by Hoda Kotb
Ron with Jennieann. September 11, 2001.
(Credit: New York Daily News/GETTY Images)
When they finally spotted help, Ron gave the information he’d gathered about Jennieann to the emergency medical workers.
A video exists that Ron opted not to view, but his family did. They watched it and told him of the amazing confirmation of his story. Irish television had interviewed Ron for a 9/11 documentary and had obtained a color photo of Ron helping Jennieann, wrapped in a tablecloth, onto the street. Miraculously, producers also obtained FBI surveillance video from a downtown building camera that captures Ron, alongside Jennieann, as her gurney is loaded into an ambulance. That yellow tie. It’s captured on tape. Ron’s special yellow tie, worn for a morning full of promise that turned into the worst day of his life.
After they loaded Jennieann safely into the ambulance, Ron began walking down the street. For the first time, he took a good look at the buildings. It was then that he realized the ghastly nature of the odd noise. People were jumping from the blazing buildings. Like frames of a horror movie, the bizarre images were seared into his memory.
“I couldn’t believe it,” Ron says, looking off into space. “I still have these visions of a woman who jumped with her purse. I could see her holding on to her purse. I could see couples jumping hand in hand.”
Dazed, Ron made his way through the trappings of catastrophe and asked strangers for any news of what had happened. They told him that two commercial jetliners had hit the towers. Ron was now one of millions of people making the mental transition from accident to terrorist attack. He tried to call Brigid, but cell service was unavailable. Hoping his calling card would work, Ron ran into the American Express building. He’d often taken friends and family on tours of the city and always brought them into the Amex building to see the paintings displayed in the lobby. He knew there was a row of phone banks right inside the doors. Ron was joined in the building by milling emergency workers. A gentleman wearing a police badge stood at the phones and told Ron he didn’t have any change to make a call. Ron dialed his AT&T 800 number for the man, then used it on a neighboring phone to call Brigid.
“I said, ‘Brigid, I’m down here, I’m okay, I’m looking at it, I will be home. I know the trains are going to run. I’m going to try to get home for Monica’s birthday.’ ”
Brigid told Ron how relieved she was that he was okay. They spoke for just a few minutes, Ron managing a mix of relief and disbelief as he watched people dive off the towers to their deaths.
When he hung up the phone, Ron reached down to pick up his briefcase. His intent was to leave, but his body slumped to the ground. For a moment, he sat frozen, watching the jumpers and watching people pray and scream as they witnessed the same appalling images.
Ron had no way of knowing the worst was yet to come.
Having worked for the city housing authority, Ron knew there was a contingency plan in place by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey in the event of a disaster. Ferries would leave from the New York side and transport people to Hoboken on the New Jersey side, where they would board trains. The trains would stop at every station on every rail line that New Jersey Transit serviced. Ron told Brigid his plan was to make his way to Hoboken and take a train toward home. He first had to run one block square to get to the ferry that would cross the Hudson. He nearly missed the boat.
“I literally jumped over the gate and got on the ferry. Everybody was stunned. One Asian chap had a piece of the airplane and was showing it off.” Ron says, “Everyone wanted to kill him. They were like, ‘You are disgusting.’ ”
Ron was riding on the upper deck of the jam-packed ferry. Panicked people were crying, praying, and trying desperately to make cell phone calls. As the vessel was reaching the other side of the river, he looked back at Manhattan.
“And the first building went down,” remembers Ron. “My heart sank. I was horrified. I tried to call Brigid and I couldn’t, so she thought I was still down there. In the middle of it.”
Off the ferry and now aboard a train toward home, Ron was surrounded by people using BlackBerries to gather and share the latest developments. Ron watched a woman drink several shots of vodka as news spread that the Pentagon had been hit and another plane had crashed in a field. He still had no luck contacting his wife. The normally twenty-minute ride, with added stops, took two hours. Five minutes before his stop, Ron reached Brigid. She raced to meet him at the station.
“She was just in pieces. I was delighted to see her,” says Ron. “I had burned skin all over my coat and I smelled like aviation fuel. I was in shock.”
When they got home, Monica was still at school. Brigid had not wanted to pick her up before she knew Ron’s fate. She told him that his brother-in-law, David, had called saying he couldn’t find Ruth.
“Oh, she’s in California. She’s fine,” Ron told her, assuming his sister, Paige, and Juliana had left that weekend for their Disney trip. He would call David after taking a much-needed shower. But David’s call alarmed Ron. Instead of showering, he decided to call Paige’s husband, Alan. He had shocking news.
“Alan said to me, ‘Ron, Paige’s plane hit the World Trade Center, but Ruth wasn’t on the plane.’ ” Ron sighs and says, “I thought, Thank God.”
But an unimaginable story was about to unfold by the hour. Reality would sink in slowly and, like quicksand, immobilize the families and ultimately suffocate them with grief.
All morning, Ron’s two brothers in Ireland had been calling Brigid to see if Ron was okay. He called them back and told them he was fine but that Ruth was missing. Savvy with computers, Ron began to track his sister’s whereabouts. He scoured the Internet, searching for flight schedules and airline records. Alan told him that Ruth and Juliana had stayed at Paige’s house the night prior to their trip; therefore, they’d flown out of Boston, not Connecticut. He called his stepbrother, who lived in Boston, and told him to set up camp at Logan International Airport and gather any news he could. Ron tracked down the young girl who worked part-time for his sister as a personal assistant. She gave him Ruth’s flight numbers. Hours later, the official passenger lists were released, and Ron’s worst fears stared back at him from the computer screen.
“I was in my office upstairs on the second floor,” says Ron, who has since moved his office up one floor to escape the memories. “I remember pacing around the room,” he says as he looks up to the ceiling, “just in agony within the four walls, going, ‘No, no, tell me it isn’t true.’ ”
But it was. Ron dreaded his next move: the heartbreaking call to John and Mark, three thousand miles away.
“It’s not looking good,” Ron said to his brothers. “We’re in trouble, I think.” He pauses. “It was very hard to tell them. They were devastated.”
Shortly after eight A.M., American Airlines Flight 11 departed from Logan International and headed nonstop to Los Angeles. Ruth’s best friend, Paige, forty-six, was aboard the flight. The first boom Ron heard in the lobby that morning was Paige’s plane slamming into the North Tower.
Ten minutes after the American flight took off, United Flight 175, also nonstop to Los Angeles, departed. Ruth, forty-five, and Juliana, four, were aboard. The friends had flown separately to take advantage of their different frequent-flyer programs. Ron had no idea, as he was jolted by the second explosion, that a plane had hit the second tower, and it was carrying his sister and niece.
“You couldn’t even put that into a novel,” says Ron, still amazed. “People would be like, ‘That’s bullshit.’ ” He raises both eyebrows. “And then to have Monica’s birthday, to be eleven on 9/11. You know, September 11. That’s the other oddity.”
Odd. Horrific. Devastating. Is it possible for a person to endure such a crushing onslaught of loss, grief, and anger? The world changed at the very same moment Ron’s world collapsed.
TEN YEARS LATER
It’s a crisp October day in 2011. When I walk toward the steps leading up to his stately white h
ouse in a suburb of New Jersey, Ron greets me like an old friend. We haven’t seen each other in a decade.
“You made it!” he calls out, heading for me with a smile.
We meet on the cement steps. Ron pecks me on the cheek, hugs me, and jokes with a hint of an Irish lilt that he’s grown a bit more haggard and robust. We laugh, and as he opens the front screen door for me, a mini Lassie bounds out barking, friendly and curious.
“You okay with dogs?” he asks.
She’s Penny, Ron’s sheltie. The breed, like all of his beloved treasures, has roots in a land engulfed by the cold waters of the North Atlantic. Ron’s strawberry blond hair and white sideburns form a ring around his head; a few holdouts on top connect both sides. His eyes are bright blue, even behind a pair of rimless glasses. The fifty-seven-year-old is wearing navy blue dress pants and a blue pinstriped button-down. He’s been working on this Friday, October 14, in his third-floor office.
“The kitchen isn’t done yet,” Ron says with a big grin, leading me into his 124-year-old home, a work in progress.
Ron and Brigid have renovated several houses throughout their twenty-four-year marriage. But I’ve come to ask Ron about his journey to reconstruct his life. About the day it all came crashing down. About where the hell someone finds blueprints to lay a new foundation and rebuild the walls of a completely demolished heart and mind. Ten years later, I once again sit down across from Ron.
We’re set up in the Cliffords’ cozy living room. Brigid is not home but has left a tray of cheerful pastries for us. Ron has brewed coffee and tea. Monica, newly twenty-one, is home, too, visiting with a girlfriend upstairs. Since Ron flew to Ireland for the tenth anniversary of the attacks, he agreed to meet me after his return in October. I ask him to share details about the days and weeks following our 2001 Dateline interview.
“Ruth had a friend in public relations who knew Connie Chung,” Ron begins, “so this PR machine sort of jumped in there, and before I knew it I was on Larry King Live. It was just crazy and mad.”
With no recovered remains, the families organized funerals for Ruth, Juliana, and Paige within several days after 9/11.
Drawing in a deep breath, Ron says, “We weren’t getting the time to grieve. And I wasn’t sleeping. I knew if I shut my eyes I would see these people jumping, and I would see Jennieann. I couldn’t deal with it.”
In the weeks after the attack, support was pouring in for the families in the form of hams and phone calls. A woman Ron had helped years earlier to garner support from the Shriners for her sick granddaughter called to ask if there was anything she could do and said that her son was a New York City police officer. She wanted to return Ron’s favor. When the young officer called, Ron asked him if going down to the World Trade Center site was a possibility.
“He said, ‘Look, I can’t take you down there, but I’ll go down and tell you what it’s like.’ ” Ron adds, “When he came back, he had a piece of glass, and he had a branch of a tree, and he said, ‘This is to show you that there is life down there, Ron.’ ”
Still clinging to life was Jennieann Maffeo, unconscious and battling critical burns over most of her body. Knowing the Maffeos were suffering through the same hell as he and his family were, Ron visited the burn unit several times. On the first visit, he left behind on Jennieann’s bed his ravaged yellow tie, a reminder of their connection as survivors.
“Her dad was this lovely little Italian man—from Italy—and he just threw his arms around me and said, ‘Thank you for giving me my daughter back,’ ” Ron says. “He said, ‘A lot of people didn’t get their children back.’ ”
Even if it was only for forty days. As Ron was driving home one afternoon, he heard on the radio that Jennieann had died.
“I was devastated. I pulled over to the side of the road. I sat in my car and cried.” He tips his head back, looks upward, and says, “God. That was the hope, y’know?”
Mustering what little strength he had left, he attended Jennieann’s wake. Ron says he experienced a full-blown panic attack and had to leave early. Agony weighed like an invisible anvil on his heart and mind.
“I was getting very aggravated with lack of sleep and the world was caving in. I was crying like a baby every day; something would set me off,” Ron explains. “If anyone started up a motorbike or anything, I would shiver. I couldn’t take the loud noise. If I put my head on the pillow, I could see these people jumping and falling. I couldn’t watch the twenty-four/seven television coverage. Everything was a reminder. I wanted to get out of where I was at that point. I just didn’t know how to deal with it all.”
Brigid’s sister-in-law put Ron in touch with a New Jersey therapist who specialized in treating clients with battle fatigue. Ron had clearly experienced battlefield conditions and was exhibiting the signs of post-traumatic stress disorder. Ron refers to the therapist as Dr. Doug and smiles when he relays that the doctor, Doug Martinez, claims he’s half-Irish. Dr. Doug and Ron met three times a week for six months, exploring Ron’s frightening daily existence. “I would look at a newspaper and just see dripping blood,” Ron says.
The ultimate goal was to have Ron talk through every moment of that ugly morning. Thirty seconds of terror could take the pair three days to discuss. Ron forced his mind to retrace every step.
“Walking through all that grayness reminded me I was walking through skulls and bodies. It was like in the movie Schindler’s List, and I was scrubbing my feet every night in the shower until they bled. I knew this was just not me. I was in a really bad place.”
Even sailing, which Ron had enjoyed since childhood, was threatened by his toxic mental state. When wind in the sails caused his boat’s ropes to strain, Ron was reminded of the sounds of the distressed towers, and he panicked. His brain was fractured.
“It’s like someone has whacked you in the head with a baseball bat.”
Ron was determined to dig his way out of this very black hole. A mortgage, his job, Monica, and Brigid were waiting at ground level.
“Brigid is incredible,” says Ron. “She’s very calm and quiet and angelic. She’s a very good woman. She had a huge loss, too. Ruth was a great sister-in-law to her. And the fact that I was feeling the way I was became a loss for Brigid, too. It could never be the same again.”
Ron says Brigid gave him the space he needed to grieve. She graciously managed the home front when Ron flew to Ireland to spend time with family.
“She was the perfect wife and the wife that Ruth said she would be.” Ruth told Ron how she felt about Brigid when he began dating her. “She said, ‘This is a special woman. She’s gonna make a great wife.’ ”
They both shielded Monica from as much of the grief as possible. Ron says she was a well-behaved and loving daughter, and he stayed involved with all her activities. He also threw himself into work.
“Work was a huge distraction because I could roll up my sleeves, and I took a couple of companies that really needed me and brought them from zero to one hundred. I put my everything into it. It kept me busy, it kept me financially sound, it kept me going.”
What did suffer was Ron’s social life and various friendships. He found it uncomfortable and overwhelming to be around large groups of people or loud noises, like the explosion of fireworks on the Fourth of July. He avoided parties and the inevitable questions about how he was doing after 9/11. Ron also deliberately avoided soothing his pain with alcohol.
“I gave up drinking for the first three years,” Ron says knowingly. “I didn’t drink because I knew that if I jumped into a bottle, I’d pull the cork in after me.”
Friends told Ron later that his humor was completely black for about five years. He even named his boat Cruel Circus.
Eventually, the intensive therapy and the support of his family helped Ron flush his poisoned subconscious. In the living room, he points to a colorful painting hanging on a wall behind me. He says it once served as one of several tools Dr. Doug gave him to cope with his emotions. The painting used t
o hang over the fireplace mantel where Ron could see it from the couch. Every day, he would look at the painting of rural Norway and imagine it was, instead, Ireland. The mental exercise transported him to a “happy place” where he could rest his weary mind. Ron also wrote down all of his bad dreams so he could talk through them in therapy sessions. Averse to flying following 9/11, Ron tackled his fear by riding in a friend’s small plane and taking over the controls. Slowly, painfully, it worked. Seven months later, in the spring of 2002, Ron was able to fly to Cork to bury the remains of Ruth, which were recovered the previous December. (Juliana’s remains were found in November 2002. She was buried next to Ruth in April 2003.)
Up to this point in our interview, Ron has not cried. He’s been strong, but now we begin to talk about the very darkest days.
“That first Christmas was very hard,” Ron says, choking back tears.
The families had traditionally gathered together for the holidays.
“I couldn’t tell you how low I was. I was just”—his flat palm slices across the air—“the lowest I’ve ever been in my whole life.” Ron stops talking and looks toward the front door with tears in his eyes. “The only mail that came on Christmas Eve was a letter from President Bush.”
The letter, typed on official White House stationery, offered sympathies from the Bushes and thanked Ron for his “selfless efforts”: Your actions in the midst of this national tragedy were truly heroic. Your protecting and leading Jennieann Maffeo to safety as she struggled for her life reflected the best of the American spirit.
The letter is not displayed in the house. Ron had to dig it out of an antique glass cabinet that Ruth gave him and Brigid as a wedding present. I ask Ron about his heroic act, not using that phrase. I ask him where the instinct came from to stay with Jennieann, a woman he didn’t know, at a time when everyone else was running for their lives.
