The cool and quiet of Rosemary and Larry Mild's Severna Park home was broken again by the ringing phone.
Reporters were calling to probe their reaction Thursday to news that the Libyan intelligence officer convicted of planting a bomb on Pan Am Flight 103 - the bomb that killed Rosemary's daughter over Lockerbie, Scotland - had been released from prison. Scottish authorities allowed Abdel Baset al-Megrahi, who has terminal cancer, to return to Libya and his wife and five children.
"You ask how I am?" said Rosemary. "I'm awful."
All the pain and outrage of the 21 years since her daughter, Miriam Wolfe, a Syracuse University student, was killed along with 269 others, is fresh again.
"It is like an undertow, a riptide of despair," she said. "I am a writer, and there are not enough adjectives to express my revulsion. This is a whole new kind of grief."
Her despair was shared by many, including relatives of the eight Marylanders who died in the bombing.
Parkville resident George Williams, whose son died in the explosion, doesn't believe al-Megrahi is dying; he calls it "supposed prostate cancer."
"He'll probably die in bed an old man. I can't understand the world today - how a mass murderer can get compassion. He ripped my son's body apart. And the bodies of all 270 people on there. He should have been executed with as much compassion as he showed my son."
Half a world away, al-Megrahi, convicted of 270 counts of murder in the Dec. 21, 1988 bombing, walked, stooped and with a cane, onto a Libyan airliner in Glasgow, Scotland. Hours later, he landed in Tripoli, greeted by thousands of flag-waving young people and the sound of patriotic music, according to news reports.
Diagnosed with advanced prostate cancer, he was granted a compassionate release by the Scottish government. Justice Secretary Kenny MacAskill said that compassion was "a defining characteristic of Scottish people" and that "the perpetuation of an atrocity cannot and should not be a basis for losing sight of who we are."
"Mr. al-Megrahi now faces a sentence imposed by a higher power. It's one that no court ... could revoke or overrule."
The Milds were just about newlyweds when the plane exploded, so it is safe to say that their entire married life has been spent in the suspended animation of justice delayed.
