Remembrance Week 2014 Part 2 of 4

When she arrived at the Rose Laying Ceremony during Remembrance Week last year, Carol King-Eckersley wasn’t sure where to sit.

At the front of the crowd were the family members of the victims. Toward the back were Syracuse University students and other community members. King-Eckersley didn’t know where she belonged. It was just six months after she learned that the son she gave up for adoption 46 years ago had died in the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103.

“I said ‘No I don’t belong up there,’” she told her sister, Sandra King, who had come to the ceremony with her.

But when King-Eckersley finally approached the family section, one woman gave up her seat. After she sat down with the other family members, something clicked.

“I sat and I suddenly realized that for 46 years I had carried the stigma of being an unmarried mother,” she said. “And that it had affected so many decisions I had made, and I suddenly understood why I had made some not very good decisions.”

“I finally realized that had been carried in my heart all those years,” she said. “And I was finally able to let it go.”

Her son Kenneth Bissett, a junior at Cornell University who was studying with SU’s abroad program, and 34 other students were returning home from studying abroad when Pan Am Flight 103 exploded over Lockerbie, Scotland on Dec. 21, 1988. The bombing killed all 259 people on the flight. Since then, SU has honored the lives lost on Pan Am Flight 103 every year through Remembrance Week, which started Monday.

King-Eckersley’s journey to letting go of the pain of giving away her only child for adoption when she was 19 years old was not a simple or short one. It began in 1967 when King-Eckersley went on a blind date and drank for the first time. A little while later, she said she realized she might have been pregnant after the date.

“And we’re talking 1967, where girls didn’t get pregnant outside of marriage,” King-Eckersley said.

Her father was also the principal of her high school in California, and King-Eckersley said she didn’t want to put him in any bad position. Her mother’s family in Oregon also said they wanted nothing to do with the situation, she added.

But Sandra King, her sister, who was 25 years old at the time, invited King-Eckersley to live with her in New York City during the pregnancy. The two were friends, King said, but they were not close because of their five-year age difference. But after King-Eckersley moved in, the two became much closer.

“In a sense, Kenneth gave us each other,” King said. “Even though it was a very difficult thing for her.”

King said it was easy for her to acknowledge her sister’s pain to give up Bissett for adoption and then to try and forget about it. But she said she knows that pain never leaves King-Eckersley’s mind.

“That umbilical cord never really does break,” King-Eckersley added.

‘He looked like me’

King-Eckersley never saw Bissett’s face when he was born on Dec. 19, 1967. She only saw a tightly wrapped yellow bundle. Giving away Bissett was the hardest thing King-Eckersley had ever done, she said.

When she and her sister left the hospital, they rode in the same car as Bissett and representatives from the adoption agency. King-Eckersley sat in the middle of the backseat hoping Bissett would not cry. If he had cried, King-Eckersley knew she wouldn’t have been able to let him go.

He didn’t cry.

King-Eckersley got out of the car in front of her sister’s studio and stood outside in the cold, watching the car drive down the road until it was out of sight.

Forty-five years and one marriage later, King-Eckersley decided it was time to reach out to the son she gave away. Her husband had died on Oct. 1, 2012, and King-Eckersley went to grief counseling to help her cope. Her counselor told her that one way to help grieve is by finishing things in her past that she left incomplete, King-Eckersley said. She said she was waiting for Bissett to reach out to her first, but she wanted to meet her son, which was a major unfinished part of her life.

So on April 8, 2013, King-Eckersley signed into Facebook and searched the name the adoption agency gave her that she had held onto for a long time. She then found a website with his name and picture.

“He looked like my dad and he looked like me,” she said. The birth date was also same, and King-Eckersley said she knew then that this had to be her son. But then she said she noticed there was a second date next to his birth date.

“I was thinking, why are they only showing part of his life?” she said. King-Eckersley called her sister into the room to look at the website. It took a couple of minutes until King-Eckersley understood what the second date meant.

“I realized that my baby was dead,” she said.

‘More and more real’

After King-Eckersley realized Bissett had died in the bombing, all her older sister could think about was how painful it was to watch King-Eckersley cry and handle the pain.

King added that she had forgotten about Bissett and had focused on taking care of her sister. But now the two had an opportunity to learn about who Bissett was as a person when they connected with those who knew him and saw more pictures.

“He became more and more real, but odd enough not as much as a nephew, but as a person I would have loved to have known,” King said.

King-Eckersley never had the opportunity to meet Bissett’s adoptive parents because they passed away prior to her discovery.

Every year, 35 seniors at SU are named Remembrance Scholars to represent the students who died on Pan Am Flight 103. The senior representing Kenneth Bissett this year is Sam Rodgers, the starting senior long-snapper on SU’s football team.

Rodgers said he wanted to represent Bissett because the story about King-Eckersley’s discovery stuck out to him. From what Rodgers read, he said he thought Kenneth was a fun-loving guy that he would have wanted to hang out with. Rodgers added that he is looking forward to meeting with King-Eckersley during the week as well.

“That’s part of what’s pretty cool about Remembrance Week — the families that decide to come back and just the relationships you can build,” he said.

Thanks to the connections she’s made through Remembrance Week, King-Eckersley said she can clearly imagine the wonderful life Bissett lived for 21 years.

“I can’t hug him, but I can hug him in my mind,” she said.

Published on October 21, 2014 at 12:01 am

Contact Anna: almerod@syr.edu