The Woman Who Wasn’t There (10 page)

Dave’s parents loved visiting the beach house, Tania said, and they sometimes all spent long weekends there, usually reminiscing about him well into the night. His mother always claimed she could feel Dave in that house, and Tania felt envious because, try as she might, she wasn’t able to “feel” his presence—only those two times: first, on 9/11, when she sensed him guiding her out of the World Trade Center; and again when she went to the footprints with the other survivors. She was grateful to have Dave’s family still in her life, she said. Tania told a friend she’d met through her work with the survivors’ group that she’d recently invited her in-laws to come to the beach for the third anniversary, and they’d eagerly accepted.

She’d initially promised the survivors that she would attend the ceremony with them at ground zero. It was to be their first time attending the memorial service as a group, and she wanted to lend them moral support. It was only after she’d told Dave’s parents about her plans that things changed, Tania said. She had heard the disappointment in their voices when they realized that, for the first time since Dave’s death, she wouldn’t be spending the anniversary with them. She couldn’t bear to let them down, so she’d changed her mind and invited them to Amagansett. It was probably for the best, she said. She had been feeling down in the dumps lately and wasn’t sure how much help she would be to anyone else anyway. She hoped the survivors
would understand. This was something she needed to do for herself and Dave’s family.

The anniversary was only days away when Tania emailed the same friend to reiterate her plans for the anniversary.

She wrote:

I think I already told you that Dave’s family doesn’t want to go to the site this year. They get heartbroken with the way it looks. They don’t like to see trains and construction trucks go by in their son’s final resting place. Instead I proposed that we spend the day quietly in Amagansett, a coastal area in Long Island, where Dave and I bought a house. Dave used to love that place! We’ll have a service there in the morning at a local church. Many friends are driving up there for the service as well. The priest is very nice and knows us well, so we asked him if it could be a mass and a memorial service at the same time, and he agreed. This means that we’ll have friends and family come up and talk about Dave, and we’ll also play his favorite songs. In the evening, we’re going to have a sunset ceremony where we’ll congregate at the beach, and we’ll throw flowers and messages for Dave into the ocean. His old band will play, and we’ll have a few beers and a BBQ, just as he liked it. We’ll then get a fire going, and we’ll talk about him all night till sunrise.

Dave’s parents were private people who didn’t fit into the very public 9/11 community, Tania told friends, so it was better that they spend the anniversary away from the probing eyes of the press. In fact, the only reason that she never revealed Dave’s last name, except to her innermost circle of survivor friends, and only if they asked, was to protect his family’s wish for privacy. If she had her way, she’d be spending the day at ground zero with the other survivors, listening for his name to be read from the roll of the dead.

On September 12 Tania was back in the city and more downhearted than before. The time with Dave’s family had only made things worse, she told the other survivors. Her father-in-law spent the
afternoon on the jetty where Dave loved to fish, and she and Dave’s mother shut themselves in the room where most of the mementos of Dave were kept, and watched, over and over, the video of the wedding ceremony in Hawaii. That had set the tone for the sunset service, she said, and she’d spent the entire evening consoling her distraught mother-in-law. More than ever, she needed to get away, and she planned to travel to her parents’ vacation home on the California coast for an extended visit. Being with her family always seemed to help.

E
xcept for a few random emails, the survivors didn’t hear from Tania for several weeks. Then, right after New Year’s, she wrote that Merrill Lynch, together with other Fortune 500 companies, was deploying volunteers on a humanitarian mission to the countries in Southeast Asia that had been devastated by the Indian Ocean tsunami one week earlier. She had been asked to go and was one of the first to sign up. She and eight of her coworkers were leaving for southwest Thailand the following morning for ten days.

Tania told the group that she was keeping a diary of the trip and would share it with them when she returned. As promised, in mid-January she emailed a twenty-eight-page missive, single spaced, with exhaustive daily dispatches. In her first entry, on January 6, 2005, she talked about the long flight from New York to London and, finally, to Bangkok. The trip had been arduous, and the team was dragging by the time it landed in Thailand.

She wrote:

A colleague from our Bangkok office met us at the airport. He escorted us to the hotel and offered to entertain us for the rest of the day. After a shower and a change of clothes, this seemed like a good idea. It was better than sitting around waiting and thinking of the task ahead. He told us everyone remains shocked by the tragedy and that almost every Thai he knows has lost someone in the tsunami. This is starting to sound very familiar, and my stomach is churning already wondering how this trip is going to affect me. A dear Okie friend sent me an email on the eve of my
trip cautioning me about the toll this trip could have on me, and I’m beginning to understand the wisdom in her caution.

After a delicious Thai meal, we visit Wat Arun, the Temple of Dawn, one of the city’s most impressive temples. The sun is setting, and as the reds, pinks, and oranges inundate the sky, the temple shimmers, as its walls are made of pieces of colored glass. The beauty of it all contrasts with the reason why I’m here, and as I stand there taking it all in, I say a silent prayer for those affected by this terrible tragedy.

After walking around some of the city’s most picturesque streets and doing some shopping, we head back to the hotel and say good-bye to our colleague. As we enter the hotel, we notice a large group of English speakers sitting at the lobby bar, and we decide to join in. Somehow a lonely hotel room doesn’t seem appealing. As we mingle with the group, the topic of discussion becomes apparent immediately: the tsunami.

Some in the group are in the country looking for loved ones, others are members of the media who take breaks in Bangkok after days of reporting live from the different struck areas, and a few others are business travelers fascinated by being part of “it.” We introduce ourselves, and suddenly we are the focus of the group. We get asked a lot of questions, and when their curiosity is satiated, they resume their conversations.

Tania went on to tell about meeting a couple from California who were searching for their missing daughter and her fiancé. She was particularly moved by their sad plight:

They have already been to Khao Lak, where she [their daughter] was vacationing in a beach bungalow. They looked for her, but their search turned up nothing. Both are listed as missing but not confirmed dead. They tell me about her and show me an album with pictures of them. She looks so pretty, so full of life.

I wish I could tell that mother how deeply I understand her pain, but this is a conversation I don’t think she is ready for at the
moment. I have exchanged contact info with her, and hopefully someday I can tell her. I know too well what it is to go through a loved one’s effects to collect their DNA. I know too well what it is to apply for a death certificate without having the remains of your loved one. I know too well what it is to cling to the hope that they are not dead and then to finally have to accept the reality without being ready or equipped to do so. This is only the first day of this trip, and already all my old wounds have been opened. This was my reality not too long ago, and I’m reliving it tonight. I cry and cry for Dave, for myself, and for my family, knowing too well what I put them through. But as much as it hurts tonight, I think good will come out of this. In some sort of bizarre fashion, I feel this is healing for me even though I cannot feel it right now.

That was Tania, always looking for the break in the clouds. Two days later, she was traveling from village to village, helping to rebuild schools that were damaged and delivering supplies to people who had lost everything. “I have a very clear picture of what the tsunami must have been like and what the survivors have endured,” she wrote. “It concerns me that while their physical wounds are being treated, their psychological ones are not. Having lived with PTSD for three and a half years, I recognize a lot of it: guilt for surviving while others died, intrusive thoughts, nightmares, the blank stare, etc. I wish more mental health professionals responded to a tragedy like this the same way rescue crews do. I wish I could do more, tell them it wasn’t their fault that they couldn’t hold the other person any longer, that they did enough by surviving, but I can see that a lot of their spirits are broken, and they will need a long time to heal from this. I think about how much my life has changed since 9/11. I remember when I volunteered with Habitat for Humanity through my company’s social responsibility program, after Hurricane Mitch desolated parts of Central America in 1998. I spent a month building houses and schools, but somehow this trip means so much more this time around.”

In yet another entry, she wrote, “Everyone here has a story, and it seems they are most eager to share them with one another. I sit
there fascinated, hearing stories of rescue or survival, of friendship and bonding over hardship. I also share the reason why I’m here, and after the word spreads that I survived the WTC, I get introduced to a couple of people who responded to ground zero. Is the world small or what????”

She had learned so much about herself on this trip, Tania said. On the day before she was scheduled to return to New York, she wrote:

For about a year now I have been debating what to do with myself. After all the pain I experienced, continuing working in the same place, doing the same things as my pre-9/11 life doesn’t seem enough. I’ve been through too much. I’ve seen and experienced too much just to go back to my old life. I want to make a difference in the world, I want to help people, I want to work with children so that they don’t hate enough to slam planes into buildings . . . I’m not sure of the long-term effects of this trip, but somehow it is transforming my memories of 9/11 and putting them in a less painful place.

When Tania arrived at the survivors’ meeting later that month, everyone stood and applauded her. Her face turned crimson, and she giggled in that childlike way of hers. The others asked her to begin the meeting with a recap of her trip, and Tania obliged happily. For the next hour, she regaled the others with stories from those ten days away. The trip had done her good, she said. Tania had turned a corner in her own recovery while she was away.

Now she wanted to help them to turn a corner in theirs.

I
n one year, Gerry Bogacz’s idea for a peer support group had grown into a budding movement of people searching for a purpose. Tania had taught by example. If you want to move forward, she told the others, get past yourself. Help someone else. Find a cause. “Live for something other than the pain,” she said. Linda had heard Tania say that so many times that she’d adopted it as her own mantra. Tania didn’t just talk the talk. That’s one of the things the others admired about her. She lived the philosophy. There didn’t seem to be anything she wouldn’t do for the survivors or the network. She gave and gave of herself and asked nothing in return but a little appreciation and a commitment from the others that they follow her lead.

In her first few months with the network, she’d built the group a website, which she managed, and she’d organized a survivors’ speaker’s bureau. She’d facilitated a writer’s workshop, met with publishers about producing a book of survivors’ stories, and tossed around an idea for a survivors’ documentary. In addition, Tania hosted fund-raisers at her tony midtown apartment to keep the network running, and she always contributed the food, the wine, and the use of the beautiful glassed-in party room on the roof of her building.

Her devotion to the group only intensified after her return from Thailand. After that, there wasn’t a day that passed when Tania didn’t propose some new initiative, some new way to ensure the network’s relevance. Her mission was to get the survivors noticed, and she worked until her fingers blistered from punching the numbers on her phone and pounding the keys on her computer. She reached out to influential bureaucrats in the New York State Assembly and city hall,
to the movers and shakers in the 9/11 stratospheres, and to survivors’ groups from other disasters. Her emails to the other survivors arrived at all hours of the night, and they wondered when she ever slept. But it was largely due to these compulsive efforts that the survivors were gaining recognition and, at least to some degree, an identity within the cloistered 9/11 establishment.

Tania’s energetic personality was the perfect complement to the more measured and cautious Bogacz. When he asked her to cochair the burgeoning network, because the job had become too much for one person—and because she was uniquely entitled, with her extraordinary story and with her impressively bold and unabashed pursuit of getting the survivors noticed—Tania hesitated at first. She was back at Merrill Lynch full-time, she said, keeping late hours and traveling the world for her company, and her survivor’s story was no more significant or important than anyone else’s. She worried that having the title might mean that the survivors had higher expectations of her, and she didn’t want to shortchange them or disappoint anyone if her career took her away from the network, which was likely to happen now and again.

She certainly didn’t need the recognition of a title to continue the work she was doing for them, Tania said, but if he really thought that giving her that official legitimacy would help push their agenda, and if no one objected to her having to be incommunicado from time to time, then of course she would consider his proposal.