A Decade of Hope

by Dennis Smith

  It’s understandable that people made errors, but then to use the tragedy as a platform for a political career, which Giuliani tried to do, and then to watch people who, particularly in the case of Bush and Cheney, who were in part responsible—and believe me, I’m an independent—use it successfully in a platform for a political career is absolutely nauseating. It still is.

  There was a terrible waste of our resources, and our prestige, and so many lives lost when Bush and Cheney elected to go into Iraq, with no connection to September 11. Anyone with half a brain knew that at the time, and it is clear now. And it’s hurt our security. I think that over the last nine years the Iraq war and the failure to clean up Afghanistan have hurt our country.

  ANN: This is a big part of our grieving too. Because you have got to get mad.

  CAMERON: You can quote me: Cheney can roast in hell. And since Bush followed his ideas and advice, they both can. Our security is internationally weaker because of all this. Domestically it’s not very pleasant, to say the least, because of how many of the recommendations of the 9/11 Commission that have not been incorporated—for instance, cargo security. Having a “national security czar” has turned out to be counterproductive. On the positive side, it is quite remarkable that a number of these plots in recent years have been foiled. The New York City Police and Fire departments are as alert as any city’s defenses can be. I am impressed that we were able to intercept the Times Square bomber, but, unfortunately, terrorism just keeps going on. Now Germany is on alert for a possible Mumbai-like attack. The problem is that we didn’t corral the thing.

  The Obama administration has been reasonably successful in providing security, and some of the things the Bush administration did at the end were working. I also think that mistakes are being made by the Obama administration, such as the idea of having civilian trials for terrorists, which is just way-out liberal thinking gone crazy by people who have never been in a courtroom. Why they should be tried in New York City is beyond me, and Attorney General [Eric] Holder has been extremely ill advised in pushing for those kinds of things. Certainly it’s beyond me, when you have a quasi-military attack on our facilities abroad, whether it’s the USS Cole or one of our embassies, [that they] will not admit that we are essentially fighting an ongoing war.

  ANN: I know exactly where I was when I realized Cat was truly gone. It was the Friday after September 11. We often go to church, and there were a lot of services that week. But that Friday we went to the Church of the Heavenly Rest, where Cat had actually been confirmed. The church was packed [with people] praying for those lost on September 11. I remember sitting in that pew thinking, and it just came to me: She’s dead. It was as if she had whispered in my ear. I just knew it; it was a revelation.

  Her memorial service was October 6, and we spent a lot of time from September 11 until then planning it. Your focus goes to that. It’s concrete. We did a program and decided who was going to talk and what the music would be and how to get everybody there. We had a thousand people at the service in Southampton. They normally close the Episcopal church after the summer season, but they kept the church open for that.

  The first five years after losing Cat were pure hell. I’m a docent at the Met [the Metropolitan Museum of Art], where tours start in the middle of October. I give tours to children, and I never missed one. After two weeks Annie went back to Amherst, and it being a small college, they embraced her.

  CAMERON: Andrew graduated the year he met Cat, and then he went to Harvard Law School. He was in his second year there when September 11 occurred, and because he wanted to be close to us, he transferred to NYU and took over Cat’s apartment. Harvard and NYU have a program, and he still has a Harvard degree.

  ANN: He got married in May of this year to a girl who knew Cat, whom we love.

  We stay close to Andrew.

  We all picked up our lives, which were just shattered. The first year you are in such shock, just putting one foot in front of the other. I don’t know what I felt, but I knew it was so deep. It wasn’t like, Oh, I’m so sad that she’s dead. It was just an awareness, a rather amorphous thing. But I knew it. We were a really close family. Cat called me three or four times a day. She was the first child, so I knew practically every detail of her life.

  CAMERON: Another interesting thing about Cat is that she was a force. Not many people are a force. She had a tremendous effect on anyone who knew her but without being a talkative person or a center-of-attention person. That’s why we stayed so close to all of her friends, because they wanted to stay close to us, and through us to Cat. That was her force.

  ANN: She was energetic and so full of love and beauty. She wasn’t just charismatic—she was human too—far from perfect. We wanted to memorialize her life. And we all—myself, Cameron, Annie, and Andrew—had the wonderful idea to create a special fund. And that has helped. I never understood what things like that meant to people, but it has helped me, and Cameron too.

  At Thanksgiving of 2001 we wrote a letter proposing the fund, which Andrew and Cameron hand-delivered to nearly everyone on the list who was from New York. The response was extraordinary.

  CAMERON: We put money in, and we also used a large part of our proceeds from the Victim Compensation Fund [the federal government’s fund for survivors and families of survivors administered by Kenneth Feinberg]. Our fund has created a benefit. All four of us are the trustees. It’s much easier to raise money than it is to give it out sensibly. Annie had personal views that it should be focused around the five boroughs of New York City. I actually wanted to do things like Seeds for Peace [a nonprofit organization that trains young people in war-torn regions in leadership and conflictresolution skills].

  ANN: Andrew got a list of schools, and so he and I started going around, meeting with people, and finding things that we liked. It was also really therapeutic for our grief. Now here we are, ten years later, and we’ve really figured out what works.

  In the very beginning I went to Children’s Storefront up in Harlem, where we gave funding for a math program, and the headmistress said, Will you come and talk about Cat? Now I don’t like to talk in public, but I can talk about Cat until I’m blue in the face and I don’t get nervous. And I told them about her. The headmistress had warned me that they would probably get a little iffy after twenty minutes, but it was first through eighth grade [children], and you could have heard a pin drop. And they asked, When she did her homework, was it messy? Did she like sports? Did she keep her room neat? They wanted to know about her. In another program we ran downtown, they told the children about Cat before I got there, and one of the little children said, “Can I tell you something? I know something that will be good for you. If you take a picture of Cat and you light a candle next to it, that will make you feel much better.” And this was a little seven-year-old.

  CAMERON: There are a number of schools we help fund that are not public schools or parochial schools or charter schools, but somewhere in between. They’re privately funded schools that are starting to spring up, and they’re extraordinary, offering some unique programs. And we want to help them. The bottom line is, our efforts are helping.

  ANN: It’s helping us, and helping the world. We have two Cat MacRae libraries: one at Brooklyn Jesuit Prep and one at the George Jackson Academy [for academically capable boys from lower income and underserved families].

  CAMERON: Brooklyn Jesuit Prep had been a parochial school next to a great big high school, next to a big church. As the neighborhood changed the Catholic presence moved away, and then a Jesuit priest came and built up within the building a wonderful school, which is better than the one I went to. The library, which we just installed there, is magnificent.

  ANN: We’ve sent four children to parochial high schools so far. We have a reading program, a writing program, cultural enrichment programs. They are really successful. And our friends who gave to Cat’s fund are now finding out about the programs that we are running, and they are getting more involved too. One o
f Cat’s teachers at Brearley, Mrs. Smith, writes to everyone who went to the school who loved Cat, and there are still so many of them that we continue to build.

  ANN: Two September 11s ago, a friend of Annie’s who teaches in the public schools, Katie, said that she was talking to the kids in her second-grade class about what had happened that day. A little girl raised her hand and said, “I know somebody who was killed on September 11.” Katie said, “How do you know someone who was killed? You weren’t even born yet.” The girl answered, “Her name is Cat MacRae. Her name is in all the books that I read.” They were from our enrichment program for kids, GO Project, which runs [programs in the] Little Red School House and Grace Church. And we started the Cat MacRae Expository Writing Program, so they all have pencils with little CAT MACRAEs on them and in their little books, and they take the Cat MacRae oath in the summer.

  CAMERON: They pack the schools on Saturdays with the children from public schools south of Fourteenth Street. The classes are overseen by a certified teacher and a number of assistants who are studying to be teachers, and they break down the kids into little groups, one tutor for every two children.

  Reading is obviously one of its biggest goals, but the program is quite remarkable, because not only is it offered every Saturday of the school year, but because they have concluded that these kids get to a certain level during the school year and then they drop off a bit in the summer, the program also takes them five days a week throughout the summer.

  ANN: And then there is the work we do at the Harlem Academy, which Vinny Dotoli built up, grade by grade, each year adding another. It’s in the bottom of an office building.

  CAMERON: And they attract very bright kids. They insist that the parents pay a little something, but obviously the school is charitable. They are now up to seven grades. And it’s wonderful, because the good prep schools are watching and in another year will be beating their doors down to try to attract their students.

  ANN: What we do when we’re assessing a school is, I’m the guinea pig. I go and see if I like the school and the people I would work with. I meet the headmaster and his development team. If I like it, I bring Cameron. And we ask, “What do you want?” So the second year at Harlem Academy we asked that, and Cameron added, “Cat was so good in math, and we already have all these reading and writing programs and libraries. We need a math program.” Vinny said, “I’d love to start the Singapore Math Program. It is a very effective way of teaching mathematics.” We had a party here the other night for Harlem Academy, parents and friends, people who supported the Cat Fund. I wanted them to see where the money has gone. It was a bit of an emotional event but a good job. We had little fifth graders there, and they were doing all of the math problems. Presenting their math problems to everybody. It was lovely. And it’s part of Cat’s legacy.

  We’re also involved with something called SSP, Student Sponsor Partnership, and they send kids to Catholic high school.

  CAMERON: Which is very interesting. Brother Stanley runs it within the workings of the Catholic school system. The program takes kids out of public schools and sends them to the good parochial schools, like this wonderful one on Seventy-sixth Street, St. Jean. However, we were also supporting the program of parochial elementary schools, and there was one eighth-grade girl in them who was dropping between the cracks. I watched her participate in class, and when I asked the headmistress where she was going to high school, I discovered that she couldn’t afford to go anywhere. The SSP wouldn’t pay for kids from one parochial school to go to another, but that’s been changed now, and we want to support their programs.

  One of the tragic things about education here in New York is that the parochial schools are four times better than the public schools, and they are run on an efficient budget. But because of the dynamics of life these days there’s not enough money to have all these parochial schools continue.

  ANN: I think I’m more personally involved in the actual work of the fund. I go to Harlem Academy, and they say, Hi, Annie. I teach them art history, and I bring them to the Met too. Maybe it’s just the mother in me who wants to mother. I love being involved in the Cat Fund and getting to know the kids. It’s more of an emotional commitment for me. And I need it. It helps me tremendously. But you know, there are always sad times. Always.

  CAMERON: It helps me in a little bit of a different way, and not as much as it helps Ann. What it does for me is that in some way Cat, although she only lived twenty-three years, has put quite a mark on a little piece of the world. This fund has done a lot of good, and there will be a number of kids who will benefit from this and who will not be failures. But that’s not how I solve every period of downtime. The downtime is the reality. These horrible people.

  ANN: I think Cat was murdered, but I also think it was a phenomenon. Oh, I assign blame. I went to those 9/11 Commission hearings. I really did feel that it could have been prevented. It was shocking that our government knew as much as it did and didn’t do anything about it. Shocking.

  CAMERON: We all approach this differently. I was very interested in knowing, and really wanted to make sure, that Cat was in a good place. I wanted to understand this from both a religious and a scientific standpoint, so I started studying quite extensively advanced physics, string theory, and unification theory, where you get into the question of other dimensions. I was also studying comparative religion—I wanted to come out on the comparative religion side, as my training had always been to look to the internal. All these traditions—Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, Confucianism—are very similar, which is the thesis of a number of leading textbooks. But as I got into it I realized that there really are some major differences between the Muslim religion and the other great religions of the world. The differences are that most other religions are very peaceful. In fact, Hinduism and Christianity are probably the two closest; they do not have a militaristic bent, nor should any religion. Whatever you might think of the Western religions and their riches, they do have central authority. There is no centralized dogmatic authority in the Muslim religion, which means that any Muslim can say that he has studied a little bit and run a mosque, or be an imam and proclaim fatwas. Admittedly, the more enlightened Muslims are only going to listen to true scholars. Unfortunately, it’s the militant side that is extremely dangerous. People who have no respect for human life, people who blow themselves up, who blow their brothers and sisters up—that is a tremendous foe to have. Twenty or thirty years ago the international concern was a state attacking a state. But now you have failed states like Yemen, Afghanistan, Somalia, and Libya that are creating festering pools for murder.

  There’s an academic side of Islam that is truly a scholarly and peaceful religion, but there’s an extremist side too, and we have unfortunately now gone overboard with being politically correct in pointing this out. For example, this mosque by Ground Zero is an example of something that is in very poor taste. Yes, we’re all for freedom of religion, but do you think it’s really in good taste or appropriate to build a mosque higher than any other religious building downtown? This is a real estate development story, but it happens to be right next to the World Trade Center.

  ANN: I remember someone saying, Does there have to be another September 11 before anybody takes this all seriously? People still think September 11 was just another emergency. America doesn’t really get it yet.

  Our family gets bigger, which really has helped a lot. Annie just married a wonderful man. So much in the beginning was the three of us. We’d go into restaurants, and wherever we went they’d say, “Are you a party of four?” And we’d say three. And the three of us were brave and had done a good job, but having Annie be married added a new dimension to our family. When he married Annie, Win had never met Cat, but his brother was in Cat’s class at Princeton and knew her. Win now talks about Cat as if he knew her too. She just comes along with us.

  I noticed in the beginning that my friends didn’t quite know what to do, because it’s every mother’
s worst fear, or every parent’s worst fear, to lose a child. But all of Cat’s friends had lost their good friend, so they would come to me and say, Mrs. MacRae, what are we going to do? So we all became a family together and stayed really close. We go to all of her friends’ weddings. When they have babies, they send us pictures. One of them sends Annie a birthday present and a Christmas present every year, because Cat’s not sending those presents any longer. We all talk about Cat all the time. We haven’t let her go. A lot of grieving is often kept inside, but we reach out, and say, God, we miss her. God, she should be at this wedding, on this trip, at this dinner. And it helps.

  CAMERON: It’s a journey, and it’s not over.

  Rudy Abad

  Rudy Abad was in the process of retiring from Merrill Lynch, where he was first an analyst, then a broker and options specialist for nearly twenty-five years. When his wife, Marie Rose, died in the South Tower, Rudy returned to his native Philippine Islands, where he was determined to build a memorial to her that would be as meaningful and as consequential as the life taken from her.

  I am one of five children and was born in 1945, right in the middle of a brother and three sisters. We were a modest and unassuming family. My parents determined to give us sound educations, and all five of us went to one of the better schools in Manila. I cannot say that I had a really happy family, as my parents were very involved in their work. But so were other parents. Our relationship was not as good as what I might have seen in the families of friends of mine. But it was okay.

  My father was a businessman, basically in advertising, and my mom was by his side the whole time. When we were kids it was already a multimilliondollar business, and so we were very comfortable. We had our own car, a very decent home. We were not in the very, very rich category, but we were certainly not lacking for anything.