One of the biggest tragedies to me about Brian’s death is that he was firing on all cylinders. He was finally an “adult.” His ego had grown up. The impatient sock-it-to-ya buzz of his twenties had mellowed a bit as he moved into his thirties. From building his first internet company in the 1990s, to his work with Amazon, Visible Markets, and the solar industry, he had learned, taken risks, and done lots of the deep work of transforming. He was in a groove and poised to make a huge difference in the field of energy and the environment.
And then BAM. He left hundreds of people spinning: What?!
Now what?
The day after the crash, December 23, 2011, certain things needed to be done. My parents connected with people at their church to begin funeral arrangements as my brother and father went out to the crash site to see what they could see, to recover the recoverable.
Despite the level of financial planning Brian had done—and I’m hoping here that readers will read between the lines and start having some of those uncomfortable conversations about end-of-life preparations, wills, and estates—I was dismayed at how bureaucratic the process of settling our affairs was. Obviously, I’d never had to deal with my husband dying before, and the legalese was mind-boggling. In my most fragile state, being asked to read the small print could have been salt on the wound; but I signed and initialed one form after the other, because that was what I was told I had to do.
When a person dies, their bank accounts are frozen, and you have no idea how long they’ll stay that way. If you are fortunate enough to have life insurance, or to have thought of setting it up before it’s too late, there is no guarantee as to when you’ll receive your money. Because most of our bank accounts were in Brian’s name, I needed to transfer money quickly to make sure the kids and I would be okay. I needed money in my account to pay the bills.
It was nuts. On December 26, puffy-eyed, parched, and in pain, I was driving back from the mall, where we had just bought Max new shoes for his daddy’s funeral. This was back in the days before ubiquitous Wi-Fi access, and I had my dad on my cellphone. He was on his home computer conferencing with me and the people at my bank. Bankers can’t simply follow orders from even a grieving woman’s father, so there I was, granting everyone permission to do this and that, and telling my father our password.
“That’s not it,” my dad said. “Invalid password.”
I’m driving, I’m drained, but I’m sure of our damn bank password. “Try it again.”
My dad enters our password several times before he finally gets it right.
The pressure on him, when I think about it now, was funny as hell. And me, looking like I had been at Santa’s workshop pulling fifteen-hour graveyard shifts and barking into the phone: “Make sure CAPS LOCK isn’t on!” and thinking, “Don’t lock us out, Dad. Please, don’t fuck this up!”
*
Because of the number of people Brian knew and the time of the year, it was decided immediately that there would be more than one memorial service. His employees in California told me I would not have to lift a finger for the West Coast ceremony—they would plan and manage everything. I accepted their generosity. Brian’s parents would hold a ceremony in Canada. I understood their need to honor their son where they had raised him.
My parents, in contacting their church to begin making funeral arrangements, did what nobody else was capable of doing. I was grateful to them for taking immediate action, immediate control. But, while my father and brother were out at the airport picking through the pieces of Brian’s plane, airport staff relayed a message: A man named Al Khuner from the local Khuner Associates Funeral Home wanted to know if he could get in touch with me.
When my brother came home and told me this, my initial reaction was to question why a funeral home owner was reaching out to me. I was skeptical, thinking he must be an ambulance chaser. My mom and dad had things covered; but at my brother’s urging, thankfully and miraculously, I returned Al’s call.
Al Khuner, also a pilot, had been flying the same flight pattern as Brian the night of December 22. He had heard Brian over the radio, communicating with the NTSB. (York Airport is an unmanned airport; there is no flight tower.)
“I landed thirty minutes before Brian was supposed to,” he told me on the phone.
My heart, if it was out of steam at that time, must have leapt. My heart, if it was beating too fast that hour, must have calmed.
“I would be honored,” Al said, “as pilot to pilot, to take care of all your husband’s funeral expenses.”
What kind of stranger makes this kind of offer? I wondered.
My second thought was the answer: An angel.
With gratitude and an instinctual confidence that the funeral would be perfect in Al’s hands, I let go.
“Okay,” I said.
If changing funeral arrangements on a whim upset my parents or their church friends, I don’t know. I doubt it did, but either way, in my state of trauma, I knew that I had to go with what felt right to me. Even in chaos, there are moments where you know beyond doubt that if you let anyone else dictate or contradict matters of your heart, you will live to regret it. In the immediate hours and days following the crash, as unclear and rudderless as I felt at the time, I was going with the flow. Here was a man, a pilot, who had heard Brian’s voice—disconnected, floating out there in the ether of that dark December airspace. He had heard Brian speak the words, “Engine out.” He might have heard Brian’s very last word, which would have been “Mayday.”
Al and I quickly determined that his funeral home, though large, wouldn’t be spacious enough for all the people who wanted to come to the East Coast memorial service to bid Brian Robertson farewell. Also, there was no major airport nearby, and people were going to fly in from around the world. I suggested to Al we hold the wake at his beautiful funeral home and the memorial service in Baltimore, between where Brian’s sister lived and where he and I had lived.
“I’d like a gorgeous space,” I said. “Like a museum.”
Al knew a caterer in Baltimore who knew the city like no other and would deliver us a few options. Until everyone got through Christmas, though, there was nothing to be done—nobody was working anywhere. Between the plane crash on the night of the 22nd and the visit to the mall for funeral shoes on the 26th, my family and Brian’s family did our best to keep the holiday spirit alive. And then, on December 27 and 28, Al and the universe led me somehow in the planning of Brian’s funeral and the first of his three life celebrations.
On the phone with the caterer, I Googled the places she named as possibly suitable for Brian’s memorial service. I clicked through several fingernail images, instantly rejecting the ones I didn’t love. When she suggested the Alonzo G. Decker Gallery at the Baltimore Museum of Industry, I zoomed in and enlarged the image once, then twice, and then a third time. I couldn’t believe my eyes.
“This is it,” I told her. This was one of many “but of course” moments to come.
The Decker Gallery was perfect: A twin-engine plane hung from the ceiling, and light poured in through floor-to-ceiling windows that looked out on Baltimore’s Inner Harbor. The space accommodated three hundred people. The fact that it was housed in the Baltimore Museum of Industry was no coincidence—innovation and industry were Brian’s middle names.
Al took me under his wing, and the amazing thing was, I let him. When you are trudging through foreign territory and trying to plan the kind of event you don’t expect to have to plan until you are retired and wrinkled, leaning on people who know what they are doing helps ease the pain. Never one to like feeling out of control, I completely surrendered when Brian died. I had to.
My husband’s death was a huge opportunity for me to wise up to the reality that none of us is in control of everything. Something larger than us and larger than the sum of us is always present, and it does—at times—take over. Tragedy illuminates our need to exhale and give in; but ever since Brian’s death, I have tried to be more conscious of when and where I still need to step more gracefully toward surrender and support.
After Brian’s funeral in Baltimore, I would tell Al, “You are literally a live angel to me. You are so good at your job. You have found your calling.”
Prior to the funeral, on Christmas Eve of all evenings, everyone but Mary Kay and the kids accompanied me to the Khuner Funeral Home to start planning Brian’s memorial. After introductions and condolences, Al pulled me aside. From the get-go, he made it clear that, though many beloved mourners were present, I would be “the decider.” As he led me alone to the casket showroom, a part of my heart was crying out, “Mayday! Mayday!” and another was shouting, “How do I pick out a box to put my husband’s body in? Who gives a fuck about this box?!”
It was a horrible, bizarre moment—casket shopping is not car shopping, and this was a task I had never envisioned. But I knew that, though we were going to have Brian cremated and this box would be temporary, we were having an open casket at his funeral. I would do what I had been doing since the moment I pulled up to the York Airport and my entire reality had shattered. I would do what Brian and I had been trained to do, more or less, in all of our transformational work together. I would do what felt right in the moment, moment-by-moment. I chose a nice wooden casket with a silky white interior.
Al was a gentle and efficient pro. I told him I couldn’t imagine anyone better than a pilot to help me start the surreal process of saying goodbye to a pilot. “We’re a unique breed,” he said. He offered comfort, too, in saying what others would say, and which was true: “Brian died doing what he loved.” Brian loved doing so many things, but yes, he died while living a childhood dream he’d made real. No regrets.
“I want you to know you’ll hear things,” Al said. “It doesn’t matter what happened in the sky, NTSB will tell you it was the pilot’s fault.”
He was right about what the NTSB would tell us, but at that point, of course, we didn’t know anything. We were all still completely immersed in what happened what happened what happened mode—trying to answer this question for people, with no answers yet for ourselves.
In the long and sometimes eternal limbo of not knowing—of wanting to know, and of not wanting to know—you eventually stop wishing you could turn back time, and you start trying to make sense of things. Logic slaps you relentlessly to attention until you concede that a respectable portion of pain consists of you arguing with reality and losing. At first, my urge to know what happened in Brian’s last moments wasn’t gut-wrenching, it was gut-punching; I wanted to know that the crash, and his death, were not his fault. In pressing the universe and anyone in it who might have answers, though, I kept falling into endlessly looping black holes of knowing about unknowing: Having the answers wouldn’t make a difference; answers would not stop the pain.
For months, I would work through dozens of iterations of possible details and likely scenarios, knowing that, despite the thorough investigation that was to come, we would likely never get a perfect replay of how or why N48BS went down.
I knew this too, for a fact: Brian’s energy had passed through me while I sat at the York Airport waiting for the answer I dreaded most, and, after that answer was delivered, all other answers held less power.
In the days immediately following Brian’s death, in those first moments where I had a taste of what our relationship would look like moving forward, his energy would pierce through my sadness. I wondered if I was going crazy. You are being taken care of, Eileen. In that first shower I took after his death, I sensed he was still with me, and this feeling simultaneously freaked me out and calmed me. Brian had not abandoned me; he was still loving me; he was still talking to me and pulling strings with the collective conscious universe. Knowing his energy hadn’t simply been wiped off the face of the earth comforted me.
I thought that Brian, wherever he had gone, might be asking why, too—might now be stepping into an entirely new sea of mysteries and wonders. I wanted to ask him what it was like “over there.” Not that I wanted to die too—I didn’t—but I wanted to be with him. We had always been excellent traveling companions, and, though I knew I was being irrational, I was slightly jealous he was taking such a monumental adventure solo. He had been an avid explorer and learner, so what would become clear to him there, on the other side? I wanted to know; I wanted to know what Brian knew.
They say humans can perceive only 4 percent of the universe—I have always wanted access to more. My tears decades ago on the flight to Phoenix were tears of all the joy in possibility. To think that, from this limited field of perception, we each craft entirely different stories and unique realities intrigues and excites me. Had the kids and I been on the plane with Brian, and had we crashed but all survived, each of us would have painted a different picture of falling from the sky. The answers to the question, “What happened?” would vary. To me, these differences in perception, imagination, and reality are not confusing, not right or wrong, but proof that anything is possible—proof that the sky is not the limit.
I wanted to know what had happened to Brian in that plane, but I didn’t. I wondered: if I were to learn that Brian had made a mistake, would I feel mad at him? I tackled questions I didn’t want to whisper aloud, and eventually realized that I would write the story of our lives together, the way each of us writes our own life story. Each of us is trying to make sense of things—from the silliest events and challenges to the toughest—by weaving together facts and feelings we can live with. Most of us never have all the pieces we need to complete the puzzle and we choose the pieces that best suit our needs, hopes, and desires.
My survival strategy after Brian died was to continually choose what felt best for me and for our children. Pain highlights where there is difficult work to do, and I try hard not to run away from it. But it also worked for me to lean toward what felt good and light and positive as often as I could. My husband, a man who literally harnessed the sun for a living, died on the darkest night of the year. The kids and I survived our darkest night; we are alive because we have work to do and light to share.