The Chapecoense crash victims will never be forgotten

A chartered plane carrying most of the Brazilian soccer team Chapecoense, including players, staff, club officials, their invited guests, and journalists, crashed into the mountains near Medellín, Colombia on Monday night. The plane was carrying a total 77 passengers, 71 of them died in the accident. The only survivors were three players, Alan Ruschel, Neto, and Jakson Follmann, two crew members Ximena Suárez and Erwin Tumiri, and one journalist Rafael Hensel. Danilo, the team’s goalkeeper, was found alive on the scene but died later in the hospital.

Chapecoense was a team from the small industrial city of Chapeco in Southern Brazil, inhabited by 210,000 people; they were headed to Colombia to play against Atlético Nacional in the Copa Sudamericana final. They had beaten well-renowned teams like Independiente and San Lorenzo on their journey. They made the quarterfinals in the previous season, which then was considered a surprise, and this year was to be their Cinderella story.

According to leaked audio from the flight, the pilot had requested permission to land because of “complete electrical failure” and lack of fuel before the crash.

One of the players absent from the wreckage was Alejandro Martinuccio, an injured striker who stayed behind to rehab. On Wednesday, a picture of him and two other teammates who also didn’t travel with the team was circulated on Twitter, with the three of them sat in the team’s home locker room.

There’s obvious grief in the picture, and one can only imagine the heartbreak that the players are going through. On top of that, there must also be survivor’s guilt. They are the only ones remaining, and had it been for a small change of events: Had Martinuccio decided to fly with the team to be supportive, as many injured players often do, he could have been one of the dead. There must also be gratefulness as well, that they did not, in fact, board the plane. People usually thank their Gods fervently for things like that.

The unbearable aspect of the picture, though, is the emptiness. A few days ago, that room was full of life. After holding San Lorenzo to a 0-0 draw and qualifying for the final, the team celebrated inside that same locker room. All were singing in unison, clapping, beating against the lockers, taking pictures, and laughing; coaches and players were all hugging and jumping around together. It was pure happiness. Joy in all of its infectious glory.

That joy haunts the picture with the three players. Two nights before, it had flowed relentlessly through numerous bodies; it had been shared by men who worked together to achieve a collective dream. It was their uncorked champagne. And now, the memory of it is choked by the ceaseless emptiness. The emptiness of the room that was once full, of the lockers that held sweaty and triumphant jerseys, of the scattered sneakers and cleats, things that are useless without bodies to occupy them. Things that now can only serve as a reminder of what is no longer there. Of the missing bodies.

Teju Cole wrote about the effect of this human exclusion in his novel Known and Strange Things. In the article titled “Object Lesson” he says:

“Photographs of people’s things reach us in this way even in the absence of such biographical coincidences because we recognize their things as being like ours. Our infants wear bodysuits, too. We have favorite coffee mugs, too. There’s that lace curtain we always liked, or have always meant to change.

Proust once wrote in a letter, ‘We think we no longer love the dead because we don’t remember them, but if by chance we come across an old glove we burst into tears.’ Objects, sometimes more powerfully than faces, remind us of what was and no longer is.”

The picture of these three Chapecoense players is not just of objects, but of players now stranded. Homeless without the rest of the team. They are, being part of a club in a team sport, existing as individuals that can only work in that team community, a bit like those empty objects. Lost without the other bodies to complete them.

But contrary to what Proust said, we do remember the dead. They will never be forgotten. Fifty-eight years after the Munich air disaster that killed 23 people, including eight of Manchester United’s “Busby Babes,” the world still remembers.

The Chapecoense fans will never forget.

Nor will the city and country itself. Or the soccer world as a whole. This tragedy, like the Munich air disaster, is a great wound, an immense emptiness, that will ache forever. It will never go away. And the only answer to that is to keep the memories of those who died alive. To chant their names, to celebrate what they had done, to remember them and commemorate them in the manner of the Babes, of Il Grande Torino. Some teams will donate money, others loan players to keep the team afloat. All will help their families of the fallen in whatever way possible. Not to try to fill the emptiness, but to endure it through compassion.

The answer is to remember the immense joy that that the players showed in that locker room, and as the team’s Twitter account said in the caption, to “Let this be the last image of our warriors.” Or rather, to let that be the lasting image of their warriors.