I Lost My Father in a Plane Crash. Now I Feel Closest to Him at 30,000 Feet.

The night my father died, a police sergeant delivered the news in eight words. “Your father was killed in a plane crash.” I had been sound asleep in my midtown Manhattan apartment with my now husband, Ross, after a night out with friends just days before Christmas vacation, when my cell phone started buzzing. I reached for it in the dark. A voice I didn’t recognize said, “Jordi, this is Sergeant Thomas.” And then those eight words. I remember thinking, the way the mind grabs for something solid when the ground gives out, that eight words was not enough. Eight words could not possibly be the right container for what had just happened. Eight words was the number of words in a grocery list, a text message, a casual thought. Not the number of words required to end someone’s life. Not the number of words required to end mine.

I was 24 years old. I had an apartment near Central Park and a job as a celebrity gossip reporter, which meant I spent my days elbowing past other journalists on red carpets and my nights at clubs where my company picked up the tab. It was a life that looked, from the outside, like a dream. On December 22, 2010, that dream ended. My father, Dr. Michael Lippe, emergency-room physician, amateur pilot, the person I called when anything happened, was alone in his single-engine plane, flying to work in upstate New York when he encountered icy weather a few miles from the landing runway.

I will never know what those final moments felt like for him. What I know is that when the phone rang in the middle of the night, everything I understood about myself and my future dissolved into eight words and the sound of a stranger’s voice.

The author’s father, Dr. Michael Lippe, standing beside his four-seater aircraft. The plane had the tail number 968SM—the months of his daughters’ birthdays and his and his wife’s initials.

My father learned to fly when I was still in elementary school, and he continued taking to the sky as an amateur pilot, a hobby and a personal passion. The prop plane he flew was a four-seater. The two of us later had a ritual: He would fly north from New Jersey to Boston to pick me up from college and take me somewhere for lunch, sometimes two or three states away, just because he could. On those flights, he was a different version of himself, the emergency room far below. He would talk about his childhood, his patients, the mistakes he'd made and what he learned from them, what he hoped for my life. Other times we would sit in comfortable silence and watch the world from above, and it was enough.

One Fourth of July we flew into the clear summer night, just the two of us in that little four-seater. At some point he leveled off and nodded toward the window. Below us, stretching as far as I could see in every direction, town after town was lighting off fireworks—red, gold, white, blooming and fading across the dark all the way to the horizon. It looked as though the whole eastern seaboard was celebrating at once, and we had the best seat in the house. My father didn’t say anything. Neither did I. We just sat there, side by side in the cockpit, watching. No music, no commentary, just the hum of the engine and miles of color below us, the two of us exactly where we wanted to be.

Flying was a language my father spoke fluently, and being in the plane with him was the clearest way I knew to understand him. On the ground he carried a lot: an emergency room full of other people’s worst days, a house full of three daughters and everything that came with them. But in the sky he had control and, paradoxically, freedom at the same time, and up there the weight of all of it seemed to lift. He talked, he laughed, he sat in a quality of silence that felt less like quiet and more like ease, like a man who had finally set something down.

The plane was only part of it. My parents believed, with a conviction that never wavered, that the world was something their daughters were supposed to see. So we saw it. My parents took me to places we couldn’t have found on a map the week before: wandering through the markets of Italy, snorkeling in the Caribbean, renewing their vows in Israel while my two sisters and I looked on. Each trip left a particular deposit—some image or smell or moment of feeling genuinely, unexpectedly small in front of something enormous—and my father was always there at the center of it, the person who had decided we should go, who made the reservations and read the guidebooks and believed without any apparent doubt that the right response to a world this large and strange was to get out into it.

The author, second from right, with her two sisters, father, and mother at a restaurant on Long Beach Island, New Jersey, where the family spent summers.

One trip took us to the beaches of Normandy, in France. I was in high school, it was windy and cool, the sun bright but thin, and the beach was nearly empty. My father stood beside me and said we should try to picture it: the thousands of men who had come ashore on this same stretch of beach, in the dark, not knowing what was waiting for them. “Most of those guys were your age, you know,” he said. I didn’t say anything. “I just wanted you to see this place,” he said, “I wanted you to actually see it.”

When my father died, I tried everything the Western world offered for grief: therapy, self-help books, antidepressants, the slow and effortful passage of time. Some of it helped some of the time. None of it reached the specific shape of what I had lost. And airplanes were particularly charged. For months after the crash, I couldn’t hear a plane overhead without my chest tightening. I didn’t think I’d ever want to fly again.

And no one would have blamed me for never setting foot on another plane. But staying on the ground would mean losing him twice: first to the crash and then by denying the life he had spent years trying to show me was worth living. The world he had taken me into was still out there. I just had to find my way back to it.

The family swimming with dolphins in the Bahamas in 2007.

About eight months after the crash, an assignment came through to me from my editor: a work trip to Fiji, a 7,900-mile, 16-hour flight away, farther than I had ever flown. And I would be going alone, my first time on a plane since the accident.

I almost didn’t take the assignment. The thought of boarding a plane—any plane—terrified me. There was something else too: Being in a plane meant being in his world, the place where I had felt closest to him, and I wasn’t sure I was ready for that. But there was something else still, something smaller and older and more stubborn. It was the same thing that had once sent me climbing into a four-seater prop plane with my father.

I went on the trip. I recited the Jewish Shema prayer as the plane taxied down the runway, which surprised me because I don’t think of myself as particularly religious. And I spoke directly to my father, out loud or close enough to it, asking him to keep me safe the way I used to ask him to keep me safe when I was a child and the world felt too big. And when the plane left the ground and I finally opened my eyes and we were already above the clouds, something happened that I have spent 15 years trying to accurately describe.

I felt calm. A genuine, settling calm I had not felt since before December 22, 2010. And beneath it, something more specific: the unmistakable sensation that my father was near. Near in a way I could not have rationally explained, near in the way that only makes sense when you stop defending yourself against the irrational and let it be true. At 30,000 feet, somewhere over the Pacific, I suddenly felt closer to my father than I had anywhere else, through all the conventional ritual spaces I’d sought him in.

The author with her younger sister and their father on a trip to Los Angeles in 2005.

This is the part that is difficult to explain without sounding as if I have lost my grip on reality, but let me try: What I have come to understand is that my father is not at his grave site. I have stood there many times and felt his absence profoundly—the marble, the quiet, the terrible stillness of a place designed for the specific purpose of marking that someone is gone. Graves are monuments to loss. I understand why we build them, and I’m grateful for them. But I cannot feel my father there. I feel him in the world, when I’m moving, when the ground drops away and the horizon opens up and the ordinary coordinates of daily life become briefly, startlingly irrelevant.

On the plane was where my father was most himself, and so that’s where I find the most of him. Henry Scott-Holland wrote, in a poem I return to more than any other, that death is nothing at all. “I have only slipped away into the next room.” He wrote that the dead are waiting for us, just around the corner, and that when we meet again we will laugh at the trouble of parting. I don’t know if I believe in an afterlife in any formal theological sense. But I believe, completely and without reservation, that the poem is pointing at something real. My father has slipped into the next room. When I travel, when I move through the world the way he taught me to, I am closer to the door.

With her sister and father on a scuba-diving trip to Belize in 2008.

In the 15 years since the crash, I have been to more than 65 countries on all seven continents. In 2015, I quit my gossip-reporting job and became a travel writer, which was not the career I had planned and is the only career I can now imagine having. The bylines followed—Condé Nast Traveler, Travel + Leisure, The Wall Street Journal—and with them came assignments that sent me to places my father had always wanted to go and some he had never imagined: jumping out of a helicopter in Hawaii with a Navy SEAL, covering the 2016 Olympics in Rio, sitting across from Richard Branson at lunch on his private island, visiting Antarctica at 21 weeks pregnant and helping break a major news story from the ice because the Internet barely worked and the story happened to be ready. That last one felt especially like something he would have appreciated—the absurdity of it, the improbability, the sense that life, if you let it, will keep finding ways to surprise you.

But the travel and the travel journalism gave me something I hadn’t anticipated and couldn’t have planned for. In all those countries, in conversations I was having for other reasons entirely, people kept saying things that sounded like advice my father might have given me. A hotel manager in Hawaii who told me, with total certainty, that the only way through fear was to walk directly into it. A shaman in Peru, speaking through a translator at the ruins of Machu Picchu, who described letting go of what you cannot control as the only real form of power. A Tanzanian guide who often said, “Pole, pole”—literally, “slowly, slowly.” I came to understand it as something deeper: a reminder to be present.

The one that really stopped me was in Peru. We had just found out that my husband’s grandmother had died when a shaman led me through a ceremony called a Despacho. It’s a ritual of gratitude built on the idea that we are connected to everything and that the right response is to slow down and appreciate what you already have. I stood there in the ruins, the mountains enormous around me, grieving one loss inside another—exactly the kind of thing you cannot control and cannot outrun. But the slowing down did something. In the quiet of that place, I realized my father’s wisdom hadn’t left with him.

None of these people knew I was grieving. They were not talking to me about loss. They were simply living philosophies they had been practicing for generations, and I kept recognizing in those philosophies the contours of what my father had understood but perhaps was not able to share with me in time. The world, it turned out, was full of people saying things he would have said. I just had to be out in it to hear them.

The author’s father on the rooftop deck of their beach house in New Jersey.

You might see this as a story about overcoming fear, and there is truth in that. I do fly all the time now, and the panic of those early post-crash years has faded to something more manageable: a breath held until we are above the clouds, a habit of still saying the Jewish Shema prayer as the engines rev. But I didn’t fully get there by confronting the fear therapeutically or by reasoning my way through it or by following any of the conventional advice about how grief is supposed to go. I got there by recognizing and embracing the specific thing that caused it. When you start trying to get closer to the loss rather than past it, grief changes.

In 2018, I had a son. We named him Wilder because we wanted something adventurous. And we gave him the middle name Mooney, after the brand of my father’s plane. It also means “precious” in the Irish language. Our wild treasure, and a reminder for him to always seek what’s precious in the world. By his seventh birthday he had been to all seven continents. I want to be careful here not to romanticize what is also simply a function of circumstance: a travel writer for a mother, a willing husband, and a son who turned out to be constitutionally unbothered by airports. I am taking my son to the ends of the earth because I want him to find me there, the way I found my father: in the movement, in the distance, in the particular quality of being somewhere far from home and feeling, improbably, at peace.

My father believed that the appropriate response to the world was to get into a plane and go see more of it. That the world is larger and stranger and more beautiful than the version of it you can see from a single vantage point. That the best response to that fact is curiosity rather than fear.

My son knows this now, at eight years old, in whatever way an eight-year-old knows things. He has stood on seven continents and looked at seven versions of the sky. He doesn’t know yet that he is carrying his grandfather with him, that the willingness to go somewhere strange and far and unknown is itself an inheritance, a language passed from one generation to the next through the specific vocabulary of motion and the particular silence and wonder of two people watching something extraordinary from above.

He will know someday. I will tell him about the Fourth of July and the fireworks and the easy silence, and I will tell him that the closest I get to my father is at 30,000 feet, and that I hope, when the time comes, the same will be true for him.

And when I am gone, whenever that is, in whatever way it happens, I want Wilder to know that if he is somewhere far and strange and beautiful, I am with him. I want him to look for me in Antarctica, in the Serengeti, in the ruins of Machu Picchu, in the window seat of a long-haul flight somewhere over an ocean, and I want him to feel what I feel when I fly: the particular, inexplicable sense that the people we love who are no longer on the ground are somehow easier to reach from the air.

The loss doesn’t go away, of course, and the fact of my father’s death still arrives without warning sometimes: when my son gets sick or when I’m watching fireworks. In the meantime, we keep going. There’s always another country, another window seat; somewhere ahead of the plane, the world opens up as it does at altitude, vast and full of possibility. Whoever you’re looking for feels like they’re out there in it, just around the corner, waiting.

A few days before the 15th anniversary of my father’s death this past December, I was in the air when the clouds closed beneath us and the sunset lit everything up—gold and pink and impossibly vivid, the ground gone, nothing below but white and nothing above but color. I took a video because I didn’t know what else to do with it. It looked like heaven. It felt like him.