Firehouse (18 page)

Debi Morello was left with two young children, Justin, seven, and Paige, five. Debi had worked at HBO as an executive assistant, and she knew she would work again, but her main job now, she believed, was to be there for her children. Even so, she was planning to become a teacher and was going to arrange her schedule at home so she could take courses at Queens College; she hoped to get her degree and start teaching at precisely the moment when her children did not need her full-time at home anymore.

Her main job now, though, was to keep life as normal as possible for Justin and Paige. The loss was searing, the destruction of her family as it had once been, a family torn right down the center. But she was resolved not to feel sorry for herself. The transition to a new life was overwhelming, but she did not feel, with the daily needs of her children, that she could afford to think too much of the past.

Something that bothered Debi was the effect of the outpouring of sympathy on her children. One of the dangers, she thought, was all the attention they were getting, which included too many presents from strangers; she was uneasy with the idea that the children might think that they were somehow being rewarded because of the death of their father. Over-rewarded, even. She understood the impulse behind it, that there were millions of people who felt that the attack had been aimed at them as much as it had been at those who had suffered the immediacy of the pain, and that this was their way of trying to say that. But generous as the gestures were, she was afraid they would confuse her children. There was other potential psychological damage as well. In the minds of her children, becoming a hero now meant that you had to die, and they wanted no part of that. Justin now told her that he was not going to be a fireman when he grew up for just that reason.

One thing that made things even more difficult was that Vincent had not been permanently stationed at the firehouse, and so she did not know very many of the wives there. The previous summer, at a picnic in the Bronx organized by Steve Mercado, she had gotten to know and like two of the wives, Marion Otten and Jennifer Liang, and she stayed in touch with them after the tragedy. She often pondered what had gone on in Vincent's mind in those final moments. One of the firemen she knew told her that if Vinnie had known the building was going to collapse, he would not have gone in. But there was never going to be any answer to that, she thought.

Vincent's older brother, Marc, also a firefighter, returned to his firehouse in Brooklyn, Ladder 147, which was difficult for him in the weeks right after the tragedy because that house had not lost anyone. Though Marc loved his colleagues, somehow it was for the moment a little hard to be there. But then he heard that Ladder 35, devastated as it was, needed men for temporary duty, and he volunteered to work there for a few months. “Are you doing this for your brother?” his father asked him, and Marc thought about it, and said yes, he was. But it was the right thing to do, at least temporarily, because his own terrible sense of loss seemed to parallel that of so many of the men at 40/35. It was good for him to be there, he said, and perhaps it was good for them that the brother of one of the men who had been lost wanted to be there with them.

Vincent Morello would have been thirty-five years old on January 6, 2002. One of the things he and his pals loved to do—and they had to be careful how often they did it, because none of them made that much money—was to celebrate at a good steak house. On the occasion of his birthday this year, Marc Morello took a table for fourteen at Bryant & Cooper, a steak house in Roslyn, Long Island. He invited all of Vincent's buddies, and set a place for Vincent. Beside it he put a shot of Ketel One vodka mixed with 7Up, which was Vincent's favorite drink. They ordered a birthday cake and sang happy birthday to him, all of them weeping. Thus did they celebrate the short but rich life of Vincent Scott Morello.

The death of his son, Richard Otten thought, was by far the hardest thing he and his wife, Terry, had ever undergone. Three or four days after the tragedy, he went down to Ground Zero and walked the scene as best he could. He asked the various men in charge a great many questions, and then he simply stood and stared at the wreckage. As a former fire captain, he tried to visualize what had happened that morning in the terrible confusion and chaos, what the men in command had been forced to do at a moment when all their codes and their traditions suddenly collided with a reality that was far too painful. Richard needed to understand it, or at least to understand it as best as anyone would be able to understand it. He looked out at the site for a very long time, surveying the enormity of the collapse. It was like nothing he had ever seen. Whatever frail hope for his son's survival that he might have been holding on to, drained out of him as he looked out over the rubble.

Richard Otten tried as best he could to accept it, to accept the fact that all of this was in some ways beyond him. A local television reporter had come by and had told him that a number of the fathers of firemen whom he had interviewed had seemed to accept their loss more stoically than other people might have. Probably, Richard Otten decided, that was true, though in no way did it lessen the pain. He had been a fireman, and he had always known the risks, and his son had known those risks too. Michael had loved the life, and he had made his own choices—he had died doing his duty. So Richard Otten had to accept that—it was one way of understanding.

Small gestures helped too. In Deer Park, New York, the town board voted to honor Michael's memory by changing the name of the street that his parents lived on from Headline Road to Michael Otten Memorial Road.

Jimmy and Susan Giberson had been separated at the time of his death, but she was pleased that the separation was amicable and that they had remained close. She was proud too of how good and loving a father he had been with their three daughters, Erika, Kari, and Sara. All three girls were talented swimmers, and the fact that Jimmy had spent what would be the final Saturday of his life with the girls at the Great Kills Swim Club in Staten Island pleased her immensely. She was grateful as well that he had spent his entire career at one firehouse, because that meant that she was close to and had the support of many of the men there, such as Mike Kotula, and many of the wives as well, including Marion Otten, whom she found to be a wonderful, strong person. The Ottens and the Gibersons had been particularly close because, though the Ottens had three boys and the Gibersons three girls, their children were roughly the same age, and that had helped to forge a considerable bond. In February, Susan Giberson joined Marion Otten and the other widows when they held a reunion at a restaurant near the firehouse. She felt very much at home.

On December 7 the Lynch family held a memorial service celebrating the life of Michael Lynch at St. Frances de Chantal in Throgs Neck, Bronx. It was the church Michael had attended as a boy. Coming as it did soon after the Thanksgiving holiday, the family included in the program a letter Michael had written at Thanksgiving when he was nine years old, thanking his parents for all the things they had done for him that year, and assuring them that “when Thanks giving dinner is over, I will be 2 pounds heavier.”

It was hard to do the service without a body—like a dress rehearsal for a funeral, Jack Lynch thought—that was why they made it a celebration of Michael's life, with his brothers, sister, and close friends speaking of his love of life. Without the service, Jack and Kathleen Lynch felt, there might have been no closure. The service was very emotional because of its size; the Lynch family had an enormous number of friends, and they all seemed to have shown up. In addition, the firemen from both Ladder 32 in the Bronx, to which Michael was normally attached, and from Engine 40, to which he had been attached the day of the tragedy, attended in full force. There was a huge overflow crowd, much of which was seated downstairs, to listen to the service piped in over loudspeakers.

When the service was over, it was in fact not over for Jack Lynch. He continued to go to Ground Zero, visiting there almost every other day. He was hoping that the workers would eventually find the bodies of his son and of his son's colleagues. It was, he said, the most elemental impulse of a parent, to look out for and protect his child, and this was his last offering for his son. He was quite sure they would one day find the bodies of his son, Lieutenant Ginley, Steve Mercado, and Mike D'Auria—the four men caught in the brief video clip of the engine. The clip also showed Glen Pettit, a police cameraman going in with them, and in mid-December Pettit's body was uncovered near the south wall of the south tower. This gave Jack Lynch renewed hope. He was convinced that as the excavation continued, the bodies of the men from Engine 40 would someday be discovered. It seemed to him to be a father's responsibility to watch over the site, and so he kept going there. By February, he was quite sure he knew where the remaining bodies were, buried under what had become a makeshift road used by workers to cart away the wreckage. It would be at least another month, he knew, before workers would be able to excavate beneath this road.

Jack Lynch spent so much time at Ground Zero that he became a member of a new, informal community there—a community of men like himself who had lost a child and who had come to watch over the workers and to keep their own vigil. They had, not surprisingly, a special, albeit terrible, bond to each other, and there was rarely much need for words. When they would meet for the first time, often through introductions that were made quite tentatively, the fathers would simply give the names of their sons and daughters and what they had been doing that day at the towers—fireman, Cantor Fitzgerald, Windows on the World. As they offered their terse descriptions, there would almost always be a few tears shed.

In the meantime, Jack Lynch understood that there was a void in his and his wife's lives, and in the lives of all their children, and that nothing else would ever be quite the same, that a part of them was missing. There would
always
be a part of them all that was missing. The tragedy, he said, was the only thing in all his life that had truly challenged his faith.

At 3:00
A.M.
on January 1, 2002, workers found the body of Michael D'Auria. For his mother, Nancy Marra, the news was at once upsetting and a vast relief. It meant that they would have to go through another service, but it also meant that there would be a genuine finality to it. The body had apparently been found relatively intact. Marra had watched television constantly in the months after September 11, and when she saw video clips of Ground Zero, all she had been able to think was,
Michael's down there somewhere
. She knew that it was not really the body that was so important after death, but the spirit, and at the first service, they had celebrated the wonder of his spirit. But nonetheless, without the body, she felt she had been unable to say a proper good-bye to her son. After all, his body had come from her body, and it was a body that she had hugged countless times. The body mattered.

After they found him, Marra and her daughter Christina D'Auria Rinaldi drove down to the New York University Hospital morgue and waited for the body to be brought there in a hearse. Then they drove back to the funeral home behind the hearse, and at the funeral home, Marra was allowed to spend some time alone with the body, and that was a great source of solace. The funeral service, held Saturday, January 5, 2002, in Staten Island, almost four months after his death, was emotional for her, and for Michael's father, Carmen D'Auria, who had come up from Florida for it.

Carmen D'Auria had been apart from Nancy for many years, and because his son had lived with Nancy, Carmen felt that he had been removed from his son's life more than he had wanted to be. At the first service, he had been sensitive to his treatment by the firemen, priests, and other members of the family. Those tensions had been increased because he suffered from multiple sclerosis, and did not get around very well. At the second service the men from 40/35 made an extra effort to make the day as bearable as possible for him. He showed up at the firehouse early that morning, long before the service, and he asked to ride out to Staten Island on the engine in his son's seat. The firemen were glad to accommodate him, understanding that this was his last attempt to reach out and touch his son's life.

On March 21, 2002, rescue workers, digging through the rubble at almost precisely the point where Jack Lynch thought the bodies would be found, did indeed discover eleven bodies, including those of Lieutenant John Ginley, Vince Morello, and Michael Lynch, all three of whom had set out with Engine 40. The men doing the extrication came on the first body in the early afternoon and were able to identify Michael Lynch because of the markings inside his gear, and then within minutes found the bodies of Ginley and Morello. The extrication was a slow, difficult process, and as the workers labored through the afternoon the word went out and members of all three immediate families began to arrive. There were several men from 40/35 there and others joined them—some of them fighting back tears. The regular workers stepped aside and allowed the members of the firehouse to dig out the body of Vincent Morello, the last of the three to be freed from the rubble. Then the medical examiner came and checked the remains, which were put in body bags, and then the body bags were drapped with flags. At about 9:30
P.M.
, a slow, mournful procession took place as the bodies were carried by comrades to waiting ambulances.

That meant that the only body still to be found from the engine was that of Steve Mercado. The three families, the Ginleys, Lynches, and Morellos, like the Boyle family, now had to await DNA confirmation. The emotions triggered were infinitely complex; some degree of relief that the bodies had finally been found and that a process of extremely painful waiting was over, and yet no small amount of pain and grief that wounds which had not yet healed would be so raw and open once again. For the Mercado family and the families of those who rode on Ladder 35, the small, daily rituals of life became, if anything, even harder, and it made their status—still waiting, suspended as they were without hope and without bodies, and trying to accept the idea of death without a body—that much more difficult.