “David! Janet!”
Jim had been like a brother to me in many ways. We had met three decades ago during our medical training in Loma Linda and had become good friends. Jim once said that it was because of my influence that he decided to specialize in ophthalmology. He later became head of the ophthalmology department at Loma Linda University. When he left the university to work in a friend’s private practice, I took over his position.
I forced myself to smile.
When he asked us the inevitable question of how we were both doing, it hurt so much that I didn’t even try to sugarcoat anything. I don’t remember if my eyes filled with tears. I only remember that my voice was shaking. “Monte was on the Swissair flight that crashed last night,” I said.
Jim stared at me, momentarily unable to comprehend what he was hearing. “Oh no!” he said. His eyes welled up and he slowly shook his head. Jim is a rather reserved person and not one to show his emotions; his tears were enough to know that he felt our pain. It seemed as if he was hugging us with his eyes to show us how sorry he was. “I have to go get Peggy,” he said.
“God has done it again,” Janet said, taking my arm. “We are not alone. Just like last night. He sent someone to us on this flight.”
Jim went forward to get Peggy without telling her the sad news. Her warm, loving smile froze when she heard the news. There was an empty seat in our row. Peggy sat next to Janet for the rest of the flight. Jim went back to his seat. Crying quietly, we talked to Peggy about the events of the previous night.
Several times I wiped the tears from my eyes and silently thanked God for sending us good friends on the plane who surrounded us with love and compassion. Just being with them gave us strength. They lived in the Tri-Cities of eastern Washington. To me, there was no logical reason why they were on the same flight.
Arrival
The plane landed at 9:20 a.m., and we had to walk across the tarmac to the terminal. As Janet and I got off the plane, I saw my brother-in-law Jim Simpson and our pastor Clarence Shilt standing at the bottom of the stairs. Next to him were four uniformed Delta Airlines employees. No explanation was necessary.
One of the Delta employees stepped forward and confirmed the devastating news that was only slowly sinking into our hearts. I heard the expressions of condolence, but I felt too numb to respond. Jim and Clarence hugged us. Once again, I was glad to see familiar faces.
Sheryl Johnson
One member of the delegation introduced herself as Sheryl Johnson and told us she was a representative of Delta Airlines. She and Jay had been chosen as our care partners as soon as the passenger list had been confirmed. (We would meet Jay that evening.)
It may sound strange, but we quickly developed a relationship with Sheryl that transcended time and place. I kept thinking about how Sheryl stood in front of me with her hand outstretched on that morning of September 3, when our pain was at its greatest. The compassion on her face alone made it clear that she wanted to be part of our healing process. She simply became part of our family tragedy, and we felt that she was becoming a member of our ever-growing family.
Jim Wise
Jim and Peggy had rented a car to visit relatives near us. We had left our car at the airport and planned to drive home.
“You’re not driving home!” Peggy said. “We’re driving you home. There’s no way you can drive like this!”
I didn’t protest. On our 45-minute drive home, I called my friend Jim Wise. He knew about the crash but had no idea that Monte was on the plane. Jim had lost his own 20-year-old son to cancer a few years earlier. I told him that now it was his turn to keep me going.
It wasn’t until later that I realized how much Jim Wise supported us. For a whole year, he wrote us a letter of encouragement every week.
Arriving home
When we arrived home, Marci, Darren, and Yvette were already there, and we were surprised to find our house full of church members.
“Oh no! I don’t want to see anyone right now!” was my immediate reaction. But I had no choice. We hugged our children amid many tears and few words. Almost instantly, everyone in the room came forward and hugged us. Some cried, some held us tight, and a few tried to find words of comfort. Instead of resisting their presence, I simply let myself fall into their arms.
Real help
The presence of our friends was more than just them being there; we felt loved and connected to others in our loss. Coordinated by Bonnie Parker, a longtime friend of the family, the siblings from the church also took care of all the usual tasks for us. We didn’t have to worry about a thing. They washed our car, cooked for us, fed the dog, and did the laundry. Bonnie’s husband Dick set up an answering machine to take all our calls. Gordon Day, a 6’3″ man, stood outside the house to protect us from the media. Not a single journalist or reporter managed to get past him.
Would you like to fly to Nova Scotia?
In the meantime, Sheryl Johnson from Delta Airlines sprang into action. “Would you like to fly to Nova Scotia?” she asked us. After some consideration, we decided to go for it, and that same evening, two vans pulled up outside our house and we got in. We were Darren and Yvette, Shannon and Dan, Marci, Janet, and me. With two more friends who joined us during the stopover in New York, there were nine of us.
From that point on, the Delta staff took complete responsibility and took care of all our needs during the trip. At no point did we have to worry about tickets, luggage, boarding passes, connections, local transportation, personal necessities, or even money. Delta employees arranged everything for us. At each location, they shielded us from the public and, above all, from the media. They seemed to know perfectly how to take care of us without being intrusive. All we had to do was stick together.
In Halifax
We arrived in Halifax, Nova Scotia, late on Friday afternoon, September 4, almost 48 hours after the crash. Most of us were emotionally and physically exhausted, as we hadn’t slept for two nights.
When we arrived at the hotel and got off the buses that had picked us up from the airport, there were so many of us that the staff at the Lord Nelson Hotel were briefly overwhelmed and asked us to make ourselves comfortable in the lobby. We later learned that the hotel had insisted on accommodating the victims’ families. They immediately moved the guests who were already registered to other hotels. The state government had secured the hotel and posted guards at every entrance.
Dan Dearing from the Salvation Army
As we sat there for a few minutes, a handsome, uniformed captain from the Salvation Army approached us.
“Oh no!” I groaned and closed my eyes. “I don’t have to talk to him now, do I?” I wanted him to go away.
“Hello, I’m Captain Dan Dearing,” he said, extending his hand toward us. I took it and shook his hand. Did he notice my hesitation? I’m not sure, but it was there. I stared at him and thought, “Salvation Army? What does he want here?”
Since birth and throughout my childhood, I have belonged to a small Protestant religious community. I was tolerant of other Christians, but I believed they didn’t have as much truth as we did and therefore weren’t as good Christians. I hadn’t yet reached the point of accepting them unreservedly. But that was about to change.
If you asked my children, they would tell you two things about the evening Dan Dearing showed up. First, at that moment, they didn’t want to see anyone! Second, within minutes, they took Dan Dearing into their hearts.
Instead of standing around watching our grieving group, he came into our circle and started talking to us. “You know, I want to be there for you! I know how much you are grieving, and I want you to know that we here in Nova Scotia share your pain.”
He didn’t know us, and we didn’t know him, but he understood something that holds incredible power: he let us feel our pain and didn’t try to take it away or convince us that we didn’t need to feel bad.
After we received the news about the plane crash, I lost all sense of time. Maybe he was with us for just a few minutes, or maybe it was almost an hour. Dan Dearing won the hearts and emotions of my children, Janet, our two friends, and me. I can’t remember a single word he said after introducing himself, yet he wrote the compassion and love of Jesus deep into our souls. It wasn’t his words that reached us, but his caring heart. He embraced us with his heart.
I remember him encouraging us to talk about our pain. Then he did something rare: he listened. His eyes and voice reflected his compassion as each of us spoke. He let us talk and hardly interrupted us. He asked for some explanations and details, but he really listened. That showed us that he cared about us.
Months later, I asked Dan why he had come to us. “How did you know what to do?” I asked.
He smiled at me. “When I looked through the foyer and saw your group, I had the impression: These are the people I’m supposed to be with. I had no idea what to say, but I wanted to be there for you.”
Dan stayed with us until we went to our room. He spent the next two days with us. Whenever we needed him, he was there—the human hands of Jesus, ready to hold and embrace us. Dan not only understood how we felt. He also understood that we needed someone—someone who would remind us of God’s loving presence.
Peggy’s Cove
Despite our jet lag and grief, our whole family slept well on our first night in Halifax. Saturday morning was bright, sunny, and clear. Our plan was to take the bus to Peggy’s Cove.
The place was breathtakingly beautiful. It was hard to imagine such an immense tragedy just seven or eight kilometers from the coast. On the horizon, we saw ships at sea carrying out their necessary but difficult task: searching and salvaging.
When we arrived, busloads of relatives were arriving at Peggy’s Cove. From a tent where items that had been found but not yet identified were laid out, we walked perhaps a block’s length to a lighthouse standing on a rocky outcrop. Wooden barriers had been erected about 25 meters from the lighthouse. We were to wait there until someone accompanied us to the water. Rough waves were not unusual, and just a few days earlier, we were told, they had swept an unsuspecting person into the sea. Officials took one family or group at a time to the water so they could commemorate their loved ones in their own way.
There were nine of us, which was a relatively large group. As we gathered in a circle near the water, a uniformed member of another religious community approached us. He looked to be in his late twenties or early thirties.
John O’Donnell
“I am a clergyman.” He paused and then asked, “Are you Christians?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Would you mind if I read a passage from the Bible with you and then prayed with you?” He introduced himself. His name was John O’Donnell and he was a Roman Catholic chaplain.
Once again, I was shocked. Another man from a different faith was reaching out God’s hands to us and acting exactly as Jesus would have done.
John opened the Bible, read Psalm 77 to us, and said a beautiful prayer. Afterward, we sang a few songs, such as “Nearer, Still Nearer” and “Amazing Grace.”
We spent quite a bit of time there, and eventually I began to worry that we might be holding up the many other families waiting to be escorted down from the barrier. But when I looked up, I saw that every single person on the rocks above us was standing there moved: the firefighters, the police, the Red Cross volunteers, the other families, and the clergy. They were listening to our singing family. Many were crying in the face of such grace amid so much suffering.
Later, John told us, “I couldn’t understand how you could sing songs under such terrible circumstances. I just couldn’t believe it.”
Down on the rocks, we spent some time just staring at the horizon. We could see ships still fishing parts out of the water. Helicopters guided them across the sea to predetermined coordinates.
I remember the lighthouse and how impressed I was by the majesty of this structure. I had no idea how often we would remember this lighthouse in the future.
Involuntary brotherhood
When people suddenly find themselves sharing the same traumatic and unfortunate experience without having chosen to do so, I call this involuntary brotherhood. No one chose to become part of this community, and yet they belong to it because they have been brought into it through trauma and pain.
As I learned, traumatic experiences were not unfamiliar to the people of Nova Scotia. The first disaster occurred on the night of April 14, 1912. That was when the seemingly unsinkable Titanic struck an iceberg and sank within two and a half hours. The lifeboats could only accommodate half of the 2,200 people on board. The passenger ship Carpathia ultimately took 705 passengers on board—the only survivors. The accident occurred 1,100 km southeast of Halifax.
Another tragedy occurred on December 6, 1917, when the 146-meter-long Imo, a Belgian passenger ship, sailed into the port of Bedford. The Imo and several other ships were to transport supplies to Europe for World War I in a convoy. At approximately 7:30 a.m., the Imo collided with a French munitions ship, the iron Mont Blanc.
The Mont Blanc was carrying 2,600 tons of wet and dry picric acid, TNT, powdered wool, and 300 loads of ammunition. Drums of high-octane benzyl fuel were safely stored on deck. Sparks from the collision set the benzyl on fire. The Mont Blanc, unable to maneuver, drifted toward the port, which is not far from Halifax. The fire and the fire trucks attracted a lot of attention, and onlookers rushed to the shore to see the fire or watch it from their windows.
At 9:06 a.m., it was as if Armageddon, the apocalyptic war, had broken out in Halifax. The explosion killed 1,900 people, injured 9,000, and fugitive gas blinded 200 people.
The out-of-control explosion destroyed and damaged 13,000 buildings and left 25,000 people homeless. It razed 140 hectares of land at the northern end of Halifax to the ground. Pieces of the Mont Blanc’s iron hull landed kilometers away. It was the largest explosion ever documented before the atomic bomb. The explosion triggered a huge tidal wave that hurled the Imo against the rocky coast. Five crew members and the captain died. The next day, the worst snowstorm they had experienced that winter buried the city.
The loss of property seemed minor in the face of the survivors’ emotions. In their struggle to start a new life, they developed an amazing ability: to understand others and not to despair in the face of such turmoil and loss, but to take action. An invisible bond was formed that reached out and touched other people—all those who would one day join this involuntary brotherhood.
We, too, became part of this involuntary brotherhood. Our hearts were broken with grief, but through countless people and experiences in Nova Scotia, we were able to feel how the people there embraced us in our time of loss.
Blessed stranger
Bob, a tuna fisherman, also became part of this involuntary brotherhood. On the evening of September 2, 1998, he had had a particularly productive day with his boat, the Jubilee. He had caught five huge tuna. He had set out at 4:30 a.m. So his exhaustion at 9:00 p.m. was well deserved. After dinner, he turned on the TV and fell asleep on the sofa.
At 10:35 p.m., Bob woke up and heard someone on TV say that a plane had crashed. When he heard the word Blandford, he was wide awake. He had just returned from that area. After hearing some details, he decided to drive back to see if he could help.
The sea was stormy as he drove to his boat. The road was already full of emergency vehicles. That night, he did something he would never normally have done. He and his crew set out alone on the sea in his 11-meter fishing boat. As he left the bay, he saw flares lighting up the sky in the distance. Planes were dropping them to illuminate the area where they were searching for the crash site.
Nothing could have prepared Bob for what he saw when he reached the debris field. “I sailed into an unbelievable scene of wreckage and torn bodies,” he told us later. Bob’s consolation was that a whole armada of other fishermen had also answered the call. These men knew the sea. It was their life.
Each boat had a bright spotlight to illuminate the water. With this light and the flares in the sky, the scene seemed surreal. The smell of kerosene filled the air. After a short time, Bob realized that there was no one left to save. All that remained was to search and recover.
While the fishermen helped with the search, the Canadian Navy arrived in the area with a rescue ship. They established radio contact with the fishing fleet, and a proper rescue system was set up. Captain Town had a strong, firm, reassuring voice and brought some composure and calm to the unimaginable horror.
As Bob’s spotlight scanned the deep blue water, he saw something that looked like a doll floating on the surface. As he got closer, he realized it was the mangled body of a baby. It was later determined that the baby was one of only two people on the plane who were found nearly intact.
Bob pulled the body on board and held the baby in his arms, stunned. At that moment, as he cradled the baby, something happened inside him. That fisherman and the tragedy of the plane crash were suddenly no longer strangers. The accident had taken on a personal dimension. Later, he met the baby’s relatives. They, too, became part of that big family.
Bound by suffering
Through connections we didn’t know about until then, Bob found out that our son Monte had been on the plane. He contacted us and wanted to meet us. He and his wife Peggy invited us to dinner.
Later, he told us that he wondered if the meeting might be awkward. After all, we didn’t know each other. Would we be on the same wavelength? Would there be cultural barriers? How would we deal with what he had seen? Would we understand the loss that he also felt?
But instead of feeling any inner distance, we all embraced Bob warmly as soon as we met him. That was enough. We discovered that he could tell us many things that eased our grief and his.
When Bob tried to describe his feelings at the scene of the accident, I had the impression that they didn’t really make sense, but that didn’t matter. As he spoke, his eyes and facial expressions told me everything I needed to know. Bob needed to be with people who had suffered the same tragedy, because he felt and suffered as we did. He hadn’t chosen to become part of this brotherhood, but God had ordained it.
A grave
When we returned to Nova Scotia a year later, we wanted to find a place for Monte’s remains. We thought of a grassy hill from which you could see the sea. Actually, Monte’s remains are buried in three places: in the mass grave in Bayswater, where all the remains that could not be identified were buried, on the seabed, and where we would bury the parts that had been identified.
At first, we found a place in a cemetery—very quiet and indescribably beautiful. But the local pastor did not allow us to bury there, for understandable reasons. So we searched for three more days. As we drove around the area, we found a place in the small community of Blandford that seemed ideal to us, right by the sea, not far from the memorial and the mass grave. Without hesitation, the Blandford city council offered us a burial site overlooking the sea. Although we tried hard, they would not accept payment. They took our son in as their own.
Compiled from David Wilkins, United by Tragedy. A Father’s Story, Pacific Press Publishing Association.
Editor’s note: During the recovery efforts for Swissair 111, a Bible was found floating in the water. To this day, it is not known whether it was Monte’s Bible.
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