Lori Falce: What is your Challenger explosion?

On a fall day in Philadelphia when my mother was 13, she walked out of class and saw people sobbing in the hallway.

“What happened?” she asked.

It was the day that President John F. Kennedy was shot. School was dismissed. Everyone went home and glued themselves to the television where they waited for Walter Cronkite to make sense of things for them. It was days of confusion and evolving information about the assassination.

“We were watching when Jack Ruby shot Lee Harvey Oswald. I saw that happen,” she said. “School was canceled on Monday, and we watched the funeral.”

When I was in junior high, I was home sick on a Tuesday, interrupting “I Dream of Jeannie” reruns to see a social studies teacher from New Hampshire join space shuttle astronauts on a mission. I watched in shock when the Challenger exploded 73 seconds after it left the ground. I counted the minutes until school was out and I could call my best friend to share what I was feeling.

It wasn’t the first big news event that had happened in my life. I was 10 the year that assassination attempts seemed to really hit their stride, when President Ronald Reagan was shot in March 1981 and then Pope John Paul II in May and Egyptian President Anwar Sadat in October. I saw Cronkite count off the 444 days of the Iran hostage crisis.

But there was something different about that moment. Like Kennedy’s death, it was a kind of checkpoint. Everyone cannot tell you where they were or what they were doing when Reagan met with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev later that year, even though that would prove to be more globally significant. But the shuttle explosion? That you remember.

They are milestones for a reason. They are events we remember and feelings we share. The joy of the moon landing. The terror of Sept. 11, 2001. The pain of the Tree of Life synagogue attack. They etch our collective experience like the bands of color in the Grand Canyon. They mark our growth like the rings in a cross-cut tree.

My son has spent his whole life stewing in the news, which I imagine will come up in therapy one day. In the years he has been on the earth, there have been highs and lows, tragedies and triumphs, firsts and lasts. I have often wondered what his Challenger will be. So much of 2020 seemed like it might be that fixed star in his constellation.

And then he took off his headphones and turned to watch people scale the walls of the U.S. Capitol. He watched the glass broken and the doors battered. He heard the screams of a Capitol Police officer being crushed by the crowd.

I knew that in a sea of shootings and protests and a pandemic, this was that checkpoint for him when I heard him on the phone with a friend.

“Are you watching the news? Yeah, me too.”