Stealing Time
For this series of personal stories about the life and death of my son Charlie, I’m putting up a paywall for the Wednesday Substack. I’ll offer stories for free on other days but the Wednesday Substack will focus on Charlie’s story and the space where his story weaves into the stories of others facing challenges with mental health, family estrangement, and addiction.
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Petite Writing Intensives: I am fully booked until May 1, 2026.
The book, Write On: A Daily Writing Practice for Anyone With a Story to Tell, has 365 writing prompts to support you in telling your story.
Writing Prompt for March 4, 2026
Tell about losing time or tell about having extra time.
After reading the prompt, write for 15 minutes allowing your awareness to guide you. Don’t *think* about the prompt, just start writing. If a different story comes up than the theme of the prompt, go there. You may be surprised by the story that is revealed.
October 1994
260 days before Charlie’s birth
Maybe Charlie and I were both living on borrowed time. A few weeks after I conceived him I was booked on a flight that ended up crashing. It was the American Airlines flight 4184 from Indianapolis to Chicago. I was booked on it to connect to a flight to London to see my sister-in-law Jan De Villeneuve in a Noel Coward play on the West End. It was going to be a quick trip, I didn’t want to leave my kids for very long but it was also important to see Jan in the play. She wasn’t a trained actress and this was a huge opportunity. Who ends up on stage alongside Rachel Weisz and Rupert Graves in the prestigious West End in their first play? I was thrilled for Jan.
At the last minute I called the travel agent to rebook the flight through NYC instead of Chicago to meet my niece Daisy (Jan’s daughter) who was a student at Parson’s School of Design. Together Daisy and I traveled to London for the weekend to see her mom in the play. My husband Butch encouraged me to go while he stayed at home with our three young children (Sam, 4, Lucy, 3, and Willie, 1) with support from a babysitter.
The crash was on a Monday, October 31, 1994. There was a severe storm in Indiana with heavy wet snow and wind gusts of over 50mph. The flight took off from the Indianapolis airport at 2:55pm, my kids would have been waking up from their afternoon naps then. The plane flew for thirty minutes towards Chicago but was put in a holding pattern in northwest Indiana due to the weather. For over thirty minutes a dangerous layer of ice gathered on the wings as the plane circled waiting to land. At 3:37pm the pilot lost control of the plane and it crashed.
Daisy and I had flown to London the Friday before. I remember reading a headline that stated, There Were No Faces, meaning that the plane had disintegrated so rapidly on impact there wasn’t much left to see other than pieces of a plane mixed with pieces of people resting in a snowy field in Northern Indiana. A few weeks after the crash I went to a memorial service at a church in downtown Indianapolis. I almost felt ashamed to be there among the families who had lost loved ones. I didn’t feel lucky to survive. I didn’t feel like God chose me over them. I just felt nauseous because that morning I’d taken a pregnancy test and found out I was pregnant with my fourth child. The child must be something special, I thought if it was powerful enough to switch us from a plane crash that would have ended both of our lives.