The Plane Crash Should Have Killed Her. Sometimes She Wishes It Had.

Astrid López rolled her wheelchair to the edge of the field where medics once pronounced her dead. She rose, wobbled, then planted her cane in the grass.

She hoped that something in this landscape — the green hillside, the barren winter trees, the little cove — might help pry loose memories of the plane crash and her life before it.

All she felt was pain.

Ms. López looked to the man standing at her side, Dr. Victor Fornari, a child psychiatrist whom she met in the weeks after the accident, when it wasn’t clear whether she would survive. Now, 35 years later, they were seeing the crash site together for the first time. She took his hand and frowned.

“Nothing,” she said in Spanish. “I remember nothing.”

Avianca Airlines Flight 52 slammed into a wooded hillside in the Long Island village of Cove Neck on Jan. 25, 1990. There were 158 people aboard; 73 of them died. Most who lived were severely injured.

The crash had been avoidable, investigators would later find, and many of the dead probably should have survived.

Ms. López sometimes feels as if she should have died.

Today, Flight 52 has largely faded from the public memory. Only a few survivors and rescuers who responded to the crash commemorated the tragedy by attending Mass on Sunday at the Church of St. Dominic nearby in Oyster Bay.