Found

This is the eighth post in a series about my experience in the immediate aftermath of the Flight 5342 tragedy (part one: The Night It Happened). Revisiting this period is helpful to me, but reading about it may not be helpful to you. Feel free to skip this one if you might find it upsetting.

My sister, Amanda, and I were in D.C. for a total of six days following the Flight 5342 tragedy. But it felt like one long day. I was operating in a robotic state. I was being presented with the most difficult questions of my life, but my brain wasn’t functioning.

Minor decisions, like what to eat, were difficult. So I just repeated the same meals from the hotel Starbucks and DoorDash every day.

Even though most of the major work we did to support the recovery and identification process came on the first day, the days that followed were still packed with tasks and meetings from morning until 10 or 11 p.m.

Every night in my hotel room was similar to the first. I alternated between brief periods of sleep, jolts awake that didn’t bring an end to the nightmare, and pacing back and forth across the room. My mind fixated on topics that were absurdly beyond the task at hand. I should try to get a skating rink named after Spencer. I should try to get a dog park named after Christine.

Before the collision, I had cracked the screen of my iPhone. It was pretty minor, and I hadn’t gotten around to dealing with it. During our time in Bethesda, I was using my phone nonstop, and eventually, the screen started going completely black. Every time, it filled me with terror that I would lose my essential line of communication to both the team on site and my family back home. It feels like less of a crisis in retrospect, but it was freaking me out in the moment.

At some point, Amanda and I had a long enough break in the schedule to venture out to a nearby Apple Store. While it was four days after our arrival, it was the first time other than the visit to the crash site that I remember us setting foot outside the hotel.

Walking in the real world felt strange. Every little thing I saw reminded me of them. Spencer’s beloved Lululemon. The Smoothie King that matched the two credit card charges I saw from Wichita. The knitting shop that would have drawn Christine in like a moth to a flame if we were walking there together.

As we received updates in the daily briefings, there was always a gap between the two numbers: people who had been recovered but not yet identified. I clung to hope that Christine and Spencer had been found early and that the identification process was just taking a bit longer due to my inability to provide matching DNA for either of them. But the fear that they could still be in the Potomac was always there haunting me.

During the briefings, I tried to ask crafty questions to amass evidence that they were among those who had been recovered but not yet identified.

“Can you tell us how many of the recovered passengers are under the age of 18?”

Sensing my desperation, Kathy, the point person from the D.C. Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, approached me after one of the briefings, gave me her cell phone number, and assured me she would follow up with as much information as she could share.

By midday on Monday, February 3, 2025, I had pieced together enough data points that I was fairly certain that Spencer had been recovered but not yet positively identified. It was still agonizing to be so far out from the collision without any confirmation on either of them, but it was a small morale boost.

Later the same day, Amanda and I stepped out of the hotel to eat something other than the same DoorDash order again. As we were walking, I received an incoming call from a D.C. area code. I answered, and a D.C. police detective introduced himself and asked if we could meet. This was encouraging news, since a quirk of the process in D.C. is that the police are the ones responsible for death notifications.

We raced back to the hotel and tracked down the detective. He notified us that Spencer had been recovered and positively identified.

I felt a mix of tremendous relief and continuing angst. We had Spencer. But the waiting would continue for Christine.

After one more night of brief sleep, jolts awake, and pacing, I began the day of February 4, 2025 — my 51st birthday. Now that we had Spencer, there were arrangements to make. There were many moving parts between the medical examiner’s office, a local funeral home, and the funeral home I had engaged back in Rhode Island.

We had barely gotten started that morning when we were summoned back to the meeting room area. Another D.C. detective delivered the news we had been waiting for: Christine had been recovered and identified.

One of the uncomfortable realities of the recovery and identification process was that none of us could count on the outcome being black and white. Earlier in the process, I had signed paperwork accounting for scenarios where partial remains were recovered.

Our wait for answers was excruciating. But when we did receive them, we heard the word that every grieving family member was desperate to hear: “intact.”

If you found this interesting or moving, consider making a donation to the Christine Conrad Lane Memorial Dog Park.