In Memoriam of Betty Ong
Today would have been Betty Ong’s 68th birthday. You might be wondering who Betty Ong is and what significance she plays. Betty died on September 11, 2001 after the plane she was aboard struck the North Tower of the World Trade Center in New York City.
I had no idea who Betty Ong was until an hour ago. During a phone conversation with a friend, I looked her up and realized her birthday is today. Betty was an airline attendant on Flight 11 and happened to be the first person to notify American Airlines operations that her flight had been hijacked. Flight 11 was the first plane to strike during the September 11th attacks.
In Betty’s early life, she was held at gunpoint during an armed robbery at her family’s beef jerky factory. And then in 1987, she witnessed a car hit by a speeding truck. The car proceeded to roll over twice. She ran to the vehicle and found a woman who she had previously met just a month before. In these respective situations, her actions had been described as “never panicked,” by her family, and “a miracle,” by the survivor from the car wreck.
As I’m furiously scrambling to put something on a piece of a paper, I’m faced with the realization that there is no real way to convey who this person is short of telling you to spend time reading about her. There are names worth remembering and stories worth telling. We tend to forget the people that have real importance and remember the names and stories that aren’t justifiably worth mentioning. Sadly, Betty Ong will get few mentions on social media or in the news today. Not because nobody cares, but because we don’t remember. Maybe it’s too painful to remember. Stories like this are hard to hear and harder to find. The kind that are gut wrenching. Shedding tears seems to be the only way to read or listen to such a story. And you become grateful this person lived, despite never knowing them.
Ong spent 23 minutes on the phone inside of a capsule, existing closer to death every minute. 23 minutes. She did everything she could in those minutes. Betty relayed information, calmly and professionally, as it was described by the operator on the other end of that line. (If you can stomach it, I would encourage you to read the transcript here.) It didn’t save her life, but maybe it saved someone else’s life. Maybe it prevented another plane from entering airspace that had hijackers aboard.
The vast majority of us are not in such high stakes situations in life, but at least, while we scroll through our world, it’s worth understanding who people can become and what stories are worth remembering. It’s because she died that we can share her story, as sad as it is. But death should not get in the way of finding what good exists in the people around us or in the people we don’t even know.
