How could this have happened when everything was normal?

It was a Saturday the summer of 1999, in the middle of hot July. My first time visiting Hilton Head Island in South Carolina was also my first time on a vacation with my then-boyfriend now husband’s family. Just before lunch, a family friend appeared on the balcony above, calling down to us.

“JFK Jr.’s plane disappeared. They think it may have crashed.”

That week we kept the TV on more than was typical for us at the time, watching as the terrible news unfolded. Of course we didn’t know know John F. Kennedy Jr. or his traveling companions: his wife, Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy and her sister, Lauren Bessette. But we knew them in the way everyone knew them and were compelled to see the news when it broke, however bad the news was to be.

And of course the news would be devastating.

That night, while the plane was still missing, we went for dinner at a crab shack on the island and one of the servers—tall, pleading wide-set blue eyes, dressed in all black, slick-backed ponytail—looked so much like Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy that she ended up addressing it.

“I know I look like Carolyn Bessette,” she finally said to a table near ours. “It’s all anyone is talking about.”

And it was. Because it seemed a little bit possible that this was Carolyn Bessette.

Maybe they were so sick of the paparazzi that they decided to disappear. Maybe they chose to go undercover and move to a tiny island in South Carolina. They got married just down the coast from here, didn’t they? They like the Lowcountry after all? Maybe she’s working in this crab shack because it’s the last place anyone would look. What if it really is her?

We ate our seafood, but we spoke quietly, stole glances her way without her seeing, and shared wide-eyed looks with other patrons. Speaking in a normal tone would clearly break the spell this Carolyn look-alike had cast over the room.

In her book The Year of Magical Thinking Joan Didion reflects on the sudden death of her husband saying, “How could this have happened when everything was normal?”