Section: MAIN
Page: A1
TIMES UNION, Albany, N.Y.
Sunday, June 2, 1996
A NEW FAMILY, A NEW LIFE HELP A SURVIVOR PERSEVERE
The deaths of Georgia Nucci's 2 children forced her to find a new path
JANE GOTTLIEB Staff writerCLAVERACK -- After Jennifer died, there was her mother, seeking meaning in the Amazon jungle. After Christopher died, there she was in Lockerbie, Scotland, snapping pictures of the gingerbread-man crater left by his plummeting body.
``It sounds gruesome, but I will tell you all the families have done this,'' said Georgia Nucci, who eight years ago suffered the cruelest losses a parent can suffer and fought back with an aplomb that neither terrorism nor disease could dent.The serious and purposeful Jennifer Jones died at 18 of hepatitis in her final weeks as an exchange student in Ecuador. Eleven months later, Christopher Jones, her jocular 20-year-old brother, was blown from the sky in the terrorist bombing of Pan Am Flight 103. Sister and brother were buried Jan. 6 -- in 1988 and 1989. They were Georgia Nucci's only children.
Their deaths have only propelled Nucci to wring more from life. Today, she and Tony, her husband of 14 years, are the parents of four adopted siblings, and unofficial parents of the Ecuadorean woman -- now a Clifton Park resident -- who was Jennifer's host sister.
The losses of Jennifer and Christopher took the Nuccis to Amazon country, where they donated a computer to the rural hospital where Jennifer died.
Later, Georgia edited a 265-page tribute to the 259 Lockerbie victims and embraced the Scottish village where the shapes of their bodies bruised sheep pastures. Alongside other victim's families, she successfully lobbied Congress to bolster aviation security. Her appearances on ``A Current Affair'' have inspired several families to adopt sibling groups.
And on Friday, at 53, Nucci graduated cum laude from Albany Law School with students half her age, including a high school classmate of her late son. She earned a commendation for scoring highest in family and matrimonial law courses.
``If you don't bend, you can break. You can make your life a museum for suffering, a freeze-frame photograph of what happened, or you can pick up the ball and keep going,'' said Tony Nucci, 55, stepfather of Christopher and Jennifer and father of the adopted Nucci children.
The years since the deaths of Jennifer and Christopher, Georgia Nucci's children by an earlier marriage, have paved a rich path.
``Sometimes I'm glad Christopher and Jennifer died, but I'm not,'' is 12-year-old Marcus Nucci's candid assessment of Chapter Two in the life of a family.
The passing of the older children opened a better life for Sandra Lilliana, Marcus Anthony, Andrew Christopher (after Christopher Andrew) and Nataly Jean, who now range in age from 10 to 16. The Nuccis adopted the siblings from a Bogota orphanage six years ago after requesting a photo of a child and receiving one of a family. Born to the same mother and two different fathers, they lived in a dirt-floor hut where discipline was meted out with the wave of a machete.
The process of growing a new family effectively began two years before the children's arrival -- on Dec. 21, 1988, when Georgia and Tony Nucci waited in Kennedy Airport to welcome Christopher back from a Syracuse University semester in London. Instead, she learned she was no longer a mother.
``I thought, `I had a family, I'm entitled to a family. I want a family and I'm going to get a family,' '' Nucci recalled at home.
She believes the key to her healing has to do with a predisposition to happiness and sheer defiance.
``You grieve the way you live,'' she said, reviewing albums where photos of gravesites aren't separated from communions, weddings, beach vacations and silly-hat parties. ``People keep dying all the time and if you stopped every time, it would be a gruesome world. Nothing fun would ever happen. Children would never have Christmas. All your life you've got to live with gusto.''
Nucci likes to talk about spitting in the eye of those who would put her down. She had always planned to buy a mink and new towels when her children finished college, so she did so anyway when they died. She refused to cry in public, even at Christopher's funeral, because she did not want to hand another victory to murderers who planted explosives in the jet at Heathrow Airport. Nucci was in the room when her daughter was embalmed. She keeps a photograph of the spot where her son's body hit the ground.
``I had to visualize the worst that could happen and assimilate it into my life experience,'' she explained.
Group bereavement sessions with other Pan Am families were instrumental, and they remain among her closest friends and godparents to her young children.
Prosecution in the bombing is stalled with the prime suspects harbored in Libya. Pan Am has folded. In 1991, as a result of the families' lobby, President Bush signed the Aviation Safety Improvement Act. There is a new lawsuit against Libya.
Today, victims' groups meet formally or informally, said Richard Hartunian, a close Nucci friend who lost his sister Lynne on Pan Am 103.
``Georgia kind of defies the characterizations. I have never seen her succumb,'' said Hartunian, an Albany County prosecutor who suggested law school to Nucci because of her interest in the legal issues of the bombing. ``When I first met her, I said I can't believe someone could be so calm and together. It must be a big act. She's bound to fall apart. She never did.''
At first, Nucci watched a lot of funny, bad movies. She revels in humor and its darker sides. Jennifer, she insists, would be miffed that Christopher's death grabbed all the headlines. She still doesn't know the identity of the man who comforted her at the airport the night of the bombing and then explained it had claimed his brother-in-law, whom he never liked. At a wake in Hudson for a family friend, she found herself thanking people for coming.
Nucci suffered from post-traumatic stress, exhibited in impatience and jumpiness. She never wanted to die, but does recall wanting to join her children. Each day brings some grief.
``I'd get the funerals mixed up and I felt guilty I was thinking more about one than the other,'' she recalls.
There was also the stigma she sensed when people turned the other way when they saw her at the grocery store and stopped inviting her over. Nucci's real estate business fell off, she believes, largely because of her very public association with death. She gave up the business. But never did she give up talking about her children.
``People felt it wasn't polite to talk about it, but my life wasn't polite,'' she quipped. ``When people die if you don't talk about them, they die twice. That would be the cruelest thing.''
As friends retire, she begins a career, focusing on family law at the law firm of Coffin, Christiana and Desnoyers in Hudson. At a time when her grown children might have been raising families, she is only now putting her kids through St. Patrick's Academy in Catskill and Hudson High School.
After spending two years together in the orphanage, the four children arrived in 1990 not speaking English. The parents guessed their ages and assigned birthdays they could remember: Bastile Day, an uncle's birthday, a grandmother's birthday, Feast of the Assumption. The boys were ``born'' in summer months so their birthday parties could be outdoors. One Christmas, the kids got middle names.
They had never seen snow and weren't sure when to take off mittens, which one son wore all day at school. There were other things they weren't used to.
``One night Marcus said, `Dad, how come when you get mad at Mom, you don't tie her to a chair and beat her with a whip?' '' said Tony Nucci, whose early reluctance to the multiple adoptions faded quickly.
``This is not a normal place,'' reads a sign on the front door of their rambling home, which is constantly under construction. A camper parked in the tall grass out front doubles as Georgia Nucci's study carrel. Blanca Granizo washes lettuce in the kitchen sink. She was Jennifer's host mother in Ecuador. Since March, she and her husband, Jorge, have lived in Hudson, thanks to employment by the Nuccis. At 26, their daughter, Erika Samaniego, lives in Clifton Park, married now and teaching Spanish at UAlbany. She had come after Jennifer's death and never left. The Nuccis consider her a daughter.
When the Nucci kids come home, life almost seems ordinary. Dressed in Catholic school jumpers and starched shirts, the three youngest deposit reports in their mother's lap.
``According to Miss Esposito, you could do a little more work,'' she said to Marcus, 12. ``According to your mother, you could do a lot more.''
More about Georgia Nucci (July 21, 1989 - article) Georgia Nucci writes column in TIMES UNION (June 14, 1989)