At 11:39 a.m., when an O-ring failed and the shuttle began to break apart, my grandfather was at her grave in Jenkintown, Pennsylvania. He didn’t learn of the disaster until he got back to his motor lodge in Center City and turned on the television.
He sat without moving, without blinking or breathing, as a flower of fire bloomed on a stem of vapor. In that and subsequent replays he watched fragments of the disintegrated spacecraft snake across the sky, wandering, doubling back, as if blindly searching for one another in the blue.
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