Kav’s Blog

Well, the speech thing was okay, went for the sincere-but-with-one-joke-thrown-in approach. My going away present is hilarious – an LCD photo frame with a memory card full of all the folks from my department in a variety of poses. You can set the photoframe onto a slideshow and just watch everyone go by. Very thoughtful. Now, to get shitfaced.

Well.

Two people. That’s all I told. Not too bad. Neither of them mattered.

I’m fucked, but I’m obsessive about getting my spelling right.

I came home tonight because the baby we never had means more to me than all the friends I’ll never make.

Five years ago today, Vicki Yancey boarded a plane destined to kill her and 183 other innocents when it hit the western side of the Pentagon. She had meant to leave Washington on an earlier flight, but circumstances conspired to prevent this. On her call to let him know about the change in plans, some of the last words she and her husband David exchanged were “I love you”.

Vicki was both active and an activist – as well as being a devoted mother to her children, Michelle and Carolyn, and wife to her husband David, she was also heavily involved in politics and social issues, so much so that in 1991, she was asked to testify before the US Senate Finance Committee, commenting on the struggles of middle-class families. Vicki herself described her Senate appearance as “the most interesting thing I have ever done”. It led to her being profiled on CNN and PBS, and she delivered the CNN Quote of the Day: “Diving deeply into debt in our middle age is a very unappealing possibility”.

Vicki was middle-class with a difference. Unlike so many who are content with their lot and show little concern for their fellow man, Vicki firmly believed that if you wanted to make changes, you had to make yourself heard. In David Yancey’s words, “She cared for all human beings”. Apathy and laziness were unfamiliar concepts to her. Her compassion for others was obvious even after she died, when David implored America’s citizens not to abuse Arab-Americans for what happened, saying “that’s not how she lived her life and that’s not what she wants”.

It has been difficult to find a lot of personal information about Vicki. I imagine that the media focussed so heavily on her sociopolitical achievements and interests that the other stuff, the essence of who Vicki was, was to an extent overlooked. Although I salute Vicki’s achievements in her political life and her career with the Navy and beyond, it isn’t what I wanted to focus on today.

Here’s what some of her friends and colleagues had to say about Vicki:

Vicki was also an active member of the online community:

I will think of your father calling you “a good American citizen”, and of the headline in the French newspaper Le Monde after that fateful day: Nous sommes tous Américains.

We are all Americans.

God bless you and your family. You will never be forgotten.

Visit here to see all tributes to the victims of September 11th.

Kav I am.