by Dennis Smith
That week I never reported to work. I couldn’t even think, except for Where’s Wendy? Had anybody heard from Wendy? Did anybody . . . who’s going to the hospitals? Who’s checking the hospitals? Maybe go to the hospitals in New Jersey. Go to the hospitals in Lower Manhattan. . . . Go to every hospital. Please, somebody find Wendy. She’s probably shopping. She went shopping. She’s stuck in a mall. That’s what happened in 1993. Go find Wendy. Somebody look for Wendy. Where else is Wendy?
That night, about midnight, a pastor from my church called the house and said, “I’m standing in front of your school building, your building is standing straight. Nothing, not a broken window.” How did that happen? Miracles of 9/11. Sometimes I still believe the entire time is like an out-ofbody experience. Except the thing that, of course, is so real to me is: There’s no Wendy anymore. We don’t have my sister. Until days later, when we realized that there was no hope, we were like everybody else, putting up pictures : If anybody has seen this person, please notify us.
Indeed, it wasn’t long before we started hearing from the Cantor Fitzgerald people: 658 of its 960 New York employees were lost in the attack. The news media were saying, “If you were looking for someone who worked for Cantor Fitzgerald, report to the Pierre Hotel, where a center had been set up for the company,” so we went there several times. They asked us to identify whom Wendy worked with, what floor she worked on, and her boss’s name. And to look for pictures. Then we went to give DNA, at the West Side pier that they had set up for receiving samples.
I went back into my school building to collect the belongings of all the teachers, with my husband and one other person. We filled up garbage bags with their pocketbooks. Everything was covered in ash, for the windows had not been completely shut. The New York Times from that day was on my desk, which I actually have at home. Teachers’ coffee cups were on desks, and whatever coffee was there had started to rot away the bottoms of the cups, and so the coffee had spilled. It was strange, very strange.
Also, I had to get into the vault. My assistant principal had said to me, you have to go to the vault and get the school’s checkbook, so we can at least write checks for things that we might need. As I stood in front of the vault I was suddenly sort of paralyzed. Normally I didn’t even have to think about the numbers: My fingers just knew how to spin back and forth, and it was open. But now I stood in front of the vault and I cried my eyes out. I could not remember the combination to save my life. I didn’t have it written down; I didn’t have to—it was ingrained. I had to leave then. Afterward, I contacted my assistant principal, who told me the combination so I could go back and open it up.
That’s when I first began to understand. I didn’t have a name for it then, but I began to understand, Uh oh, something is wrong—I wasn’t right. I couldn’t remember the names of the kids, and I had always known all their names. So that’s how I began to realize that I was not normal anymore. What the hell was all of this? It was a lot of pain, a lot of heartache, a lot of anger, frustration, going back to a new school building. My kids were beaten up. The basketball team got beaten up. People just weren’t nice. We forgot nice. It just wasn’t good at all.
I immediately started to be proactive and got involved in a support group of school leaders and schoolteachers in the Lower Manhattan area. Some bonds were made, and Linda Lantieri, who had worked at the Department of Education for a long time, started something called the Project Renewal. It was really just a meeting, to come together, using some of the philosophy of Parker Palmer, who was a Quaker. We would gather in a circle, and whatever was in your heart came out in silence. It was silence, but we interacted, hugged. And being held gently in someone else’s arms during that silence . . . that was really tremendous. It led me to my own spiritual and emotional recovery. We did it weekly, and then it was once a month. And I’m still connected somewhat.
My family . . . we’ve never sat down and had a powwow. We never sat down and had a conversation about Wendy, to grieve together, cry together. Just never happened. Everybody kind of dealt with it on his or her own. But we were in constant communication with one another. My father performed enough funerals as a minister that I guess he had developed this really hard shell. My sister Clara, the one closest to Wendy, still feels a sense of despair. She has not allowed faith to bubble up in her soul. She’s angry—very angry at Muslim people, at anyone who may look like an Arabic person. But everybody heals in a different way. I just like to hold her gently. You know, faith does play a role in giving you some sense that there’s a future, and there’s life. We’ll see Wendy again. Faith is a beautiful thing, and faith really will sustain you. If you have that, this life really doesn’t end. There’s a pause right now, but there’s more to this.
We had a memorial service for Wendy in November. The day after Christmas we got a phone call: They had found remains of Wendy. We all cried, and I could not believe it. They identified her two molars through dental records I had given them. God has a great sense of humor, but it was no joke that they had found her molars. Because Wendy was always smiling. She always had a big, toothy, mouth-full-of-teeth smile. Her mouth was always open. She was always laughing. That was Wendy. You will never see a picture of Wendy that she doesn’t have a big fat smile on her face. Son of gun, I thought, first thing they would find would be her teeth. You know she’s smiling down on us. . . .
A few months later they called us again. They had found a part of her leg, and then, a week or so later, one more call: They found a part of her shoulder. I was very upset and said, “Please do not call us again.” I spoke to the family and told them, whoever wanted to take these calls, I would send them on, but I couldn’t take them anymore. I can’t have my life disrupted this way. Wendy is not a puzzle to be put together. Every time you get these calls it was like someone sticking knives in you. Your emotions just become bitter, it just hurts so much. I said, We know she’s gone. So we felt . . . just please don’t call us again. And they didn’t.
We did not bury her. We have her ashes, and she sits in a box in my sister Clara’s house. At first we put her in a mausoleum, because we knew that there could be more remains, and of course we hoped for a lot. We realized that if we buried her it would be a lot more expensive to go back and try to bring . . . And I got a little exasperated again, and said, “Why don’t we bring”—oh the dark, sarcastic, bitter sense of humor—“a file cabinet, you know, then we’ll know exactly where she is. File it.” Then, after the first time we went to the mausoleum, we said, “We’re not doing this anymore. This is ridiculous. There’s no joy, no nothing coming here.” So we took what there was of Wendy and we put the box in Clara’s house in New Jersey. Back with her twin. They were two of a kind, and Wendy was as much a best friend to Clara as she was a sister.
I didn’t hit rock bottom for about two years, after everything. You don’t know what that bottom looks or feels like until you’ve hit, because when you’re the principal of a school there’s no time for sitting back and pondering. You don’t have time to walk down the street and cry. You’ve got to get your act together. You’ve got to graduate the kids. Yes, the world came to me and touched me with sympathy, all of that, but about two years later I just . . . I was angry, I was upset. I was realizing the trauma. I could hear an airplane taking off miles away. People would say, “You can hear that?” Every time a truck went by I just jumped right off my feet. Loud sounds. I was quick, I was sharp. And I knew I wasn’t well.
So I started taking a little medication. It was great; it’s a beautiful thing to feel relaxed, untroubled. But I knew that medication wasn’t going to work for me in the long run. That way of coping doesn’t resonate with me. I went to faith: God, if you’re real, and you’re a God that heals, and I believe that you are a healer, then you have to heal me, because I can’t do this thing. I’m a wife. I’m a mother. I have to make sure that I’m okay.
And again I turned to the Project Renewal—the resilience work, the work of renewal, renewal of spirit,
working through it and participating. Opening yourself up, allowing others into your life in the Parker Palmer method, [according to] everything he wrote. I learned to read his little book, Let Your Life Speak. I learned to embrace the seasons of life; that’s what his little book is about, the winter of your life and what happens in the winter of your life. Just like winter: When everything is rock solid there are a lot of beautiful things happening underneath the ground that have to break through. Eventually they do. The little crocus makes it through that hard ground, doesn’t it? So I knew that I had to strengthen my spirit to get it past the winter and arrive at the spring of my life. I went to healing masses. I went to prayer circles. I opened myself up. I learned about acupuncture for stress. I learned about Reiki. I just became so open to the power of people and healing. Every time I tell the story of that day and of Wendy, it’s very healing. Every time I tell the story I honor Wendy.
Not long after the attacks some amazing and wonderful people out in California found me on the Internet. They were all brokers for Prudential Real Estate, and they wanted to volunteer, so they were invited to come and do support work at St. Paul’s church downtown. Seventeen of them came to New York for a week, taking their vacation time. This is part of the great outpouring of American love after 9/11. They wanted to meet me for breakfast, and because we were back in our school building by February 1 of 2002, we met at my building. They had just worked an entire night, from midnight to eight in the morning, helping with water and food for the recovery workers. They were tired and exhausted, in their sweatpants and T-shirts, but they came to my school for a beautiful New York City breakfast of bagels and lox. Immediately . . . there was such a bond of joy and love.
Once they were back home, Kathy and Steve Ollerton, my new California friends, continued to be in touch with me and our school. We started an exchange of phone calls, e-mails, and letters between our New York City kids and kids out in California, as a way for them to share their stories, relate their 9/11 experiences. And we actually brought them together: The California kids came to New York City. We called it East Meets West.
For the first anniversary of September 11, Kathy and Steve came back to New York City and went to Ground Zero alongside the rest of my family. The following day we went to the 9/11 family room at One Liberty Plaza, on the twentieth floor, which has a complete view of Ground Zero. They asked me, “What’s the legacy for Wendy?” And I said, “I’m an educator; there’s only one thing I know, and that’s education. And if we don’t teach, how will we ever learn? So we have to do something about schooling to memorialize Wendy.” And then I thought about it and said, “I’m going to build a school in Afghanistan. What a kick in the head to Osama bin Laden.” That’s my big sentence, my contribution.
The Ollertons left New York, but back in California they threw their energy into the project, sponsoring things like golf outings and car-washing events to raise funds. Kathy Ollerton was a woman of substance, and she had acquired a lot of these little offices for independent insurance brokers. One of these brokers happened to be a young man from Afghanistan whose family had lost his brother in a very similar fashion to how we lost Wendy. When the Russians came into Afghanistan, to their town, they walked into every house and grabbed whoever was there and took them. Only men—they didn’t touch the women. They took his brother, and they never saw his brother again. And so Ibrahim Mojadiddi became the conduit for us to build our school.
Ibrahim’s father was a big landowner in Afghanistan, and was well liked. They had nothing but their property, as everything had been destroyed there. The Taliban had taken over, and that was so destructive. Ibrahim wanted to help, so he said, “My family will donate the land.” That was in 2004, and that was when the ball really got rolling. The whole project was funded for less than forty thousand dollars.
On July the Fourth of the following year, I traveled to Afghanistan, where we dedicated the school. We met with the minister of education. At the dedication we had the governor of the town, the mayor, and the imams. There were over two hundred people inside this building. The girls sang and chanted, and we gave the boys soccer balls. There is a beautiful sign there where Wendy’s name is written in Farsi, and we dedicated a little garden to Wendy. It is just the sweetest thing. It was difficult to grow anything in the middle of this barren, hard land, but they grew flowers. We were treated as if we were royalty. They found grass and bark, and they threw it at us as if kings and queens had arrived. We broke bread with them. We were treated as beautifully as I’ve ever been treated in my life. Each time we walked in they would say, “God bless America.”
I also met the boys and girls. There are over two hundred students in the school, with boys attending in the morning and girls in the afternoon. The boys had previously had to travel over three miles by foot to go to school; the girls simply did not go at all. So this little town now has its own school with Wendy’s help. We don’t share exactly where it is; we have agreed not to mention the name of the city. The Taliban has become a real stronghold close to this community, and we try to keep it safe.
On my last day there two men had a party in their own home. Of course we were all seated on the floor on beautiful carpets. I only ate rice—I was so afraid of getting sick. These gentlemen came from means and had a cook, and the presentation was just exquisite. When we finished they took out some instruments and started banging away, and the headdress they gave me to wear came off, and we were swaying, and it became just like a revival. There were twelve of us around the floor, but only two women—Kathy Ollerton and myself. Women and men never mix together, but we were mixed for this special occasion. One of the men asked through an interpreter, Would I like to play the drum? I played it as if I knew what I was doing, and said “Oh, this is just like being in church!”
Where we were was just like being in heaven—it was my ultimate healing balm. I had to know in my spirit that I wasn’t faking when I said I was not angry toward a whole people. I had to confirm that, and I did. Unfortunately there are some real crazies who have done terrible things, but there are many Christians who have done crazy things too. So while I’m not happy with those insane people, I’ve met some amazing, beautiful people who I treasure in my heart. And I pray for their safety and their well-being.
I can look at any aspect of nature, whether it’s in a photograph or whether it’s looking at a tree when I’m in a park, and I appreciate that it’s alive. I think about the creator of that tree, and I think there’s got to be something bigger and much greater than all that we see in our world. Some people will always say, “Why did God allow evil?” And I say, “Because there’s also evil out there. Inevitable evil exists among us.” God didn’t say there would be no evil: There’s a battle and a war going on. So I think to walk on the side of good, to walk on the side of believing that there’s a greater good, and that I want a part in that. The good can exist through me, and hopefully through you, too, the same way that the bad has been exposed through other human beings. The good is shown through us. So we each have to shine the light. Light is so critical to me, because if you’re in a room, all you do is flick on the light, and there’s no longer darkness, and there’s no longer that eerie feeling. Well, I want to be that light. I personally have to find a way to play the role that will speak of the good and never give homage to the negative, the evil, and the bad that’s in this world.
For me the fundamental question is, How do you allow yourself to open yourself up in life? There’s a little faith-based book that many of us read, The Prayer of Jabez. Jabez was really an insignificant person in the Old Testament, not even a prophet. But he said a very simple little prayer: “Lord extend my territory. While that’s happening, stay close to me.” I paraphrase it to say, “Stay close to me, Lord, so no harm will fall upon me.” It became a critical book in my life, because that is all I want to say: God, give me an opportunity to touch someone else’s life. Give me the opportunity to be in the presence of someone else. Give me an opportunity t
o touch someone who might be hurting. It’s pretty much the prayer of St. Francis of Assisi: Make me an instrument. I don’t want to do anything else. I really believe that my calling in life has become, because of Wendy, to be a servant, and however I need to serve, that’s what I want to do. I’ve been an educator my entire life and I cannot think of a greater calling to give me a greater extension of my territory. And, post-9/11, God has really extended my territory.
But look at what has happened ten years later. I traveled around the country speaking about preparedness, and also, I did a very big public speech about faith. Yes, faith and church and school have to be separate. But you can’t take away from what is in my heart, who I am. I’m an educator ; I love God. God has been my strength. It’s not about standing in the front of my school building proselytizing, but rather about showing who you are, where your strength comes from. I would say to kids in my school, I don’t care if you believe in this pencil. If this pencil makes you happy, then go with it. But be sure to go with something. You cannot, should not, believe you are in this life as an entity of no value, with no connection to a greater being. Let’s honor what we believe, And that’s my spin on life for the rest of the time I have on this earth. I honor Wendy. And I honor God. That’s what I mean when I say, “God, make me an instrument.”
Peter King
Peter King (Republican-NY) is the chairman of the Homeland Security Committee of the United States House of Representatives. He has been a congressman since 1993, serving as the U.S. representative for New York’s Third Congressional District. He is the son of a New York City police lieutenant.