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In Cheyenne on Friday evening, in an interview with TIME, she defended her own response to her daughter's death. Clutching a plastic bag of Jessica's clothes, she said defiantly, "I know what people want. Tears. But I will not do that. Emotion is unnatural. There is something untruthful about it." When she and her son Josh received the news of Jessica's death, Hathaway said, "Josh started to cry." Then she rephrased the sentence, as if the verb were somehow incorrect. "No, I would rather say he was in tears. He said he didn't want to fly anymore. I begged him to re-choose based on what he wanted instead of reacting to someone else's choice."
Jessica's mother even attached a patriotic gloss to Jessica's death, putting it in the context of the Declaration's rights to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." "I did everything so this child could have freedom and choice," she told Today, "and have what America stands for. Liberty comes from being in that space of just living your life." But the Founding Fathers made a distinction between liberty and license, the latter being freedom that is used irresponsibly. License may have been precisely the freedom Jessica's parents gave her.
One of the notes placed at the crash site says simply, "God's newest little angel." But angels, of course, have wings to fly.
--Reported by Kerry A. Drake and Elaine Lafferty/Cheyenne, Sharon Epperson/Falmouth, Jerry Hannifin/Washington and William Tynan/New York