Tower Stories

by Damon DiMarco

  Normally when she flew, we’d exchange information about where she was going. But I didn’t know she was going to San Francisco on the eleventh. She just said, “I’ll be back in two days, I’ll cook a great dinner for us, and we’ll go see a movie.”

  I said, “Perfect. Give me a call when you get in.” This was normal enough.

  Ever since I got a computer, my routine is to get up early in the morning, like 5:00, to work. Deb had to be out of the house at about 5:30 to get to Newark Airport. I made some coffee and took it to her. She was like Dagwood Bumstead getting out the door that day, with papers flying all around her—a real mess. I helped her carry her bag downstairs, kissed her goodbye, and off she went.

  I had a couple auditions scheduled for that morning. The first one was for an industrial film, and I was getting ready to go out the door when I turned the TV on to New York 1. The sound was off. The first plane had already hit and I remember thinking, my God, what the hell is that?

  But I was already running late, so I ignored it and kept getting ready. The news wasn’t even sure what had happened. And then the second plane hit. That got my attention.

  My first thought was, I have to think of something to say because Debbie will be so upset when she calls. Any type of airline disaster affected her deeply.

  So I went to the first audition. On the streets, people were gathering in front of TVs, in front of shops and diners. I gleaned information little by little on the way to my destination. By the time I got to the casting office, I knew it was a terrorist attack and I was filled with rage.

  It was absolutely unfathomable to me, this deliberate mayhem of biblical proportions. It was like Genghis Khan coming through and decapitating children in a village. It was unthinkable that anybody could be so maligned, so full of fear and hatred. Everybody I met at the audition was the same way, inflamed that anybody could do this to fellow human beings. To call it troglodyte or Neanderthal behavior is insulting to the Neanderthals and troglodytes. Here were people who were so miserable in their lives, so full of fear, which I believe is the basis of hatred. Fear of freedom, or the fear of women being intelligent and non-submissive. People so lost in their byzantine, perverse mindset … so enraged that the world won’t conform to their oppressive way of life that they would lash out in this fashion.

  But at no time did I think my wife was involved. I was still thinking of things to say when she called. I knew that she’d not only be upset, but furious.

  My auditions were canceled, so I went straight home knowing that such a huge event would stop the whole world. I got to our apartment and immediately turned on CNN. The report came in that another plane had hit the Pentagon. I felt fear for all of us because those actions looked like the prelude to nuclear Armageddon. I remember thinking, oh my God, this is it, this is the day. The horns are blowing, the Seventh Seal has broken, and any moment now the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse will be let loose. That was the first real glimmer of fear that passed through my mind for Debbie’s sake, but I ignored it. Looking back, I can see I was in denial the whole day.

  I’d already heard that United planes were involved. In fact, I’d heard that one originating from Newark bound for San Francisco had suddenly switched directions and gone down outside Shanksville, Pennsylvania. My mind was racing, unable to compute all the information.

  Then the phone calls started coming in from friends and family asking about Deb, and this cemented my denial as the day wore on. “She’s fine,” I said. “She’s fine. She hasn’t called me yet because they probably told her to keep the airwaves clear. They probably redirected her plane to someplace, I bet they’re already in the process of landing.”

  Remember? I didn’t know she was going to San Francisco.

  Then a dear friend called whom we’d run into the night before outside the comedy club. A bunch of us had stopped and chatted on the street. This woman called and said, “Patrick, have you heard from Deb?”

  I said, “No, but it’s all right, I’m sure she’s gonna call me soon.”

  She said, “Patrick. I’m really worried. Last night she said she was going to San Francisco, and that plane that crashed in Shanksville was bound from Newark to San Francisco.”84

  I swear to God, at that moment, I felt like somebody’d hit me across the bridge of my nose with an eighty-pound bat.

  I snapped at this woman. “There are many flights from Newark to San Francisco,” I said. “She’s fine. She’ll call me as soon as she gets an opportunity. Debbie’s a professional. She’s got people to take care of, she’s fine …”

  To me? The odds were unfathomable. It was like I was really saying to this poor woman, “I’m sorry. You’ve got me confused with someone else. Things like this don’t happen to me. It’s just something somebody like me would only ever read about.”

  But, of course, the day went on, and I was becoming more and more unraveled, fighting my own mind. I was bug-eyed, glued to the television, pacing. A wreck of a man spiraling downward. By late afternoon, all planes were ordered to the ground, and I had yet to hear from her.

  People were calling left and right. Debbie’s sister called; her mother called. “No,” I kept repeating, “I haven’t heard.” Realizing I was in denial. Realizing I was in this incredible ghost of gloom that drifted around me, like a nightmare that I couldn’t wake up from.

  My mom was trying to comfort me. “Maybe she’s all right. The cell phones are still out of whack. She’ll call as soon as she can.”

  It was right then that the call waiting beeped. I told my mom to hang on and I clicked over to the other line. “Yeah?”

  It was a United Airlines representative. “Hello? Mr. Welsh?” I can’t remember the woman’s name on the other end. My mind was reeling. I didn’t want her to say another word. I was like, please, not one more word. But she said, “I’m so, so sorry to inform you that your wife, Deborah, was on the manifest for Flight 93 that went down in Shanksville.”

  That poor woman. I can’t imagine what she had to go through to tell me that. That job? I wouldn’t give it to my worst enemy.

  Right at that moment, time stopped. I can’t tell you what it felt like. I was so devastated by this unheard cry of souls, all the people who’d been killed that morning. This moan of humanity going straight up to heaven. I was already shaken, but when this woman told me Deb was gone, I fell to my knees and dropped the phone.

  It was no accident that my mother was holding on the other line. There I was, down on my knees, weeping uncontrollably. I don’t know how long the woman from United stayed on the phone. Finally, I said, “I’m so sorry. I can’t talk right now. My mother’s on the phone …” I don’t know what else I said.

  “I understand,” the woman said. “I’m so sorry.”

  I clicked back to the other line and said, “Mom, they just told me that Deb was on that flight in Pennsylvania.”

  I know I said more, but I honestly don’t know what. At that moment, I didn’t know who I was anymore. Everything about my life had lost meaning. I felt like the shell of a person, like somebody had scraped out my insides. I couldn’t stop weeping. I couldn’t talk.

  The phone started ringing mercilessly, and I took a few calls. Then the pastor from our church called, Father Brett Hoover from St. Paul the Apostle. And I told him. And he said, “Patrick, I’m coming right over.”

  I said, “I’ll meet you downstairs.”

  I dragged him to a bar and threw down one drink after another. I didn’t know what else to do.

  He understood perfectly. He said, “Don’t worry, I’m right here with you.”

  People from our old neighborhood still remembered her. After September 11, people put memorials in their windows. There were flowers everywhere on Bleecker Street. The Mayor was gone.

  Dear friends of ours, Pam Moss and her husband, Tim, took this beautiful picture of Debbie when she and I first got together. They framed it in black with an American flag that said, “In Loving Memorial.”

 
She would have been fifty this July 20. And we would have been married for eleven years.

  Two weeks later, I delivered my wife’s eulogy at a memorial in her honor. I didn’t think I would be capable of it, but I think she was there to help me. I knew I had a responsibility to my wife, that she needed a wonderful, lasting tribute, and I made sure she had it.

  “The world has been transformed,” I said. “The transformation isn’t in the malevolence of these madmen. It isn’t found in the scarred skyline of our great city. It isn’t in the broken walls of our proud Pentagon. It’s not in the charred crater of courage in the gentle fields of Pennsylvania. The true transformation is how all these people—our countrymen and the world—came together. That’s what we must take away from this. That transformation is the divine rescue of God among man.”

  I remember it was near sunset and so many friends had come. We had a lovely Irish wake up on the roof of our building. We’d had lots of parties there over the years, gatherings of very creative people. Now we grabbed hands and said the Lord’s Prayer, and each person had a moment to impart something about how Debbie had touched their lives. It was incredible.

  People were weeping incessantly. I was just barely holding myself together. I thought it was my duty to do that.

  I looked around and saw how Debbie had touched the lives of all these people. And once again, she had touched my life from beyond her own. She’s forever a part of me, forever a part of my life.

  For two months after that, I was … I was not good.

  I’m a different person now than I was then. I’m not just Patrick anymore. I feel like I’m Patrick and Debbie and a lot of these other people. I’m the person who’s going to mold his new life in whatever direction God has chosen for it to go. I struggled for a long period with this. But you have choices to make in life, and life is very hard.

  M. Scott Peck started off his book The Road Less Traveled with “Life is difficult.” He said that when we finally understand that life is hard, and that anything easy is the gravy, then it’s actually not so hard anymore. But if you think that the world owes you a living, for instance, and everything should be a silver spoon in your mouth, well, you’re gonna have a hard time.

  Editor’s note: Patrick wanted to be sure to thank Greg Wolfe, Madeline Klinkova and her sister Vanessa, Barbara Sinaris, and many other dear friends for their remarkable friendship and support during his grief. “They came to my rescue,” he said. “Please make sure to mention them.”

  UPDATE

  In his book, Among the Heroes: United Flight 93 and the Passengers and Crew Who Fought Back, Jere Longman evaluates the voice recordings that were eventually analyzed by the U.S. intelligence community: “A few minutes after 9:31 A.M., a hijacker on board Flight 93 can be heard on the cockpit voice recorder ordering a woman to sit down. The woman, presumably a flight attendant, implores, ‘Don’t, don’t.’ She pleads, ‘Please, I don’t want to die.’ Patrick Welsh, the husband of flight attendant Debbie Welsh, is later told that a flight attendant was stabbed early in the takeover, and it is strongly implied it was his wife. She was a first-class attendant, and he says, ‘knowing Debbie,’ she would have resisted.”

  A New York Times reporter, Longman is perhaps best known as a sports writer, though he did extensive coverage for the Times concerning the developments surrounding United Flight 93.

  While the exact events that took place on United Flight 93 will probably never be known, some events have been ascertained by careful evaluation of phone calls made by passengers as the hostage crisis ensued. The 9/11 Commission Report cites that Deborah Welsh, the flight’s purser, was held in the plane’s cockpit and killed there early in the crisis.

  83 The movie Wall Street was loosely based on what Lorenzo tried to do to Eastern.

  84 Four planes were hijacked and crashed on September 11, 2001: American Airlines Flight 11, bound from Boston to Los Angeles, which crashed into the North Tower of the Trade Center at 8:45 a.m.; United Airlines Flight 175, bound from Boston to Los Angeles, which crashed into the South Tower of the Trade Center at 9:06 a.m.; American Airlines Flight 77, bound from Washington, D.C., to Los Angeles, which crashed into the Pentagon at 9:45 a.m.; and United Flight 93, bound from Newark to San Francisco, which crashed inexplicably in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, at 10:10 a.m. Cell phone calls from the Shanksville plane confirm that the passengers staged some sort of revolt against the hijackers shortly before the plane spun out of control and crashed. Experts theorize that Flight 93 may have been heading toward Washington, D.C., to attack either the Capitol Building or the White House.

  LAUREN ALBERT and KAROL KEASLER

  Lauren Albert, thirty-five, describes a situation that thousands of families throughout the New York metropolitan area were forced to participate in following the attack: the search for a missing family member or friend.

  Lauren went down to the Red Cross the day after the attack to register her friend Karol Keasler as missing.

  I WAS HERE in my Murray Hill apartment on Tuesday morning, the eleventh. I’d made some coffee and was drinking it when I watched the first plane hit on TV. The first thing I did was call my mother who lives up in Maine and say, “Oh my God, you’re not gonna believe what just fucking happened.”

  Then the second plane hit. I thought I was seeing things. My hand went to my mouth and I kept saying, “Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God.” I was in shock. Who wasn’t?

  Right after that, my phone went dead, so I got online immediately—I have a cable modem, and there was this flurry of emails. A tight-knit group of my friends rent a house together every summer out on Fire Island, and everyone was asking each other to check in. “Please! Please! Hit ‘Reply to All.’”

  It took a little while, but everything seemed fine, everyone seemed accounted for. Until we remembered Karol and Mike, two friends who worked for the same company. No one had heard from either of them.

  Karol worked on the 89th floor, Mike on the 88th of Tower 2. Which I guess is what eventually made all the difference, that one floor of space that separated them.

  To say that everyone was frenzied wouldn’t do it any justice. When the phones came back on, I called the Chicago offices of Karol’s company—Keefe, Bruyette, and Woods—to find out if they had any information. I told the woman in Chicago Mike and Karol’s names, and she was really helpful. She said, “Oh, I know Karol. Look, we know some specific departments escaped entirely, they’ve already checked in. But we don’t have any information about Karol or Mike right at this moment.”

  I remember thinking, well, okay. There’s confirmation that some people as high as the 88th and 89th floors got out, so there’s a good chance for both of them.

  Just to be sure, I called Keefe, Bruyette, and Woods’ Boston office and got a guy who also said he knew Karol. In fact, he said he used to sit right across from her when he’d worked in New York. This man said, “We haven’t heard anything. All I can tell you is to keep calling. And pray.” He was definitely not as optimistic as the woman in Chicago had been.

  But now I thought, well, he’s just being emotional. People did get out. It’s probably okay. It’s just really hard to get in touch with people right now, since the phones aren’t working.

  Well, around three or four o’clock that day, I got word from my friends that Mike had checked in. He’d fled Tower 2 and called Rho’, who got in touch with all of us through the network we’d set up.

  Mike had worked in the Towers for years and was there when the first bombing happened in ’93. He’s an ex-marine who worked in a small department. He said that everyone heard it when the first plane hit. They felt it, too. Folks in his department looked at each other and said, “Let’s get the fuck out of here.” So they left.

  He made his way over to the World Financial Center and found his girlfriend, who worked in an office there; she was suffering from pretty bad smoke inhalation. They took the ferry to Staten Island, where she lived, and that’s where he finally called everyone from.
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  But [by] four or five that afternoon, no one had heard from Karol.

  The Chicago office was nice enough to call me back to say they hadn’t heard from Karol, either; they had heard from Mike.

  I said, “Yeah. Okay. I got that. I know.”

  That’s when I started to feel numb. It was starting to sink in.

  I’d known Karol for four years. She was vice president of events and communications for KBW, which is a securities broker and investment bank. She coordinated events and road shows for her company, and you could tell she was good at what she did. Karol was a one-woman party. She could light up a room just by walking in the door.

  Early on Wednesday morning, the twelfth, I talked to my friend Elizabeth. She said, “I have some upsetting news.”

  “What is it?”

  She said, “Karol’s fiancé, Michael, has been living in Moscow …”

  “Right,” I said. “I know.” Karol was gonna move there. Michael had been calling frantically from Moscow. He’d obviously heard, but he couldn’t get in touch with anyone. Our network of friends was still in operation—if anything it had gotten larger. Karol’s mom had been in touch with somebody, and it ultimately got back to Elizabeth. This is the way it happened for a lot of people, I later learned, this round robin of diluted information that went on for days afterward.

  Desperate for their loved ones’ return, the families of those missing in the Towers created homemade flyers like these and plastered them all over the city. Buildings and street posts in the Financial District were wallpapered with them.