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CHARLOTTE, N.C. — When US Airways Flight 1549 splashed down in the icy Hudson River, Mike Berkwits was too busy getting his wife off the slowly sinking plane and out of the swift-moving water to worry about dying.

Now that’s he’s had a week to remember it, every time he tries to fall asleep, he can’t think about much else.

He sees passengers crying and praying as the jetliner bound for North Carolina hit the river. The desperate scramble to escape as water filled the aisle. The look on his wife’s face as they huddled cold on a wing, wondering if the ferries in the distance would arrive in time to save them.

“I haven’t slept much. I keep thinking about it, replaying it in my head,” said Berkwits, a 55-year-old business owner from Charlotte. “At the time, I was just focused on what I had to do to survive. I didn’t think about dying. It just didn’t register.

“But now, it’s different. I think about it a lot.”

The United States hasn’t had a major fatal plane crash in more than two years, but the idea that all aboard the plane that landed in a river survived still seems absurd. Many of Flight 1549’s 155 passengers and crew were still in wet clothes when New York Gov. David Paterson dubbed the landing the “Miracle on the Hudson.”

Close to death

Survivors who went home after the sensational landing are now coping with a dual reality: They are celebrating the simple grace that they are alive, but also chilled by recurring memories of coming so close to death.

Vallie Collins, 37, of Maryville, Tenn., took her husband and two kids along to Los Angeles to join a group of survivors on “The Ellen DeGeneres Show.” While in Los Angeles, she stopped a tourist at Universal Studios and asked him to take a family picture.

“When he took the picture, it just washed over me: It’s amazing I’m here to be in this picture,” Collins said. “It’s those kinds of emotions that sometimes catch you. In the still moments, I guess, is when it kind of hits me a little bit.”

Talking about the experience — be it on TV or at home among family and friends — will help the survivors confront “something that was totally out of the normal,” said Carolyn Coarsey, a psychologist who has studied aircraft accidents and is co-founder of the Atlanta-based Family Assistance Foundation, a nonprofit that helps people after tragedies.

Sleepless nights amid endlessly looping memories of the crash are typical, she said, and some survivors will need professional counseling. But most will be fine as the memories fade with time.

“It’s very unusual for someone to go through something like this and survive and not have some of these reactions,” Coarsey said.

‘Trying to cope’

“But it doesn’t at all mean that anybody’s sick. … It’s simply the brain’s way of trying to cope.”

It’s not just the passengers facing such feelings. Michael Mills learned while watching TV at home that his wife Beverly’s plane had crashed, and for a frantic half-hour, he didn’t know if his wife of 37 years was dead or alive. “I had this feeling like somebody had ripped away half of me,” he said.

When she called from a rescue boat — using a borrowed cell phone dialed by someone else, her fingers too cold to strike the keys — the celebration was on.