Adieu Miguel

Young MH17
victim had eerie
premonitio
In a bedroom in a townhouse near
Amsterdam, Miguel Panduwinata
reached out for his mother. “Mama,
may I hug you?”
Samira Calehr wrapped her arms
around her 11-year-old son, who’d
been oddly agitated for days,
peppering her with questions about
death, about his soul, about God. The
next morning, she would drop Miguel
and his big brother Shaka at the
airport so they could catch Malaysia
Airlines Flight MH17, the first leg of
their journey to Bali to visit their
grandmother.
Her normally cheerful, well-traveled
boy should have been excited. His
silver suitcase sat in the living room,
ready to go. Jetskiing and surfing in
paradise awaited. But something was
off. A day earlier, while playing
soccer, Miguel had burst out: “How
would you choose to die? What would
happen to my body if I was buried?
Would I not feel anything because our
souls go back to God?”
And now, the night before his big trip,
Miguel refused to release his mother
from his grasp.
He’s just going to miss me, Calehr told
herself. So she stretched out beside
him and held him all night.
It was 11 p.m. on Wednesday, July 16.
Miguel, Shaka and the 296 other
people aboard Flight MH17 had
around 15 hours left to live.
The next morning, Samira Calehr and
her friend Aan ushered her sons onto
the train to the airport. They were
joking and laughing. Shaka, 19, had
just finished his first year of college,
where he was studying textile
engineering, and promised to keep an
eye on Miguel. Their other brother,
Mika, 16, hadn’t been able to get a
seat on Flight MH17 and would travel
to Bali the next day.
At the check-in counter, Calehr fussed
over her boys’ luggage. Shaka,
meanwhile, realized he’d forgotten to
pack socks. Calehr promised to buy
him some and send them along with
Mika.
Finally, they were outside customs.
The boys hugged Calehr goodbye and
walked toward passport control.
Suddenly, Miguel whirled around and
ran back, throwing his arms around
his mother.
“Mama, I’m going to miss you,” he
said. “What will happen if the airplane
crashes?”
What was this all about? she
wondered.
“Don’t say that,” she said, squeezing
him. “Everything will be OK.”
Shaka tried to reassure them both. “I
will take care of him,” he said to his
mom. “He’s my baby.”
She watched the two boys walk away.
But Miguel kept looking back at his
mother. His big brown eyes looked
sad.
Then he vanished from view.
Flight MH17 took off around 12:15
p.m. on what should have been an 11
hour and 45 minute flight.
It lasted two hours.
Calehr had just finished buying
Shaka’s socks when her phone rang. It
was her friend Aan. “Where are you?”
he screamed. “The plane crashed!”
She made it home just in time to faint.
She grapples now with the what-ifs,
the astronomical odds, the realization
that the world she knew has grown
alien in a blink. She thinks about how
her baby boy seemed to sense that his
time on Earth was running short. She
imagines the futures that will never
be: Shaka’s dream of becoming a
textile engineer, gone. Miguel’s dream
of becoming a go-kart race driver,
gone.
How could he have known? How
could she have known?
“I should have listened to him,” she
says softly. “I should have listened to
him.”