SUSAN STAMBERG, Host: `The passage of time has helped,' Susan Cohen writes in this week's Time magazine. `I get up every day, go places, meet people. I live my diminished life, but grief is always there.' Susan Cohen's daughter Theo, 20 years old, her only child, died when Pan Am flight 103 blew up over Lockerbie in 1988. Now, watching the anguish of families in the aftermath of the TWA explosion, Susan Cohen is reminded of her own experience.
 
 

Mrs. Cohen is on the line with us from her home in Cape May, New Jersey. Thanks for talking with us, Mrs. Cohen. You write that the great grief scam has begun, that America denigrates tragedy by treating it as a curable disease. What do you mean by that?
 
 

SUSAN COHEN, Lost Daughter in Pan Am Crash: Well, when something terrible happens, America cannot face the full implications of it, the fact that grief is permanent, the fact that the pain never goes away, It's as if people demand that we have some kind of happy ending here, some kind of dismissal of this tragedy, that somehow it will be `worked through' - I hate that phrase - and then the grief will, you know, go, and the whole tragedy will be cured.
 
 

SUSAN STAMBERG: After the Lockerbie crash, the grief therapists descended on you and other loved ones. The same thing is going on now with the TWA explosion. You were lucky. You finally found a good one, a therapist that helped you to deal with this, but before that what was your experience like?
 
 

SUSAN COHEN: Well, I encountered really terrible, terrible therapists. They seemed to encourage denial, and I am a fighter by nature and am very angry over my daughter's death. She should have been saved, there should have been airline security. Since then there should have been justice in going after the terrorists and the countries that sponsor terrorism, and this anger of mine, which I consider to be reasonable and- and- and even strengthening, bothered the therapists, so that they tried to talk it away or imply there was something wrong with me. Well, how could I not carry this tragedy within me all the time? And I believe that fighting for justice is the right thing to do, and that's what I've done for seven and a half years.
 
 

SUSAN STAMBERG: You've been rather successful in- in a perpetual fight that you've been waging - calling, lobbying the Congress - and this week, after hours on the telephone, the House voted in behalf of the sanctions against foreign oil companies that do business with Iran and Libya - those are the- the two countries implicated in the Lockerbie disaster - so that kind of work on your part seems to have worked.
 
 

SUSAN COHEN: Well, I would say we have a- a long way to go. We have to make sure that that is- bill is signed by the president and also that it is enforced. After Pan Am 103, there were aviation security laws passed and they were simply ignored by the FAA, so, you know, we're partway there. But the problem with the grief therapists is that- the grief therapy- the grief industry, I call it - is that their view of moving forward would be that you don't fight for justice, that you take this- something else in your life and- and don't deal with this, and don't think about this, and try to put it out of your head, then you're staying with it. But, truth was that my daughter, 20 years old with her life ahead of her, this wonderful kid, was gone. At least allow me the dignity of my tragedy, which is for the rest of my life.
 
 

SUSAN STAMBERG: Uh-huh.
 
 

SUSAN COHEN: I will never be the same, my life has been destroyed. And I say that very openly. I have improved. I go on, I do a lot of things I couldn't do in the- in the very beginning, but there is no way out of this. This is a life sentence, and that is why it is so important to prevent tragedy and not to allow the public to think that, well, it isn't so terrible because, you know, it's all going to be OK in the end. We have all been fed too many Hollywood happy endings.
 
 

SUSAN STAMBERG: Hmmm. Mrs. Cohen, I'm not asking you to give us a happy ending, but I am asking you, having gone through this hideous experience, to help us, because I think you're right that we don't deal well with the tragedy of others, and partly it's because of our own discomfort and not knowing what to say. So tell us this. In- in the immediate moment of learning about a tragedy like this, or shortly thereafter, what could actually be helpful for the loved ones?
 
 

SUSAN COHEN: The things you can do are practical. You can, first of all, go in and help people with the everyday needs that a crisis thrusts upon them that they cannot do for themselves. When I had this terrible thing happen to me, I went back to my house the next day in the little town I lived in, Port Jervis, New York, and my friends all went- were there, and- and people from the town I barely knew brought food to us. Because it was a little town, they did that kind of thing. They brought food in every night for weeks, so we had dinner. My friends came every day and they did all my laundry, they ran the vacuum. I couldn't do anything. So they were there, first of all, to meet practical needs.
 
 

The other side, of course, is that if I- if I wanted to talk and cry and- and scream, I mean, they were there and- and they would listen. I would suggest a lot of listening and very little talking, and those are things that people can do that are very, very helpful.
 
 

SUSAN STAMBERG: Hmmm. Thank you very much, Mrs. Cohen.
 
 

SUSAN COHEN: Well, thank you very much.
 
 

SUSAN STAMBERG: Susan Cohen, now of New Jersey. Her daughter Theo died in the bombing of Pan Am 103. Theo's 28th birthday would have been September 10th.
 
 

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