The Woman Who Wasn’t There (7 page)

Bogacz moved across the main lobby toward the turnstiles, where uniformed emergency workers were guiding people to safety. Out on the street, it was chaos. People flooded out of the towers, and police barked orders. “Keep moving!” “Don’t look back!” Bogacz did as he was told and ran off.

A few blocks away, he turned to look at the buildings. They had disappeared inside a giant plume of smoke and debris. He thought about his family. Surely they thought he was dead, but he had no way to call them. His cell phone was in his bag up on the eighty-second floor, and it probably wouldn’t have worked anyway. He thought about his office. He was certain it was in ruins. They had probably lost everything. He thought about the towers and how they would look when the flames were extinguished, and he wondered how long it would take to repair them. Part of him felt disconnected from what had just happened. He felt almost as if he had observed the disaster from a distance rather than lived through it.

Eight hours later, Bogacz was finally back home with his family in the Bronx. The towers were gone. Thousands were dead or missing. He stripped off his jacket and trousers and sat on the edge of his bed, feeling cold and numb. Sleep wouldn’t come, not that night, or the next, or the night after that. He would soon learn that three of his colleagues died in the tower. The coworkers who had been with him on the stairs were caught in the congestion and barely made it out of the building with their lives.

In the months after the attack, Bogacz suffered severe bouts of depression and stress, but most of all, guilt. He quietly berated himself for not staying in his office longer to make sure that his coworkers had all evacuated, and he second-guessed his decision to flee as quickly as he had. One day he passed an impromptu memorial outside a church near where the towers had stood and stopped to read the messages. They were from people all over the world. Before moving
on, he left his own message: “I escaped from the World Trade Center on September 11th. I am very sorry for those who did not.” Those two sentences summed up the whole, awful experience. Tears stung his eyes as he walked away. A year later, he was still taking antidepressants to be able to get through the days and still looking for ways to redress his survival.

At the same time that others were coming together in the online forum, Bogacz was floating to fellow survivors the idea of a support group. After work on February 26, 2003, a group of a dozen gathered at the Cedar Tavern in the West Village to talk it over. They discovered that they had all begun thinking about reaching out to other survivors at about the same time and decided that was significant. If they had all been suffering with the same feelings of angst and isolation, surely there were other survivors who were still struggling and needed the same sense of belonging. Toasting to a better future, the group clinked glasses that night and promised to forge ahead. That August, Bogacz sent out a solicitation email to a wide net of professionals, and, by word of mouth, news of the support group spread.

On September 23, 2003, Bogacz presided over the inaugural meeting of the survivors’ group in the basement of St. Andrew’s Roman Catholic Church in Lower Manhattan. The group adopted a statement of purpose, which was to address “the high probability that large numbers of survivors—those placed at immediate risk of injury or death during the attacks—have had their lives significantly disrupted and altered by the experience and, as a result, continued to face stress, disorientation, and significant levels of grief, guilt, and helplessness in the aftermath of the attacks.”

A second meeting was scheduled for November 19 at Trinity Church on Wall Street. It was then, as the members of the fledgling group shared a potluck supper in the church hall, in the shadow of the former World Trade Center, that someone mentioned a survivor named Tania Head and her incredible account of survival and loss. Bogacz was smitten with the story.

“I want to meet her,” he said.

A
ll eyes were on her as she walked into the meeting at 520 Eighth Avenue in Manhattan on January 28, 2004. None of them had ever seen her, but they all knew who she was. She was Rubenesque and not conventionally pretty, but her cheeks were apple red, her dark eyes sparkled when she smiled, and she was well turned out in her tailored, moss-colored pantsuit and Rolex watch.

What struck everyone had nothing to do with her appearance, though. She had a presence. It was undeniable, even mesmerizing. And her story, well, it would have been unbelievable if it hadn’t been so beyond belief. Some of them didn’t feel worthy to be in the room with her.

Of course, the anticipation of her arrival had been spine tingling. It was all any of them could talk about for days before. In the few short weeks since she’d posted her amazing account of bravery and heartbreak online, Tania had become a legend in the awakening survivor community. She was the ubersurvivor. So when she walked into the meeting, it felt to the other two dozen or so men and women there as if a celebrity had entered the room.

This was the survivors’ group’s first meeting at the place called September Space, a suite on the eleventh floor of an office building at the corner of West Thirty-Sixth Street in the garment district. It had been designated by the nonprofit organization World Cares specifically for 9/11-related activities and would become the group’s home base.

Gerry Bogacz had invited Tania. The two began an email friendship shortly after he’d heard about her, and they’d done a lot of
messaging and talking on the phone over the holidays. There came a point, with each of the survivors, when family members could no longer provide the emotional sustenance needed to keep going. How many times could a husband or a wife be expected to listen to the same dismal memories, the same angry rants, the same irrational confessions of guilt and shame? How could they possibly understand what it was like to live through something that most people couldn’t even imagine, or the conflicting repercussions of surviving such a cataclysmic nightmare?

Bogacz had reached the point where he felt as if his family couldn’t relate to him anymore, or maybe it was the other way around. He was a lone man stranded in a foreign place where no one understood the language he spoke, and he was tired of trying to explain how he got there and why he wasn’t able to go back to where he’d been. The trouble was that he no longer even recognized the man he’d been on September 10, 2001, and sometimes he wondered if his post-9/11 self was even compatible with his former life. In Tania he had discovered someone who truly understood, a person who had been in a darker place than he was, worse than any of the other survivors, and had somehow found her way back to the light.

He was surprised when he saw her. From their email exchanges and phone conversations, Bogacz had formed a mental picture of Tania, and he was expecting someone different, someone with a face that matched the honeyed voice with a hint of a Spanish accent. It didn’t matter what she looked like, of course, but it had just taken him aback at first. He walked toward her with his hand outstretched, eager to introduce himself, and the moment they greeted each other, hugging and patting each other on the back, he knew they would be good friends. Tania was warm and unassuming and a little bit shy. And when people surrounded her, competing for a moment of her time, she seemed comfortable and responsive but far from caught up in all of the attention.

At six o’clock, Bogacz called the meeting to order. After a moment of silence for the people who perished in the towers, everyone took a place around a long, rectangular conference table. Tania sat quietly at
first as they discussed ideas for the structure and mission of the group. But as the meeting wore on, she seemed to relax, and she summoned a few of her thoughts and opinions about ways to get the group off the ground.

By the end of the evening, they had settled on a name—the World Trade Center Survivors’ Network—and drafted a mission statement that began, “The Survivors’ Network seeks to provide a forum for personal contact between survivors as a means to empower them both to deal with the circumstances of the aftermath of the attacks and find renewed purpose in that aftermath. The network can also function as a place for people to go and get survivors’ perspectives and as a conduit for the common thoughts of survivors.”

The seed planted by Bogacz nearly a year earlier had sprung its first blossom. They were officially a group with a name, a direction, and an ambitious long-term agenda. They would begin by identifying as many of the people who had survived the attack on the towers as they could—a challenge because the number that survived was somewhere in the thousands. Then their job would be finding ways to facilitate the needs of their forgotten comrades. Ultimately, the survivors would need to find a common voice to finally be recognized as part of the 9/11 community and have a say in the important decisions about the rebuilding and memorials at the World Trade Center site.

It was time to move forward. But the next step had chinks that, up till then, had proved insurmountable.

In the two years and four months since the destruction of the towers, and life as they’d known it, the survivors had never been permitted private access to ground zero the way that family members and first responders had. If they chose to go to the site to pay their respects to the dead or to spend a moment reflecting on that life-changing morning, they were expected to tough it out like every other visitor and wade through throngs of tourists with their fanny packs and cameras, and past the dozens of vendor carts with 9/11 baseball caps and postcards with the towers before and after the attack—only to be stopped at the tall metal fencing that surrounded the trade center grounds. Bogacz and every other founding member of his group tried
repeatedly to arrange a private tour for survivors to visit the footprint of the towers, but the powers within the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey had always rebuffed their requests—another indication that the survivors were invisible.

The number one item on the network’s agenda was to facilitate a Survivors’ Day at the site, a time when only they would be permitted inside the fence. “This would provide survivors the opportunity to remember, find solace, and to move forward in the healing process,” the group wrote in the meeting minutes. It would also go a long way toward lending credibility to the new network and drawing in other survivors. But how to do it? Everyone agreed to come up with strategies for discussion at the next gathering.

After the meeting adjourned, Bogacz and Tania walked two blocks through the foot of snow that blanketed the city to the twenty-four-hour Tick Tock Diner, which was located across from Penn Station and served breakfast all day. Over multiple cups of coffee, they talked about their lives since 9/11 and how lonely it was being a survivor. Tania told him that for nearly two years afterward, she had rarely left her apartment. She had been stuck in a debilitating depression, was unable to return to her job, and had gained a lot of weight. She still couldn’t go to sleep without leaving on a light. One day she woke up and decided that enough was enough. If she was ever going to heal, she had to crawl outside of herself and do something to help others. Bogacz was struck by Tania’s optimism and kindheartedness. After all she’d been through, she was still able to smile and laugh, and she encouraged him to do the same.

At one point, Tania suggested that her online support group merge with the Survivors’ Network. There was power in numbers, she said. One comprehensive organization would have more political might than small, fractured groups, and that meant reaching larger numbers of survivors. She said that she was ready and willing to put in as much time as it took to pull it all together, even if it meant using her own money and spending less time at her job at Merrill Lynch. Bogacz agreed that it sounded like a good idea, and he was convinced it could work. With their strong management backgrounds, they could accomplish
a lot together, he said, and hopefully some of her optimism and energy would rub off on him in the process.

The truth was that Bogacz was grateful to have a partner who was willing to listen to his cares and concerns, and who was motivated to advocate on behalf of all survivors. There was so much hard work ahead to get the survivors the acknowledgment they deserved, and he knew it would take more time and energy than he had to give. And, he thought, if this brave woman had been able to avenge the tragedy by turning her misery into action—returning to her career in the financial industry, lending support to a 9/11 families group by volunteering her time to help widows like her cope with their feelings of loss, and now coming out in a snowstorm for her fellow survivors—there was no telling what she could do for the network.

The two finished their last cups of coffee and shook hands before saying good night. But before he went his way and she went hers, Tania promised that she would set to work the minute she got back to her Hell’s Kitchen apartment. She wasn’t a good sleeper anyway.

“I’ll be in touch,” she said, shaking the snow from her scarf.

“Good luck,” Bogacz said before heading down to the subway.

Tania went home and first sent notes to her survivor friends telling them of the new network. She then stayed up late into the night figuring out how to get in touch with survivors of the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, where 168 people died, including 19 children in day care, to find out how they had established themselves. By the time she finally dropped into bed, she’d sent an email introducing herself to Richard Williams, a survivor of the Oklahoma City bombing, and another to Bob Schutz, a friend she’d met on the forum who happened to be the World Trade Center site supervisor, asking for advice about how to get that private trip down to ground zero that no one had been able to arrange.

Six weeks later, on March 17, Tania sent an email to the network with astonishing news. Where everyone else had failed, she had succeeded in getting the private visit to the site that they so desperately wanted. “I have arranged a visit to ground zero for WTC survivors,” she wrote. “During the visit, those of you who are up to it will have
the opportunity to descend to the bottom of the pit. I realize many of you still find it hard to go to the site, so please think about this carefully. Tania.”