There was a memorial wall with pictures on it, and places where you could walk around and see the missing-person photos. Family members would come and post pictures on this huge wall, and they had Magic Markers Velcroed up on the wall so they could write messages. I remember the first day walking in there, it was this huge blank wall, and by the time we left there was just this amazing collection of stories and poems and things written in so many different languages and stuffed animals and dried flowers and the photos of not only the missing people but their families and someone holding his new baby and someone’s wedding picture. Any time anybody would come to visit the pier they would always be so mesmerized by the wall.
It was also tough wanting to be able to make the process as easy for them as we possibly could, yet having guidelines and rules we have to follow. Dealing with their frustration of: “Why do you need my marriage certificate and if I don’t have this do I have to come back tomorrow? I’ve been here all day waiting.” People would say, “This has become my full-time job. This is all I do now: give my DNA sample and come here to file missing-persons reports.”
Mickey Kross After the North Tower collapsed, Kross, a firefighter, was trapped along with 13 others in a cramped space between the second and fourth floors for several hours. Only five other people were pulled alive from the rubble in the hours and days that followed.
I had a very interesting year, I spent most of the following nine months working at Ground Zero, pulling bones out of the earth–two months on Fire Department detail–then I went on my own a lot. It felt like I was doing what I was supposed to be doing. I lost a lot of friends, and it felt like this is where I should be. Kind of like I was returning to my sacred ground. Everybody from Engine 16 survived–I lost nobody from my company. The sister company, Ladder 7, lost everybody. I found the remains of one of my good friends myself. I felt good. George Kane, Georgie. The night of Sept. 10 was a Monday night. George was working and I was working, and his sister came and had dinner with us just to hang out. And we were tossing cigarettes at her because she just quit smoking. The next day she lost her brother. It kind of brought us all close together. PTSD? What’s that? I don’t know what that is. I don’t have bad dreams, and I sleep good. Some people say I have it, but I don’t know. I’m going to a seminar this week on it.
Iliana McGinnis McGinnis’s husband, Thomas, a trader for Carr Futures, died in a conference room on the 92d floor of the North Tower. He was making a rare appearance in the Trade Center for a meeting.
She [their 5-year-old daughter, Caitlin] has her moments where she cries and she misses him and she says, “A dog and a mom and a kid aren’t enough in this house.” It breaks your heart. She’ll say, “Maybe we can find another dad named Thomas.” She kept saying, “OK, Daddy died. When is he coming back? When is he coming back?” She didn’t understand dying was forever. Now she does. The difference between 4 and 5 is huge. I answer her questions and get through it, and then she goes off to play and I cry for two hours. One day she asked for more stories and she wanted me to snuggle in bed with her, which she never used to ask for, but she needed it, so I did it. She started crying, really crying so much that I couldn’t understand. She finally said, “I didn’t give my dad a kiss on my birthday. I didn’t tell him I loved him on my birthday.” It was her version of guilt. It was her way of thinking it was her fault that he’s not here. But I reminded her how he got out of the shower on her birthday and I said, “What happened when Daddy got out of the shower?” And she said, “His face was soft and I did kiss him!” It was like a light went on. She fell right asleep. And I then spent the next two hours crying.
‘I Just Can’t Get Away From It’
Lt. Col. Robert Grunewald An active-duty officer who handles information technology at the Pentagon, he escaped from a second-floor conference room just 75 feet from where the plane hit. He had minor scrapes and burns and spent one day in the hospital. He later received the Soldier’s Medal and a Purple Heart.
It’ll never be the same. Until there is nobody working in the building that worked there at the time, it’ll just never be the same. It’s hard for us because we work here. If you knew someone who worked in the World Trade Center and you lost them, you think about them all the time. But it’s not in your face. We come back here every day. There may be somebody in the Mid-west, there may be somebody in the South, who doesn’t think of it every day, who doesn’t see it every day. But we do. Every day you walk by a photograph, every day you see a crane. You can’t get away from it. There’s a smell that every now and then you notice. There are smells of possibly asbestos or smoke or jet fuel. Every now and then, when the wind blows the wrong way or someone opens a door, you smell it and it just takes you back. That is one of the more psychologically difficult things. You can’t get away from it, but you have to be here. That sometimes can be difficult.
Lt. Sherma Saif, U.S. Navy Born in Iran, he is now a U.S. citizen and a dentist in the Navy. Saif received the Navy and Marine Corps Medal for going into the Pentagon to rescue others after the attack.
I’m Iranian. That weekend [after 9-11] I went out with my friends and I experienced a little bit of hostility. I had a couple of things said to me while I was out. People were frustrated and tired. It made me realize, bottom line, I’m American. That’s how I decided to stay in the Navy. I feel more obligated as an American. I was always one of the boys. The military is the last place you’d expect any discrimination. That’s the one place you feel most secure. It was very important to me.
Once we found out it was an airplane, we pretty much knew where it came from. It’s frustrating knowing the terrorists were people from the area where I was born. You feel really proud to be an American but at the same time you feel kind of guilty knowing it was people from the place where I was born. I have a hard time even watching stuff about September 11. I tend not to watch that many programs about it. You get a lot of flashbacks. I’m trying to deal with it right now.
Michael Kiefer Firefighter Kiefer had been on the job for only nine months when he died in the South Tower. His body has never been found. His father, Bud, remembers his son’s love of the job.
Firefighting is what he wanted to do from when he was a little guy, like 3 years old. It’s all he ever wanted to do. I remember he was like 6 or 8 or whatever and I have pictures of him at birthdays and all the cakes have pictures of fire trucks on them. He used to have toy fire trucks, the hat, the helmet. He used to play with his sister in the backyard; we had a shed back there and that was his firehouse. The pain is constant. Everything is constant. Michael was big into health food and taking care of himself and all that. My wife and I go to the supermarket and see spinach or fruit or whatever and I’m always reminded of him. If we go to the store, we’ll see someone jogging or something and I think of Michael. When it’s warm, everybody’s going to the beach. Michael was a big surfer and a lifeguard. You think of him. Everything. He’s all over. There’s not a moment of the day that I don’t think of him. He wasn’t just my son. He was my friend.
Gerry Fornino FBI bomb technician Fornino has worked on every major terrorism case in the past decade, including Oklahoma City. He has spent the months since September at the Fresh Kills landfill on Staten Island, searching vehicles recovered from the Trade Center for human remains and potential evidence.
My daughter was born on Feb. 9. Like I told the doctor who delivered her, this is the greatest thing in my life. This was the first living thing I’ve been handed in six months. We took every part of the human anatomy from a car. It was just getting very horrible here. We were finding parts of people all over the place. I think the relief was in this case, finding a remain, you knew there was a chance that they would identify somebody and that would help the family. The scariest thing is looking at this list with 3,000 people on it. It’s an inch thick; it’s a telephone book. And after this thing [is over] I’ll probably keep the list and look through it every once in a while. It’s scary to see. It’s like a local town phone book in which everybody in the town is dead. I don’t think it’s hit a lot of people yet about how devastating the 9-11 attack was.
‘I’ll Never Have Closure’
Mary Danahy When her husband, Patrick, died in the South Tower on September 11, Mary was eight months pregnant with their third child. After the first plane hit, Patrick left a message for Mary on their home answering machine. But she never heard from him again. Exactly one month later, she gave birth to their third daughter, Grace.
The hardest was having Grace without him. Starting that new, because that was the first change without him and it was just so soon after that I wasn’t ready for it. It was the first step that I had to move forward without him and take care of her and do everything with her that he wasn’t a part of. Another hard time was finding him and burying him. It was just like September 11 all over again. The reality that he really was gone, and that was it. And then, I guess, the closing ceremony at Ground Zero made me very sad because it had become so familiar to me. It was the only place I could go where nobody had asked me anything. They’d just look in my eyes and I’d look in theirs and they knew the sorrow and the sadness, and I felt very much at home and very comfortable there. And it felt like that’s where I belonged.
The hurt is just as bad; it’s not worse than it was. It’s clearer and it’s not as overwhelming. I know what the days are going to be like. They’re like yesterday. No more surprises. I don’t wake up with that quick brief second when you have that pit in your stomach and you say what’s wrong. It’s been embedded in my brain and in my heart. My heart will always be sad. I’m definitely a sad person compared to what I used to be. I’m not an optimist. I’m not a pessimist; I’m just nothing. I don’t think of anything in any light except let me just get through it.
I think people don’t realize that there’s never going to be closure for us. That finding a piece of my husband–I’m the luckiest of the unlucky. But yet I still can’t have closure from that because it’s not his whole being, and it still brings back the reality of how he died and how devastating it was, and the brutality of it. And I think people don’t realize that they’re still identifying remains, we’re still getting calls. That brings us right back to him dying and his death. As long as that’s going on, I always have that fear when somebody calls and I don’t know who it is. Is it a telemarketer or is it someone telling me they found more of Patrick? I think it makes it harder when they keep replaying all the tapes. When most people die, you don’t get a tape of it that’s replayed on national TV. And we have to live with that and we don’t have control over that. Most people, fortunately, don’t have a tape of their loved one dying.
