The Woman Who Wasn’t There

by Jr. Robin Gaby Fisher; Angelo J. Guglielmo

  But as with Vietnam vets, the ability of New Yorkers to process a trauma depends largely on how close people were to the carnage.

  Still, psychologists say the most overexposed—and under recognized—victims may be the nearly 20,000 New Yorkers who walked, ran, and crawled through smoke, fire, and body parts to escape the buildings. “People cannot understand. We saw things,” says Tania Head, who was injured while evacuating. “We had to make life-or-death decisions. The higher the floor, the more lonely you were. I can’t get rid of my fear that it’s going to happen again.”

  The magazine story validated what survivors had felt for so long. September 11 was a national tragedy, and everyone wanted a piece of it, to connect with it in some fundamental way. It was human nature to want to be part of the “big story,” and there were few bigger in contemporary history than the fall of what Minoru Yamasaki, the architect of the World Trade Center, once called “a living symbol of man’s dedication to world peace.” How many people said things like “I was in the towers the week before the attack,” or “I knew someone who knew someone who was there that day,” or “My cousin’s brother-in-law saw the towers fall,” or “It could have been me”?

  Linda sat there thinking that she would have given anything to loiter on the fringes of the disaster like most of the rest of the world. Instead she was sinking under the weight of untoward memories of that hellish morning. She—all of them—had been “overexposed” to the wretchedness of it all, and then they were expected to carry on as usual, as if they had been sitting in their living rooms somewhere in the Midwest, watching it on TV. Maybe now, people would begin to understand who the survivors were: anonymous men and women who were damaged by unimaginable trauma.

  They thanked Tania for that. They stood and applauded her, and she giggled, curtsied, and took a deep bow. Linda looked at her with awe. “This woman runs the group,” she said to herself. “She’s in charge, and she has everyone spellbound. I know who I want to be friends with. I want to be in the center of things too.” But Linda’s attraction to Tania was more than just about gaining status in the group. She was inspired by Tania’s courage and resilience. After all she had suffered, she was able to put back the pieces of her life, and she was helping them to put back the pieces of theirs. Linda wanted that kind of character. She had been mired in an artificial fog for so long that she didn’t even know the real Linda anymore. “I want to be like her,” Linda told herself as she watched Tania relish the attention she was getting. “This is the life I want to live.”

  Linda began looking for opportunities to connect with Tania. Her chance came when the survivors’ group took a trip to the Museum of Natural History on Central Park West for a lighthearted scavenger hunt. It would be their first social outing together, and everyone looked a little awkward. Tania seemed a little standoffish at first. Linda followed her to the coat check and tried to make small talk without much luck. Tania was wearing a Survivors’ Network T-shirt under her coat. She was generous with her money, and she had paid to have them made for all of the board members. The coat check girl gasped when she saw it.

  “You’re a World Trade Center survivor? Oh! That’s so cool!” she cried, gawking at Tania as if she had won an Olympic gold medal. “I wish I was.”

  Linda and Tania looked at each other in disbelief and then burst out laughing.

  “Oh, believe me, you don’t!” Tania replied.

  To which Linda added, “Exactly! Are you out of your mind?”

  Linda asked Tania to be her partner for the hunt, and Tania obliged. They spent the afternoon going through the museum, interpreting clues, bantering back and forth, and laughing until their sides ached. For the first time in as long as she could remember, Linda forgot about her pain and misery. For a few hours, she felt carefree, almost like a kid again. After 9/11, she felt like a rudderless boat adrift at sea. Now she felt moored to the other survivors. She had found a place to belong.

  Linda was exhausted by the end of the day. All of the survivors were. It was late afternoon when they left the museum to go their separate ways. As everyone else scurried off, Tania and Linda lagged behind.

  “I could go for a cup of coffee,” Tania said. “How ’bout you?”

  “Sure!” Linda replied. “Coffee sounds good.”

  And that night, both Tania and Linda knew they would be best friends.

  DARKNESS ON THE EDGE OF TOWN

  In the weeks leading up to the third anniversary, the survivors began to see a different side of Tania. She was sometimes sullen and unresponsive. Days would go by, and no one would hear from her, and she didn’t respond to emails or phone calls.

  What the survivors didn’t know, but Tania confided to her new friend, Richard Williams, the survivor from the Oklahoma City bombing, was that she was suffering a crushing setback. “People ask me what’s wrong, and I tell them nothing, because I just don’t want to lay it on them,” she wrote in correspondence to Williams. “In reality, everything is wrong.”

  Indeed, she was feeling so anxious and out of sorts, Tania said, that her therapist had encouraged her to take an antidepressant. She didn’t know if it was the medication or recurring memories of the day of the attack, but she wasn’t sleeping, and her mood swings seemed to be beyond her control. She said that some days she felt too depleted to leave her apartment. Other times she was unexplainably euphoric and felt like jumping out of her skin. She couldn’t get relief no matter where she was. Being at Merrill Lynch’s offices in the World Financial Center, overlooking ground zero, was a nightmare. She was always waiting for a plane to hit the building. And where once she had loved to travel, now she felt panicky every time she boarded a plane for a business trip, for fear that it would be hijacked and crash.

  She didn’t want to burden anyone, Tania said, but she really felt as though she couldn’t go on. “It’s like I’m damaged and will never get fixed,” she wrote to Williams. “Frankly, I don’t know how a bunch of pills is going to help me with my problems, but my therapist says that they’ll take some of the emotional edge off so I can face my flashbacks and talk more about my experience.”

  Pills certainly wouldn’t change the way the world continued to perceive the survivors, Tania complained. That was something she desperately wanted to effect. Why didn’t people want to hear what she and the other survivors had to say? she wondered. Testimony from the survivors of Nazi concentration camps was painfully graphic, as it should have been. What was different about 9/11, when scores of innocent Americans were murdered in the name of a radical political ideology? Why were the people who bore witness to this holocaust expected to swallow their anguish and be as they were before the malevolent deeds of Islamic extremists intervened in their lives?

  “It seems no one cares about how much I suffered, what I saw,” Tania wrote. “How can that help people in the future? The rest of the world saw [the attack] from their TVs at home. They saw the towers burning and the people falling, but they didn’t see what was going on inside. People need to know that the 78th floor was full of bodies, burnt and ripped apart, that were their fellow Americans, fathers, mothers, daughters, and sons. That cannot simply be hidden because it is too hard to tell or show. People just have to know about it because, just like knowing what happened in the concentration camps, only by understanding the true horrors of the day can we do something to prevent it from happening again.”

  Tania didn’t want anyone to suffer as she did. It hadn’t been very long ago that she was living her dream. Nothing was the same anymore. “Dave is gone, and I should have died with all those people on the 78th floor but didn’t,” she wrote Williams. “I lived, but so many things changed. Now I can’t find meaning in anything I do . . . All of this makes me mad and makes me wonder what it is that I’m doing here. Why is it that I continue to be haunted by the images of that day? I’m so tired of trying to make sense of any of this, of trying to cope with my situation. I miss Dave more every day, and I just don’t understand how it is that I�
�m supposed to do this without him. Just this week, I attempted to put away more of his things, but then I went and put them back. I guess I’m either not ready yet or it’s terrifying.”

  As reticent as Tania had been at first to talk about Dave, now she peppered most of her conversations with mentions of him. Dave was one of those guys everybody loved, she told Linda. In so many ways, he was almost too good to be true. Of course, Dave had his quirks. He was always misplacing his keys and his wallet, he watched the movie Braveheart so many times that he could recite most of the lines, and he couldn’t stand to be late, not even by a minute when they were supposed to be somewhere. That caused little arguments as she rushed to get ready, and he stood there, checking his watch. But those were small things. What she had loved most about Dave—what drew her to him right from the start—she said, was that he was never afraid to show his sensitive side. She had seen him leave his volunteer shift at the soup kitchen in tears because, he said, no one should ever be hungry. And being the hopeless and silly romantic that he was, he had unabashedly serenaded her with corny love songs in places like the subway or the middle of a crowded restaurant.

  Dave was always thinking of everyone else, Tania said. She had always told him he was loyal to a fault, and she loved that about him. In high school, he’d been a championship wrestler, and, until his death, he regularly returned to his New Jersey alma mater to encourage the boys on the wrestling team, even if it meant foregoing other weekend plans. When he died, the team dedicated its season to his memory, and then the school held a beautiful ceremony at which they unveiled a plaque in his name to hang permanently in the lobby. She’d been so proud to be there with his family.

  How would she ever find someone else after loving Dave? Tania would ask. He never missed a birthday, and, no matter where he was, he always made sure to call his family and friends to serenade them with the birthday song. He loved kids, and they’d wanted to have three or four. Their plans were eventually to move to the West Coast, and they’d saved a substantial amount of money toward buying a vineyard in California’s Napa Valley, which they planned to name Esperanza, or “hope” in Spanish. They had a lifetime’s worth of dreams, Tania said, but not enough time to make most of them come true. Suddenly there was no future. Dave was gone.

  She was so grateful that they had gone ahead and bought a beach house in Amagansett in the Hamptons and had the whole summer there before he died. Dave loved the commotion of the city, but the ocean soothed him, and his favorite pastime when they were at the beach was walking the dunes in the morning as the sun rose on the horizon. During the summer months before September 11, they usually left the city by noon on Fridays, then fought the weekend traffic on the Long Island Expressway just to be able to make it to Nick and Toni’s, their favorite East Hampton haunt, in time for dinner and the house special ricotta gnocchi. The house at the beach had so many reminders of Dave. His picture was in every room, and his softball uniform and Hawaiian shirts still hung in the bedroom closet. She felt closest to him when she was there.

  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.

  PART 4

  2005

  A TRIP TO SRI LANKA

  Except 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 id
ea. 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.