Spencer Bailey

I feel like I carry her in me every day.

But then I carry this other reality, which has been, let's call it my conscious reality, post-Flight 232 reality, which is that effectively my entire life I've lived this day-to-day motherless existence.

So it's this combination of both being very physically aware that I carry this person I never knew in me, and at the same time, very mentally aware that I'll never know truly who she was.

For much of your life, one of the most famous images associated with you was not a portrait you chose, but a photograph of Lieutenant Colonel Dennis Nielsen carrying your little three-year-old unconscious body from the wreckage of the flight.

And long before you understood the event itself, the image had already entered public memory.

How did growing up attached to that image shape your understanding of yourself?

It's a very complicated situation to be five or six and sort of realize that you came to represent this event to so many different people.

Almost being a body that is symbolic of something that occurs as opposed to...

being seen for myself, my like fragile four-year-old self.

And then fast forward to 1994, five years after the crash, Sioux City looking to commemorate this event.

They built a statue and sort of Riverfront Memorial.

It's the centerpiece of it right on the banks of the Missouri River.

And

And I'm nine years old.

I'm standing next to my dad and my two brothers and Lieutenant Colonel Dennis Nielsen.

And I'm looking at this bronze sculpted thing that's meant to depict me, but I don't see myself in it.

And I'm feeling very confused.

And on the one hand, there's a certain pride that I came to represent myself.

I guess you could call it hope for this community and hope for a sort of strength that could arise out of such a horrific event.

And at the same time, I was like, why me?