SHORTLY BEFORE THE 1987–88 SCHOOL YEAR STARTED, I went in to see Dr. Maxwell, my neurosurgeon, for one of my regular checkups. When I first started seeing Dr. Maxwell, I went in once a month. As my condition stabilized, my appointments tapered off to once every six months.
On this particular visit, Dr. Maxwell announced, “I don’t think you need to come in anymore. Your condition is pretty good. You should continue to see Dr. Leppik, but I don’t think we need to worry about the bone fragments still in your head. There has been no change for the past year, and the scar tissue seems to have developed nicely.”
The news felt good. But I still had a problem—namely, a huge soft spot in my head. “What are we going to do about my caved-in head?” I asked. “It limits me from being able to play softball and ski hard, from doing all the fun things I want to do.”
“Jackie, there’s a lot of people in this world running around with caved-in heads,” he said.
“That’s fine,” I said, “but I don’t want to be one of them anymore. I’m tired of having a hole in my head.”
“Okay,” he said, “then let me tell you about the surgery.”
He explained the risk involved from the anesthesia. Dr. Maxwell would shave my head, lift up the skin covering my brain, then use a drill to attach a plastic mesh to my skull. Then he would take some putty and lay it over the mesh—to hold it in place. Finally, he’d shape the putty to blend in with the rest of my skull. When the putty hardened, the doctors would put the skin flap back over the wound and stitch me back up.
I had the surgery and was still bald when school started that fall. I wore a turban or a scarf over my head. You could tell I didn’t have any hair, because a scarf over hair looks different from a scarf over baldness—it lay flat against my head.
The kids probably knew that I didn’t have any hair, but none ever said anything about it to me. Until one day.
I got to school early one hot, muggy morning, and I had to run a bunch of errands. The scarf felt hot and uncomfortable, so I decided to take it off until the kids arrived.
One little special education boy came into the room and saw my bald head. “You’re bald!” he pointed at me and started to laugh.
This little boy had emotional problems, and I knew he didn’t mean to hurt me, but I still felt bad. It didn’t feel good to have someone making fun of me.
I was getting another good lesson in humility, in what it was like to be handicapped, in what it was like to look different. It reminded me of how hard it is for kids. When adults saw me bald, they would do a double take. But it’s different when a child sees you bald. They make fun or point.
In the 1987–88 school year I was teaching full time. I was still teaching learning disabled children in the mornings, but I was now teaching a mainstream first-grade class in the afternoons. I shared the first-grade class with Marcia Behring, and the two of us soon became close friends. I enjoyed talking and laughing with Marcia.
She was such a big help to me at work. When parents wrote me letters about their kids, Marcia read them to me—it would take me forever to get through them. Sometimes, when I got lost on my way to school and was late for a staff meeting, I called Marcia and asked her to let the other teachers know that I was on my way. Marcia and I got together outside the classroom too. She and her husband, Bill, were both very supportive of what I was doing in my life.
I enjoyed teaching my two different groups, yet I was having a difficult time of it. It was a lot harder working full time than I had remembered. By the end of each day I felt really drained. Attending meetings, doing paperwork, and preparing lesson plans took a lot of mental and emotional energy for me. I loved working with the kids, but all these other duties were taxing.
In some ways, the counselor I saw at the Minnesota Center for Epilepsy was right. My expectations did need to change. Teaching was much harder than I imagined it would be.
When I worked as a teacher before the hijacking, I’d always gotten “A” ratings. I was a good teacher. But now my evaluations were not so positive. A teacher evaluation specialist spent a lot of time in the back of my classroom, to make sure I was doing a good job. She often gave me ideas on things to do with my students. Before the hijacking, I never needed other teachers to give me ideas. I was always coming up with them on my own. People came to me for ideas.
It made me feel even more frustrated and unsure of myself. I knew something was wrong with my brain that blocked me from coming up with ideas or even remembering those I had used before. I was struggling just to do the basics. I was gaining a new appreciation for how hard it is to be a teacher, always having to think and make decisions.
I also understood why LD kids didn’t like surprises. As a teacher, I learned not to change things on them suddenly, but to keep a regular and predictable classroom. They needed to stay at an even keel. If I changed or interrupted their schedule in any way—say by canceling a physical education class one morning to go on a field trip—it threw off my LD kids.
Now, I felt the same need for order and predictability in my life and routine. If my principal announced any kind of change or added something extra to our jobs as teachers, I got mad and frustrated. I’d think, My God, now how am I going to do this? Now I have to learn something else! I’m having a hard enough time as it is. Before the accident, I could go with the flow so easily—with no whining or complaining. Now my brain didn’t have the ability to change gears all the time.
Discipline was another difficult thing for me. I had to think hard about how to manage kids’ behavior in the classroom. I had to really concentrate when two kids started fighting. What do I do now? How do I handle this? Before the hijacking, my responses came naturally. I didn’t need to think through every situation.
Fortunately, Scott was there to give me some support when I came home, exhausted, with stacks of papers to grade. He often helped out by grading papers. If I had some new assignments from the principal, Scott read them to me.
In time, I calmed down and adjusted to my new job. It became easier. I felt more comfortable in the classroom.
Yet deep down, I knew I didn’t belong in the classroom anymore. My heart was no longer in teaching. Every morning when the alarm went off, all I could think was I don’t want to go to work. My body was rebelling too. I got sick more often, had a lot of sore throats, and was eating a lot. I used up all my sick days. I needed to move on.
I thought about how two months after the hijacking, I’d given my first speech about what happened on the plane and on the tarmac to a congregation at my church in Baytown. In the following months, I received speaking requests from church groups and schools that had read about my story in newspapers or seen the hijacking on television.
Early on, speaking was something I needed to do to heal, a way to make meaning out of my painful experiences in recovery. I also genuinely loved speaking to people.
Now, I kept hearing, I’ve taken you this far in the world and given you life, now share your story with the world.
I was answering back, No way, Jose.
I just kept stuffing and stuffing that message. I’d never taken a speech class or had any formal speech training, but I just kept getting messages that speaking was where I needed to be. Becoming a public speaker and sharing the details of my personal life with thousands of strangers was the last thing I ever imagined myself doing.
Then one day, I came home exhausted after a taxing day in the classroom. My Inner Voice kept saying, Share your story. Share your story.
I sat down in a chair, closed my eyes, and asked, How do I share my story?
Television, my Inner Voice said.
Television? What did that mean? Then, I remembered. Right after the hijacking, I was swamped with interview requests for talk and news shows. I turned them all down, because I didn’t feel like I had anything to say at the time. Yet Scott and I made a list of everyone who called.
A year and a half later, I pulled out the list and scanned it from top to bottom. I stopped by Philadelphia P.M., a talk show in Philadelphia. I wanted to go somewhere far from Texas and Minnesota, where no one would recognize me. I dialed the number and spoke to PM.’s producer. I told him who I was and explained that I was ready to share my story and that I could promise them an exclusive interview: it would be the first time I had shared my story on television. The producer remembered my story and booked me for the show.
I had a great time doing the show in Philadelphia. As I told my story to the host, I felt my body responding. I felt really good again: my posture was better; I felt my old glow coming back.
I had more than a hijacking story to tell now; I also had a message that could help people. It was a message about weathering adversity, going for dreams and goals, and not giving up. The talk show host opened the show to callers wanting to ask me questions. One woman called in to ask me all sorts of questions about my life and about the hijacking.
After that broadcast, I went to get my coat and head over to the hotel with Scott. As I was leaving the station, the receptionist said, “Our phone lines have just been jammed. Everyone wants to talk to you!”
It was hard for me to believe that so many people wanted to hear what I had to say. It also felt great! It gave me the feeling that I was making a positive contribution, that sharing my story and message could actually inspire and help people.
When I got back home to Minnesota, interview and speaking requests began to trickle in. I accepted all the offers because I wanted to use my experience to help others if there was any way it could. I never expected money for any of these appearances. I spoke for free during this first year, sharing my story with whoever wanted to listen. In time, people started insisting on paying me. At first it was twenty-five dollars, and then gradually it grew to one hundred dollars.
One of my early goals as a speaker was to leave the podium. Speakers who didn’t use a podium seemed to be more powerful and have a better grasp of their audiences. There wasn’t a wall between them and the audience.
Yet the idea of leaving the podium was scary. I felt more exposed. People could see my body and how I moved it. I couldn’t hide my nervousness behind the podium. If my hands shook, I couldn’t put them underneath the podium.
To accomplish my goal, I’d have to memorize my speech. I read the speech into a tape recorder and listened to it while I was driving, taking a bath, or doing household chores. I also watched videos of my speeches so I could see my gestures.
There was another problem: I couldn’t see the stage underneath me unless I looked down. At first, I couldn’t take the chance of moving around a lot. I couldn’t see the end of the stage or gaps or cracks in the stage. One time my heel got caught in a gap and I almost fell off the stage. I was able to pull it out in time, but people noticed it.
I wouldn’t be vulnerable to falling or tripping if I stayed behind the podium or if I kept looking down. But if I looked down, I would lose my contact with the audience. Neither option was acceptable. I wanted to move around on stage and maintain my contact with the audience so that my presentations were smooth and professional.
It took about a year and a half before I had the courage to leave the podium and trust that I knew my speech well enough to give it without my notes. I found that by keeping the podium on my left, I could center myself on stage and reduce the risk of falling.
When I first left the podium, I often looked and felt awkward. I leaned forward and made exaggerated gestures with my hands. In time, I gained more confidence as a speaker. I was able to stand up straight and concentrate more on what I was saying.
There were other challenges to telling my story.
After one talk show appearance in which I talked about the bitter feelings I had after the hijacking—how I’d felt abandoned by the U.S. government—I got an angry phone call at home.
“What right do you have to be bitter!” the woman practically screamed in my ear. “You have no right to complain or whine about what happened to you. You knew it was dangerous to be in the Middle East when all that terrorism was going on. And you chose to be there. So stop complaining!”
My God! I thought. All I’d done was to express my feelings honestly. I explained how owning my own bitter feelings was an important part of my healing process, how getting these painful feelings out and accepting them allowed me to move past them. But the caller couldn’t understand. She hung up in the middle of my sentence.
I called the phone company and got an unlisted number. From then on, I never discussed my angry feelings in public.
Sometimes people challenged me when I talked about the lessons I’d learned through the hijacking. “I believe we live forever,” I said in one of my speeches. “I also believe in reincarnation. This is not the only body that I’ve been in. My spirit is learning lessons, and each time that I come back, I come to a higher level of understanding. I get excited about traveling, doing new things, following what my heart needs. That’s something I don’t ignore anymore. I made a commitment that I won’t stuff God anymore. I’ll let God come out in me.”
I was often challenged when I talked about what I believed—especially when I spoke at some churches. If I didn’t say what they believed, I wasn’t right—or people would think I was in la-la land.
After the question and answer period, some people would come up and try to push the Bible on me. They quoted different biblical verses to prove that I was wrong about the lessons I’d learned through my own experience! I could tell they were angry about some of the things I said.
I was very puzzled about how to communicate my beliefs and experiences to people who felt threatened by me. I kept trying to think, How can I convince them that I’m on their side? That we believe the same thing but we’re saying it in different ways? I looked for language that could bring us together.
I found a wonderful meditation guide called The Daily Word. It contained thoughts such as “I walk in the newness of life for God is my life and I am well” and “Whenever a friend or loved one experiences a health challenge, I continue to hold that dear one in thoughts of wholeness and wellness.” I read that quote at a time when one of my girlfriends was having problems with her child. Each day during my prayer and meditation time, I held her in the light.
I started reading The Daily Word along with my goals and affirmations every day. I found a lot in the guide that I could read in my speech that would make sense to churchgoers and to me. I also drew strength and inspiration from other readings by many different authors. A whole new world was opening up to me as I searched for answers to help me make sense of my new life—and attempted to share the meaning of my experience with others.
Along the way, I felt affirmed many times by the books I read and by the many people in my life who loved and supported me unconditionally. Slowly, I gained more confidence in my ability to talk about my journey in a way that was both meaningful to me and to the audiences I wanted to reach.
I felt honored when a friend asked me to be a reader at his wedding. Not only that, but he trusted me to select the reading myself. I chose this beautiful passage from Kahlil Gibran’s book The Prophet, an inspiring collection of poems that meant a lot to me.
Then Almitra spoke again and said, And what of Marriage, master?
And he answered, saying:
You were born together, and together you shall be forevermore.
You shall be together when the white wings of death scatter your days.
Ay, you shall be together even in the silent memory of God.
But let there be spaces in your togetherness,
And let the winds of the heavens dance between you.
Love one another, but make not a bond of love:
Let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls.
Fill each other’s cup but drink not from one cup.
Give one another your bread but eat not from the same loaf.
Sing and dance together and be joyous, but let each one of you be alone,
Even as the strings of a lute are alone though they quiver with the same music.
Give your hearts, but not into each other’s keeping.
For only the hand of Life can contain your hearts.
And stand together yet not too near together:
For the pillars of the temple stand apart,
And the oak tree and the cypress grow not in each other’s shadow.