The Woman Who Wasn’t There

by Jr. Robin Gaby Fisher; Angelo J. Guglielmo

  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.

  THE SURVIVORS’ STAIRWAY

  In 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.

  In Tania, the group had found a tireless advocate and a passionate voice. Now the World Trade Center Survivors’ Network needed a purpose—or, as Tania would say, something to dwell on other than themselves. The early part of 2005 saw the survivors gain inroads in many of the developing plans and policies for the rebuilding of the World Trade Center neighborhood. They had successfully lobbied for a say in decisions affecting historic preservation downtown, memorials to be built at ground zero, and the development of a tribute center at the site. “Things are starting to happen,” Tania wrote Richard Williams in Oklahoma City. But as much as the survivors had accomplished in getting the recognition they deserved, she said, they still needed a project to call their own.

  At the time, a controversy was brewing over a staircase that had
provided the only route of escape for hundreds and perhaps thousands of survivors on the day of the attack. The thirty-seven steps that had once connected the plaza outside the towers to the street below had miraculously withstood the collapse of the buildings and the subsequent demolition of the ruins. The stairway stood, intact but alone, in the midst of the vast, empty landscape of ground zero—the last remaining aboveground relic of what had been the World Trade Center. Some people had dubbed the artifact “the stairway to nowhere.” Both the Port Authority, which owned the World Trade Center site, and the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation (LMDC), the authority created in the aftermath of September 11 to lead the renewal efforts for ground zero, insisted that it had to go because it stood in the way of the rebuilding. Critics tossed in their two cents, some saying that the stairs were an insignificant eyesore and had no place in the blueprint for the redevelopment. But to many people, those craggy stairs represented much more than a bruised mound of chipped concrete and cracked granite. The staircase had been their passageway to survival.

  Peter Miller, who survived both the 1993 and 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center, was a special projects manager for the Port Authority. His job was to oversee custody of the many pieces and artifacts left over from the attack. He was tasked with placing as many of the items as he could in museums and parks and other places around the country that would preserve and display them. He was also in charge of disposing of the items that his bosses determined weren’t worth keeping. Miller mentioned to Tania that he’d been covertly working to try to save the staircase, but his job would be compromised if anyone from the Port Authority discovered what he was doing. The New York Times had made mention of the endangered staircase in a story about preservation efforts at ground zero, he said, but nothing had come of it. He worried that the powerful relic would disappear when no one was paying attention, and then it would be too late to try to save it.

  If there was one thing Peter knew about Tania, it was that she could get things moving.

  “What do you think?” he asked.

  Tania was beside herself with excitement. What would be a more fitting mission for the survivors than to lead the crusade to save the stairs? It was exactly the project they needed to establish the WTCSN as a bona fide reform organization, and not just an encounter group. When she and Miller introduced the idea at the next Survivors’ Network meeting, the others jumped on the concept of the campaign. Miller agreed to work behind the scenes, monitoring the Port Authority for information about its plans for the staircase, while Tania and the others began what was certain to be a long, uphill battle to save it.

  In April, the network issued a press release to announce the initiative:

  The World Trade Center Survivors’ Network is launching the Save the Survivors’ Stairway Campaign. This stairway is the only remnant of the World Trade Center complex remaining above-ground. It is located on the north side of the World Trade Center site near the intersection of Greenwich and Vesey Streets. While many have termed this remaining piece of stairwell the “Stairway to Nowhere,” we prefer to think of it as the Stairway to Safety or the “Survivors’ Stairway.”

  A widely circulated picture in the press after 9/11 shows people from Tower One who survived because they descended those stairs moments before their building collapsed. We believe that this was the only escape route for hundreds of survivors, after Tower Two collapsed.

  The World Trade Center Survivors’ Network proposes that those stairs should remain as a testament of hope to the thousands who survived that day. If restored and connected to a platform, the Survivors’ Stairway could even provide a fitting vantage point from which survivors, and everyone whose life was profoundly changed that day, could gain a vantage point from which to contemplate the footprint voids, paying respect to their lost friends, colleagues, and loved ones.

  Finally, we propose that development plans should be modified to dedicate a survivors’ area on the plaza: an area where survivors could remember in peace and gain strength from the renewed World Trade Center community. The area should include the Survivors’ Stairway. We hope that you agree that our stories are a poignant counterpoint to the tragic loss of life that day, and our proposal for the Survivors’ Stairway creates a fitting prominence in contrast with the memorial design, Reflecting Absence.

  The phone in the Survivors’ Network office at September Space began ringing with calls of support for the initiative. Survivors who hadn’t been part of the network volunteered to help. Other nonprofits pledged their support. Reporters called, promising to look into the plans for the stairs.

  David Dunlap of the New York Times followed up with a poignant story about the plight of the stairs. Under the headline, “Survivors Begin Effort to Save Stairway That Was 9/11 ‘Path to Freedom,’” he wrote, “These were the final steps. After hundreds of workers made a terrifying floor-by-floor descent from their offices in the sky on 9/11, as the twin towers shuddered and rained ruin, they found a gangway to safety from the elevated plaza down the Vesey Street stairs . . . The World Trade Center Survivors’ Network hopes the stairs can stay rooted. ‘There’s a great power in their being where they were,’ said Gerry Bogacz, a founding member of the group. ‘After the south tower collapsed, that was the only way anyone could get off the plaza.’”

  The survivors had their platform. They had something to live for other than the pain. By committing their time and energy to saving the staircase, they were in essence saving themselves.

  Tania was bursting with anticipation. She could hardly wait to figure out the next step in the campaign to save the stairs. “We’ve put ourselves on the map, and we have to make sure we stay there,” she told Peter Miller.

  “This is our time.”

  It was Tania’s first brush with Dunlap and the Times, but it would not be her last.

  TRIBUTE

  At the same time the campaign to save the stairs heated up, the fledgling Tribute WTC Visitor Center issued an invitation for volunteers to lead walking tours at the World Trade Center site. As it was, every day, busloads of tourists from around the world descended on the spot to look through the slats of a fence into a naked hole.

  Marian Fontana lost her firefighter husband there, and her advocacy work for grieving families mushroomed into the powerful September 11th Families’ Association, the offices of which overlooked ground zero. She’d suggested the idea of the tours after watching Lee Ielpi, the father of another fallen firefighter, usher visitors on impromptu walks around the property. Ielpi, a retired New York City firefighter, had dug for two months in the infernal wreckage for the remains of his son, Jonathan, and he carried his body home in a basket when it was finally pulled from the ashes. It had been his idea to build an educational center where visitors would get a history lesson and hear stories such as his.

  Fontana hired Ielpi and a civilian volunteer named Jennifer Adams, who delivered supplies to recovery workers in the aftermath of the attack, to make it happen. It was during those times when he was overseeing the progress of the Visitor Center that Ielpi corralled tourists and took them on tours. Fontana saw how much that effort meant to the sightseers, and how important it was for the proud father to tell the story of his heroic son. One day, after watching him speak to a group of visiting schoolchildren, she approached him with her idea.

  “You know, I’ve been thinking,” Fontana said. “Why don’t we formalize what you’re doing for tourists and train people to give tours?”

  Ielpi didn’t hesitate. “That’s a great idea,” he said.

  In August 2005, with the opening of the Visitor Center still a year off, they had a syllabus and a tour route and were ready to train their first group of docents. An invitation circulated throughout the 9/11 community, calling for volunteers. The goal for the charter docent group was for ten people to be trained in time to give tours for the fourth anniversary commemoration the following month.

  Tania was one of the first to respond.

  “Put me i
n for the training,” she emailed Rachael Grygorcewicz, a spirited young woman who had recently been hired as the coordinator of the volunteer program.

  Being chosen for the guide program was seen as an honor, and many people who responded had to be turned away. The prerequisites for the position were nonnegotiable. Everyone who applied was required to fill out an application and be interviewed by the Visitor Center staff. The candidates had to be outgoing and personable and have solid public speaking skills and a memorable story that they were willing to share. Tania hardly needed vetting. By then she was the emblem of 9/11 survivors. Her inimitable story and upbeat personality took her to the top of the list, and the Visitor Center staff felt privileged to have the celebrity survivor on its docent team.

  The inaugural training was set for a weekend in mid-August. The volunteers were asked to report to the Families’ Association offices for a meet and greet and a screening of a film showing Ielpi hosting a tour for a group of primary school students. Afterward, the trainees were invited to a fashionable downtown restaurant to toast the program’s official kickoff. Seated around a long table were Ielpi and his staff and the volunteer guides. They came from every corner of the 9/11 community: a widow who’d lost her husband, three mothers who’d each lost a son, a couple who lived in a neighborhood high-rise and nearly lost their home, and Angelo Guglielmo, a filmmaker who had befriended Jennifer Adams when they both shuttled supplies to the disaster workers and who’d ended up making a documentary about the volunteer effort.

  Gerry Bogacz sat at one end of the table, and Tania and Linda at the other. Angelo was instantly drawn to Tania. She exuded such goodness and warmth. All the volunteers wanted to meet her, and she graciously acknowledged all of them. She was in high spirits, merry even, giggling and engaging in the light dinner conversation and posing for pictures. After a spirited introduction to the program, Ielpi raised his glass, and everyone toasted the new chapter in 9/11 history.