They met by the sea, at Martha's Vineyard; two young Harvard graduates, their lives filled with promise.
Last week, as she saw him off on a flight to Paris, Michel Breistroff proposed; Heidi Snow accepted.In a jumble of love and goodbyes, in the minutes before he boarded, they planned a wedding "some place with turquoise water, like where we met," she recalled.
Instead of the setting for their union, the ocean ended up as Breistroff's grave. He was one of 230 people who died aboard TWA Flight 800, which exploded Wednesday off the coast of Long Island.
Breistroff, 25, of Roubaix, France, was flying home to play preseason games with the French national hockey team. He hoped to play for France in the 1998 Winter Olympics in Nagano, Japan.
"But he loved America; he wanted to live here. He was very excited about it," said Snow, 24, who works in investment finance in Manhattan.
"He asked me to marry him just before he got on the plane," she said, clutching his photo. "He had so many dreams; he just wanted to be happy."
Although they both attended Harvard, they didn't know each other there. When they met at Martha's Vineyard, off the Massachusetts coast, he was teaching hockey to children in a Harvard-affiliated program.
On Saturday, Snow spent the day at Jones Beach with Breistroff's parents. They chose the seaside setting because "I met him on the Atlantic Ocean," she said.
And there, by the water, "we sat quietly," the grieving young woman said, "and remembered him."