A Tortured Soul

{4:36 minutes to read} January 28th was the 30th anniversary of the space shuttle Challenger explosion. For those of us of a certain age who remember it, we know exactly where we were when we heard the news. It was like the day that John F. Kennedy was shot, the day the twin towers came down—we’ll never forget it.

With the Challenger, we watched the explosion play over and over on TV that night and for weeks to come. But as with everything else in life, the acute pain of the event fades, our memory holds it but with less force…. and life, as it must, goes on.

But not for Bob Ebeling, one of the four engineers working on the Challenger project. Now 89 years old, he is still steeped in grief that he didn’t stop the launch that day. In listening to the interview with him on NPR on the anniversary of the explosion, he recalled his memory of that event, by telling interviewer Howard Berkes, that the night before the launch, he told his wife Darlene, “It’s going to blow up.”

There were freezing temperatures in Florida that week and “I was one of the few that was really close to the situation. Had they listened to me and waited for a weather change, it might have been a completely different outcome.”

He went on to say that, “NASA ruled the launch. They had their mind set on going up and proving to the world they were right and they knew what they were doing. But they didn’t.” And so the fateful explosion.

Listening to the wavering voice of this deeply religious man, who couldn’t forgive himself for not doing more to stop the launch and the subsequent death of those seven astronauts, was heartbreaking. I had tears in my eyes listening to this tortured soul.

I couldn’t get him out of my mind.

A few days later, I had a client come in for their first official mediation session after the initial consultation. They were married for 6 years, had two preschool-aged children and having gone through marriage counseling, determined that there was no other course for them but to separate. There was a great deal of tension between them, trust issues were up in a big way, there were a myriad of difficult matters to be worked out and I knew we were going to be in for a challenging mediation.

However, we did parse out the most important issues at the first meeting and they did make some headway. They agreed to meet the following week. The next day, I received an email from the husband that they “…have decided not to continue with mediation. Moving forward we will both be hiring lawyers. Thank you.”

I emailed them back making my usual plea for sanity, saying in part: “Please allow me to persuade you not to do that. It is going to be a very costly proposition not only financially but time wise. Litigations take years and years to finally resolve. In the end, you will make some sort of settlement, similar, if not exactly, what you would work out in mediation. Your money will be better spent setting up 529 college savings accounts for your little ones. Please consider not giving up on mediation.”

On a much smaller and less grand scale, I have some understanding of how Bob Ebeling must feel. You know what you know and you try your best to implore someone to listen to you, but sometimes they just won’t. And that can haunt your soul for a long time.