On Tuesday, it will have been 25 years since a plane carrying members of the Oklahoma State University men’s basketball team crashed in Colorado, killing all 10 men aboard. My father, Will Hancock, was one of them.
The university promised to “Remember the 10,” and I have always tried to do my part by putting into words how much my dad means to me. When I was 15, I wrote about how grateful I am to the community that held my family together during the worst period of our lives. When I was 20, I wrote about what it’s like to miss your dad when you never got to know him.
Everything I said before remains true. I am forever thankful for the kindness shown by strangers, colleagues and friends who helped my family in the aftermath of the crash, and I am forever thankful they continue to keep my dad’s memory alive. I was blessed to grow up in Stillwater, running around the halls of Gallagher-Iba Arena, where my hometown has made good on its promise to Remember the 10 for a quarter of a century.
The other day, my grandmother pointed out something particularly special. After 25 years, OSU still holds memorial events like the basketball game later today — with the weather, a grim reminder of the snowstorm in January 2001 — even though the kids who will sit in the student section weren’t even born at the time of the plane crash. Kids, like me, who only know the 10 through the dedication of others.
My grandmother is right. The tragedy brought out the best in people, and it still does today. In response to the crash, I see selflessness embodied in the people around me, particularly in my mother’s parents, who left Tulsa for Stillwater that night to help raise 2-month-old me, returning only to pack up their old house. That’s the part that’s always been easy for me to talk about.
But there’s a harder part to talk about. At its core, when you strip back all that has come since, there is only a tragedy, simple as it is devastating. Ten men flew to Colorado for a basketball game and didn’t come home. They left behind parents, children, siblings, friends. Kendall Durfey, Bjorn Fahlstrom, Nate Fleming, Will Hancock, Daniel Lawson, Brian Luinstra, Denver Mills, Pat Noyes, Bill Teegins and Jared Weiberg died Jan. 27, 2001, and try as we all might, no memories, no stories, no acts of kindness can ever make up for their loss.
‘We move forward. It’s all we can do’
Well-intentioned people sometimes say the crash happened for a reason. I know these people are kind, and they’re doing their best to share words of comfort. The crash made people realize how much we take for granted, they may say, or it made people stronger in their faith. But I could never reconcile my own faith with a God who would kill my dad as some sort of grand plan to teach other people to cherish their own families more, and I never really tried. I lean instead on what my granddad once said: “God didn’t make that plane go down. God was crying along with us.”
Everyone always tells me how much grace my family members display in their grief. I try to be gracious, too, but I eventually realized the only thing I really wanted to say this year: My heart aches.
My heart aches for my mother, who lost her soulmate before they even reached their fifth wedding anniversary. My heart aches for my grandparents, who endured the incomparable grief of outliving their child. My heart aches for my dad’s brother, his aunts and uncles, his cousins, his friends. And my heart aches for the other nine families who had to experience the same pain mine did.
But we move forward. It’s all we can do.
I had the happiest childhood any kid could ever ask for, and I really believe that. I have a job I love, in a state I love, surrounded by people I love. But some nights, even after all this time, I feel my father’s absence so acutely that it swallows me whole. Sometimes, little things strike me most. I remember writing my first game coverage in a sports reporting class. I wished so badly I could call my dad — who had worked as the media relations coordinator for men’s basketball — and ask the best way to get in a sports information director’s good graces. Other times, I find myself wishing he’d be with me for life’s big changes. When I graduated and I was crippled by the fear of whatever came next, I couldn’t help but feel like the person who would understand me best wasn’t there.
Even as we move forward, we still grieve, no matter how much time has passed. We take our loved ones’ legacies with us. I do my best to carry my father with me.
Some of it is innate. With him, I share a love of writing, U2 and the Kansas City Royals. I light up when someone says we have the same smile, or the same ugly knees and bushy eyebrows. If I’m in the car with my mom and start telling her about the weird time signature of a song playing on the radio, she laughs and says, “You sound just like your dad right now.” One time, when I was little, I went nose-to-nose with my granddad, switching back and forth between shutting one eye. He played along, doing his best not to let me catch him with either eye open. When I pulled back, he smiled and said, “Will and I used to play that game.”
In other ways, I continue my dad’s legacy by choice. I’m always hungry for every story I can get about my dad, each a little piece of a puzzle I know I’ll never complete. I wear my dad’s wedding ring every day alongside my mom’s — a symbol of where I came from, of the people I represent. It’s a reminder we have to keep on living. But here, 25 years later, I sure wish those 10 men could have kept on living with us.
