Where Are They Buried? (46 page)

In 1985 Christa McAuliffe, a New Hampshire fifth-grade social studies teacher, was chosen by NASA to be the first “ordinary person” to fly into space. In the months leading up to the celebrated six-day mission, American classrooms around the nation tuned in to follow her experience and Christa endeared herself to the public at large. She was comfortable in front of a camera, well-spoken, and likable, and her “Reach for the Stars” history-making space shuttle mission was proving to be a public relations bonanza for NASA.

On January 28, 1986, Christa and her fellow astronauts Greg Jarvis, Ron McNair, Ellison Onizuka, Judy Resnick, Dick Scobee, and Michael Smith boarded the space shuttle
Challenger
and a spellbound nation watched with high expectations as their craft lifted cleanly off the launch pad at 11:38 a.m., leaving its typical trail, a blazing geyser of fire and smoke. But 73 seconds into the flight, as the majestic spacecraft soared 13 miles into the deep blue sky above Florida,
Challenger
exploded in a ferocious fireball whose power was later described by NASA scientists as comparable to a “small nuclear weapon.”

For a lingering moment there was stunned silence. As the pieces of wreckage traced slow-motion arcs out of the sky, the 1,200 well-wishers who had gathered around a giant television screen in Concord, New Hampshire, prayed in hushed disbelief. At Cape Canaveral’s VIP viewing room, families of the seven astronauts who’d perished before their eyes shared an inconsolable grief.

After being bombarded by countless scientific and not-so-scientific explanations, conspiracy allegations, and talk-show elucidations, the official cause of the accident was presented through the Report of the Presidential Commission on the Space Shuttle
Challenger
Accident in June 1986. The report concluded that there was a failure of an O-ring seal in one of the craft’s solid rocket motors. The seal failed due to a sensitive design that was degraded by external factors including temperature and reuse.

It was assumed by the general public that all those aboard
Challenger
died the moment the external fuel tank blew up. Of course, NASA was initially careful not to disturb this opinion, but the agency later concurred with scientists and engineers who insisted
that not everyone, and probably no one, aboard the
Challenger
died the second the tank exploded.

If the cabin depressurized immediately, the crew would only have lived for perhaps 15 seconds after the blast. But if the cabin remained pressurized, which is possible, they might have survived for the full 2 minutes and 45 seconds it took to fall 65,000 feet back to Earth. However, they could not have survived the crushing 207 m.p.h. impact into the Atlantic Ocean, which refutes the wilder tabloid stories that had them alive for hours, or even days, waiting under the sea for rescuers who failed to reach them in time.

Possibly the best clue to solving the mystery of how long the doomed crew survived lies in the four emergency air packs that were recovered. Three had been manually activated, which demonstrated that at least some of the crew realized something was amiss, but the remaining inactivated packs indicate that loss of consciousness was also occurring at the same time.

A complete understanding of exactly what transpired is elusive because NASA remains highly secretive about the specifics of the tragedy. Furthermore, the agency may not themselves know exactly what befell the crew members as the wreckage and bodies spent up to six weeks in the sea before being recovered. Even then, much of the debris was never found.

At 38, Christa’s remains were buried at Calvary Cemetery in Concord, New Hampshire.

CEMETERY DIRECTIONS:
From I-93 take Exit 15W. At the second light turn right onto North State Street, and the cemetery is a mile ahead on the left.

GRAVE DIRECTIONS:
Enter the cemetery at the third entrance (the one with the granite archway). Bear right after the archway, take the next left, then go all the way to the back. Christa’s gravesite is marked with a black headstone on the left.

Unfortunately, the identity of all the recovered remains could not be established and, in a private ceremony on May 20, 1986, the unidentified remains were placed in a single, common grave at Arlington National Cemetery in Arlington, Virginia. The site in Section 46 is marked with a single tablet dedicated to the memory of the seven
Challenger
astronauts.

NOVEMBER 15, 1887 – MARCH 6, 1986

Georgia O’Keeffe’s catalog is an embodiment of boldly original paintings encompassing a wide vision, from sensuous evocations of flowers to dramatic cityscapes to bleached bones stranded in the high desert. She settled in New York City with the internationally known photographer and art impresario Alfred Stieglitz after he discovered her professionally. They wed in 1924, and the couple was the centerpiece of New York’s burgeoning modern-art scene for three decades. After Alfred’s death in 1946, Georgia moved west into an old adobe house on what came to be known as her Ghost Ranch, in New Mexico north of Santa Fe.

In the following four decades, Georgia painted an ambitiously vivid narrative of the region featuring multicolored desert particularities against strident skies in hues designed to startle the senses. The territory’s dramatic mesas and desiccated terrain, as well as its ancient Spanish architecture, became her constant themes, and she only occasionally departed to interpret details of her home’s doors and windows or romanticize large-scale patterns of clouds and landscapes seen from the air.

Although she had a major retrospective at the Art Institute of Chicago and an exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art, Georgia had almost completely withdrawn from the public during her New Mexico years. By 1973 she abandoned painting entirely when her eyesight began to fail, but she soon had a new outlet for her vision of the world when she took in a 27-year-old potter who had an uncanny resemblance to the young Alfred Stieglitz. She started Juan Hamilton off pruning hedges, but he soon helped her complete her well-received 1976 autobiography. When she died, Hamilton
became the sole heir to her $70 million estate—an inheritance reduced after it was contested by a niece and nephew.

Before her death of natural causes at 98, a reflection on that destiny confirmed her unflagging spirit: “When I think of death, I only regret that I will not be able to see this beautiful country anymore … unless the Indians are right and my spirit will walk here after I’m gone.”

Georgia was cremated and her ashes scattered at Pedernal Mountain 30 miles north of Santa Fe near Abiquiu, New Mexico.

In 1997, the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum opened in Santa Fe.

OCTOBER 27, 1932 – FEBRUARY 11, 1963

Sylvia Plath was writing complete poems by the age of five and, at eight, she had one of her works published in the
Boston Herald
newspaper. By seventeen she was an experienced writer and her short stories appeared in teen magazines. As a scholarship student at Smith College, she won a magazine fiction contest and was awarded two Smith poetry prizes.

Sylvia was sensitive, intelligent, and a perfectionist. Under the perfect surface though, was grave personal turmoil, and after having returned from a stint as a guest editor at
Made-moiselle
magazine while still a student, Sylvia made her first suicide attempt. After electroshock and psychotherapy treatments, Sylvia resumed her pursuit of academic and literary excellence, graduated from Smith
summa cum laude
in 1955, and went on to Newnham College, Cambridge, England, on a Fulbright fellowship.

In 1956, Sylvia and the poet Ted Hughes married and, though Sylvia had committed herself to an honest run at happiness, Ted was not the ideal husband she imagined; he was moody and slovenly, flirtatious and adulterous, while Sylvia was blindly faithful. After two years in Massachusetts, where Sylvia taught literature at her alma mater, the couple moved back to England and by 1962 had two children. But their marriage was coming apart at the seams. Sylvia’s suspicions of Ted’s adultery were soon proven correct and he abandoned her for another woman.

Sylvia kept writing throughout these tribulations. Her talent was keenly displayed in 1960 in her book of poems,
The Colossus
, and again in 1963 in her loosely autobiographical novel,
The Bell Jar
. But the formal precision of these works only hinted at what was fermenting as her relationship with Ted disintegrated.

The winter of 1963 was furiously cold in London and, while Ted cavorted in Spain with his new maiden, Sylvia battled the flu with her children in a cold and dark London flat, mustering the courage to execute her final plan. Late one night, Sylvia left a little food and milk in the bedroom of her sleeping children, cracked open their window, and sealed their door with towels and tape. Downstairs in the kitchen, Sylvia ingested a handful of sleeping pills, sat on the floor and rested her head inside the oven, its gas taps turned on full.

Sylvia’s nurse found her in the morning. At her side, a suicide note read simply, “Please call Dr. Horder.”

After Sylvia’s death at 30, the poems over which she had toiled during the last chapter of her life were collected and released in three volumes:
Ariel
,
Crossing the Water
, and
Winter Trees
, each of which astonished the literary world. In these confessional poems Sylvia abandoned the restraints and conventions of her earlier work and unleashed graphically macabre verse full of ironic wit and hallucinogenic imagery.

“Dying is an art like everything else. I do it exceptionally well,” she wrote in “Lady Lazarus.”

“I am terrified of this dark thing that sleeps in me,” read a passage in the poem “Elm.”

It is upon these poems that Sylvia’s literary reputation mainly rests and, because her divorce from Ted was never finalized, he won control of all their rights. In 1981, after Ted assembled some of them into
The Collected Poems
, Sylvia was honored with a posthumous Pulitzer Prize.

She was buried in the new cemetery adjoining the Church of St. Thomas Becket in Heptonstall, a small hilltop village above the town of Hebden Bridge in West Yorkshire, England. To find her grave, enter the cemetery from the entrance nearest the church and walk to the left along the second row of graves. Sylvia’s unassuming stone is about two-thirds of the way down the row.

On her gravestone there is an inscription, from “Monkey,” a story written by Wu Ch’eng-en about 1560: “Even amidst fierce flames the golden lotus can be planted.”

SEPTEMBER 14, 1879 – SEPTEMBER 6, 1966

In 1912 Margaret Sanger was a public health nurse serving New York’s poverty-stricken Lower East Side tenement families
whose misery was mostly the result of unchecked childbirth. Her duties brought her into contact with many prematurely old and tired women, their bodies weakened by far too many pregnancies, and who, in panic at the thought of another child, customarily resorted to a self-induced or back-street abortion that oftentimes ended in death from blood poisoning. Others simply chose suicide directly. When women begged doctors for information on how to prevent future pregnancies, they were flippantly advised to “have their husbands sleep on the roof.” Margaret attributed her own mother’s premature death to her eighteen pregnancies and, from all this despair, she launched a revolution that discarded age-old birth-control taboos and made it acceptable not only to the medical profession, but to the public at large.

Of course, Margaret faced obstacles in her fight to make birth control information available. One was ignorance: Not even the medical community knew much about contraception. Another was public opinion: Many people considered family planning immoral and perverted, and even the discussion of it unthinkable. But the main obstacle was the Comstock law, a federal statute that classified all contraceptive information as pornography and provided hefty fines and prison sentences of up to 45 years for its violators.

In 1914 Margaret established a newspaper,
The Woman Rebel
. In this radical monthly, the term “birth control” was coined and, though the newspaper contained no specific how-to information, Margaret was charged with violating federal law. Wanting the case against her to rest on something more fundamental than the generalized offenses of which she was accused, Margaret hurriedly assembled and distributed a pamphlet entitled
Family Limitation
, which included the forbidden contraceptive information, then fled overseas to avoid prosecution. For the next year she studied birth control in the more-liberal European countries, particularly the Netherlands, where the first clinics operated. Now fully prepared to face the charges against her, Margaret returned to the United States, but was disappointed when the government backed down, reluctant to grant her a public forum or try a case that might lead to changes in the law.

In October 1916 Margaret mounted a more direct challenge to Comstockian censorship and, with her sister Ethyl Byrne, opened America’s first birth-control clinic in a desperately poor Brooklyn neighborhood. They were arrested ten days later, and the clinic was declared a public nuisance and
shuttered. The defiant sisters were sentenced to jail for 30 days and the publicity made birth control a new matter of public debate. But, far more importantly, she won a clarification of a New York law that forbade distribution of birth-control information, and this change opened the door for doctor-staffed birth-control clinics.

Despite continuing legal harassment and strident opposition from religious groups who called her, among other things, “a lascivious murdering monster,” Margaret pressed on. In 1923 she opened another New York clinic, this time staffed by a physician who offered contraceptive counseling and instruction not only to neighborhood women but also to other doctors. Police stormed the clinic six years later, but this time physicians sprang to its defense, claiming that the privacy of the doctor-patient relationship had been violated, and all charges were dismissed.