On Sunday, August 16,1987, Northwest Airlines flight 225 crashed just after taking off from the Detroit airport. 155 people were killed. One survived: a 4-year-old from Tempe, Arizona, named Cecelia. News accounts say when rescuers found Cecelia they assumed she had been a passenger in one of the cars on the highway onto which the plane crashed. But when the flight manifest was checked, there was Cecelia’s name. This little girl survived because, as the plane was falling, Cecelia’s mother unbuckled her own seat belt, got down on her knees in front of her daughter, wrapped her arms and body around Cecelia, and then would not let her go. Nothing could separate that child from her parent’s love--not tragedy or disaster, not the fall or the flames that followed, not height nor depth, not life
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