The Woman Who Wasn’t There

by Jr. Robin Gaby Fisher; Angelo J. Guglielmo

  It had taken Manny an hour to make it down forty-nine flights. The stairway was crowded with people, many of whom didn’t seem to know what had happened, and he’d pushed his way past the slower ones, pausing only once to call his wife from an office on one of the low floors. The call hadn’t gone through. He had been outside the north tower for only five minutes when the neighboring tower roared and came crashing down. Manny ran until his legs wouldn’t carry him any farther, never looking back, finally making it home to Brooklyn in the late afternoon. The next day, he went back to work at a sister branch of his company on Long Island, as if nothing had ever happened. But he had never been able to get away from the regret he felt for not doing more to help his coworkers.

  On the outside, Manny was his normal solid self. Inside, though, he was crumbling. At home, he was sullen and irritable. He was losing patience with his kids, and his once stable marriage felt shaky. One night Manny’s wife told him that up until September 11, they were always on the same page. Now there was a gap between them that couldn’t be filled. She called it “the 9/11 hole.”

  There was no such void between Manny and his fellow survivors. The tragedy was their bond, and they were attracted to one another like paper clips to a magnet. In the months following the attack, little attention was paid to the thousands of regular people who had made it out of the towers that morning. The focus of the massive media coverage and charitable outreach programs was first responders and families of the dead. Out of that seeming lack of empathy from the public grew a mounting sense of isolation on the part of the survivors, and many retreated into solitary cocoons of grief. For months, these vulnerable men and women quietly acquiesced to the role assigned them—that of inconsequential witnesses—until they could no longer deny their terminal misery and slowly began to seek out the only people who could understand: one another. Since Manny’s coming out, he had confessed more of his feelings and fears to his faceless online comrades than he did to his own family and friends. In turn, he was always there for the other survivors when they needed a sympathetic ear. He read the new woman’s confession with tears in his eyes.

  “I think I need to talk to someone about this and tell my story, but I don’t see how I will manage to do that,” her post continued. “Going through it once was more than enough.” The brief yet provocative message was signed simply, “God Bless, Tania.”

  Manny was compulsively punctual, but he didn’t care if he was late to work that morning. He knew the angst of wanting desperately to talk about what happened in the towers but feeling too afraid to remember, or too unworthy to own the incessant suffering of having lived through it. The woman named Tania was clearly in distress, and he wanted her to know that she had come to the right place, where people understood the complexities of surviving such an unfathomable tragedy, and didn’t pass judgment or assign degrees of grief. So he typed a short response to her post.

  “Tania, I’m glad you joined,” he wrote. “We are a relatively small group here, but we have a very good and strong group of people. We have encouraged one another in many ways, listened to each other, and supported each other as we have expressed what we’ve felt. Share with us your story when you are able to. :-) Manuel.”

  Within hours, other survivors posted words of welcome and encouragement for the newcomer.

  “This group has really helped me, and I felt that this was a safe place for me to recount my experience,” one survivor wrote. “Especially since I knew everyone here was feeling the same things I was.”

  “Hi, Tania,” wrote another survivor. “I just joined the group too last night; I finally got up the courage. I feel so much like you do, like we all do, and right now I don’t think I could tell what happened to me ’cause there’s so much I don’t remember. Only bits and pieces come back sometimes. I haven’t been able to bring myself to even look at Manhattan since that day. Maybe when we both feel ready, we can help each other try.”

  Brendan Chellis was one of the original members of the survivors’ group, having first posted in the forum nine months earlier, on the evening of August 19, 2002. Like many of the survivors, he had narrowly made it out of the towers. He resented being overlooked and misunderstood, and he politely complained about it in his inaugural post:

  We continue to be tortured by that day, yet it seems that nobody, even the people that are supposed to help us, understand what we are going through. We have all been through something horrible. We have seen things that people going to work on a beautiful day in September aren’t supposed to see. Most of us at least one time that morning were convinced we were looking at our last seconds of life. But somehow we walked away (or more likely ran away). We watched thousands of people just like us die. Not on TV, but with our own eyes. We knew it was just a matter of chance that it was them and not us. And when other people got on with their lives, we suffered in obscurity with that day. We lived with the flashbacks, the depression, the anxiety, and especially the survivor guilt.

  Since that first post, Brendan had come to terms with the fact that most people would never understand the plight of World Trade Center survivors, not without having walked in their shoes. He had done a lot of healing since his initial post the summer before, and he had helped dozens of others as they struggled with the consequences of that day. There were hundreds and probably thousands of others who were suffering as he’d been, but they didn’t or couldn’t reach out for help.

  When Brendan saw Tania’s post, he read in her words a certain despair that he recognized from his own early cries for help. He believed this was her last stab at seeing if she would ever be able to crawl out of the emotional quagmire that was drowning her, and he was determined to do what he could to help save her from herself.

  “Tania,” he wrote, “welcome to the group. We have been a little quiet lately, but hopefully having a new member will get people talking a little again. This group is a great place to be. When you get a chance, take a look at the old postings. (You have a lot of catching up to do!) Hopefully you’ll see that a lot of the thoughts and emotions you have experienced (and thought you were alone with) have also been experienced by a lot of people in the group. I think that is what has been most reassuring to me. We all come from different backgrounds and went through different things on 9/11, yet we share the same emotional roller coaster since that day. It’s good to know you are not alone in your feelings.

  “Someday, if you’re up for it, let us know your story. Otherwise, if you just want to share something, write it down and send it to the group. It helps as much to write things down as it does to hear from everyone else. I hope we can help you deal with some of the things you are going through.”

  Brendan wondered if he would ever hear from the woman named Tania again.

  THE LIVING VICTIMS

  Tania did return to the forum. During May and June of 2003, she posted short, grateful messages about how much the support from the other survivors was helping her to heal. In late June she agreed to join some of the others for a visit to the World Trade Center site, but she cancelled at the last minute, calling Brendan on his cell phone to say that she was sorry, but she wasn’t ready to return there; she was still too fragile. Brendan described the visit on the forum the next day:

  “The part of the day that I really liked was just being able to talk about 9/11 without worrying about making other people uncomfortable,” he wrote. “For too long, I have felt like I have to keep my mouth shut whenever I am with other people because any talk about 9/11 is a sure conversation killer. But yesterday we all talked about our experiences, how it affected us, how we have been dealing with it, etc. At any time during the day, anybody could bring up what they were feeling, and sometimes we would just stop where we were and start talking about it.”

  An inherent tension existed between the survivors and the families of the men and women who’d lost their lives on 9/11. Family members were placed at the top of the hierarchy of grief, and some questioned the veracity of the survivors
’ distress—and even their right to grieve what had happened to them. After all, they were alive. They were the chosen ones. The survivors, on the other hand, were growing bitter about being misunderstood and overlooked. Because the survivors’ forum was part of the World Trade Center United Families Group, an organization that had been formed first for families, and could be viewed by family members, the survivors who used it didn’t feel comfortable with opening up about their suffering. But that restraint cracked in September of that year, on the second anniversary of the attack, when some of them were turned away from ground zero ceremonies.

  For many of the survivors, the second anniversary memorial service was their first venture back to ground zero, and it had taken all of the courage they could muster to return. Yet when survivors were refused admission for not having the proper credentials to the invitation-only ceremony, the perceived slight unleashed a torrent of bitterness on the forum. As one survivor wrote:

  Yesterday morning early, I went down to the Trade Center site with my husband, and it was so sad, but what really got me was that of course the place was all barricaded, and there were people arriving for the memorial service who were being admitted, but, of course, not me. That always makes me feel both angry and very ashamed to be excluded like that. Like I committed some crime by surviving, and now I’m being punished by banishment. Like the authorities are saying to me, “You made your choice; you chose to survive, so now you forfeit all your claims to this place, to this event.” It makes me positively suicidal. I feel like I just want to be erased, like I really deserve to be obliterated from the earth.

  It was a sentiment shared by many of the other survivors: that in the expansive, complex dialogue of the September 11 story, they had been made invisible. “We are forgotten, and it’s disgraceful,” another survivor wrote. “I think we addressed this topic last year at the same time. I also wrote a letter to the Daily News editorial page about how we’re forgotten and that we have to go along our merry way as if nothing ever happened! It’s almost like cruel punishment, as you guys have said, for ‘exiting the buildings alive.’ They mourn the passing of their loved one(s) and can move on (which is the natural order of things) . . . We can’t mourn any passing because we haven’t physically lost someone, and if you haven’t lost someone, you have no right to be at the Trade Center site and have no say as to what is built there. WE ARE LIVING VICTIMS.”

  After so many months of conceding their right to express grief, the survivors were prepared to claim their rightful place in the hierarchal order of suffering.

  In late October Tania suggested that they split off from the United Families organization and start their own online support group, a place where they would be free to express even their rawest emotions without fear of judgment or rejection. “It’s very easy to set up, and we could configure it as a private group so membership has to be approved by one of us,” she posted on the morning of October 24. “All those in favor???????? I think it’s important that we stick together.”

  Others in the group agreed that it was a good idea. At 12:59 p.m. that same afternoon, the World Trade Center Survivors Forum debuted online. The postings on the new site were immediately more intimate and revealing. People let down their guard, and real friendships formed quickly. The survivors could at last begin to purge themselves of the resentments they’d felt over being discounted, and even shunned, and bare their souls to one another.

  The new group seemed to give Tania the impetus to begin finally opening up about herself, and, little by little, she shared snippets of her story. Then, late on a Saturday night in early November, she responded to another survivor’s details of his experience in the south tower by recounting her harrowing moments in the seventy-eighth-floor sky lobby just before the plane plowed through it, and her long descent to safety.

  She wrote:

  I had started my way out and was on the sky lobby of the 78th floor waiting for the elevator when the plane hit. It was so crowded there. The elevators only took 60 secs down to the lobby, but that day, whether true or not, they seemed to be running too slow. Everybody was pushing trying to get into the elevators. I remember this one guy who yelled, “Ladies, this is not the Titanic. It’s not women and children first.” Shortly after that, someone yelled that there was a plane coming. We heard the roaring noise from the jet, then there was a deafening explosion, and a fireball ripped through the lobby. I find it very hard to talk about what happened afterward.

  “Do you remember any injured women walking down past you on the stairs?” she asked the other survivor. “I wonder if we crossed paths that day.”

  Two days later, Tania shared more details of her story. She wrote about grabbing the shirts of people who no longer needed them and wrapping them around her burned and bleeding arms and legs, and crawling over dead people and through pools of blood looking for an escape. “Others around me were getting quiet, I knew they were dying, and I didn’t want to be one of them,” she wrote. “The fire conditions were getting worse, and air was getting scarce. My lungs were burning inside. I kept thinking about my life, my family, my fiancé, about our wedding.”

  She told of stumbling upon the dying man who put his wedding ring in her hand and asked her to give it to his wife, and of being rescued by the man with the red bandanna covering his mouth. “He said he had found the stairs.” And she revealed the tragic loss of her beloved Dave. She said that she never would have made it out of the building if it hadn’t been for her thoughts of him and their impending wedding at the Plaza.

  “I wanted to wear that white dress and swear my love for him in front of friends and family. I wanted to have his children,” she wrote. “He was in the other tower . . . I didn’t know then that he would not survive. I believe today that he stopped to give me the strength to get out of there on his way to heaven. . . . I was one of the last people out of tower 2.”

  Her story was jaw dropping. Not only had she miraculously escaped from what looked like a certain and terrible death but she had also lost the man she loved. Within days, word of the new survivor and her unparalleled account of survival and loss had spread throughout the survivor community.

  The unknown blogger had taken her first steps to becoming the face of one of the most tragic chapters in the history of the United States.

  A MEETING OF THE MINDS

  Gerry Bogacz lived through the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, and he was on the eighty-second floor of the north tower on September 11 when American Airlines Flight 11 slammed into the building. A private, guarded man, Bogacz shared the dramatic details of what he went through that day only with his wife and daughter, his closest friends, and a handful of survivors he had come to know in the two years since the attack. Indeed, when he finally put pen to paper to write down his memories of that life-changing time, he preceded the thirty-six-page narrative with a note:

  This is an account of my experiences during the attack and its aftermath, which I’ve written so that family and friends will have a sense of what happened. Recording my experiences and sharing them on a limited basis will help me and those closest to me to better comprehend what transpired. In addition, this information will hopefully shed some light on the experiences of the others who were in the buildings that day. I offer this account for them also, so that any readers will know a little more about what happened to them and to me in the buildings and afterward.

  As planning director for the New York Metropolitan Transportation Council, Bogacz had been facing a typically hectic schedule when he arrived at the World Trade Center on the morning of September 11. He had gotten to his office early to catch up on phone calls and emails before the first of a series of scheduled meetings began. By eight thirty, he was sitting at his computer, reading and responding to emails from the day before. At one point, a member of his staff popped in with the agenda for the nine o’clock meeting. After he left, Bogacz put the finishing touches on a letter to a local newspaper, and then walked down the hall to visit anot
her associate.

  The coworker’s office offered a spectacular view to the north, and, on that cloudless morning, Bogacz could see well past the Empire State Building in midtown, all the way up the Hudson River to the Bronx and into Westchester and Rockland counties. As he stood there, admiring the panorama and chatting with his colleague, he sensed a sudden, subtle change in the air pressure—“as if air were being forced into the building,” he would say later.

  The pressure change was accompanied by a high-pitched whirring sound. Bogacz stopped talking, and he could see from his colleague’s crinkled brow that he, too, had sensed something curious. Before either of them could say anything, the building was rocked by what Bogacz described as “a titanic explosion.” The north tower lurched violently toward the southern end of the island and then fiercely snapped back in place. People in the office grabbed desktops, chairs—anything they could hang onto—to keep from falling over.

  After a moment of terrified silence, Bogacz saw an enormous chunk of debris plunge past the eighty-second-floor windows. Somewhere in the back of his mind, he thought that the huge, falling mass could be a missile. That was when the urgency of the situation kicked in.

  Bogacz’s mind raced back to February 26, 1993, when terrorists exploded a truck bomb in the basement of the building. Back then, he had evacuated into a smoke-filled stairwell, and more than half of the trip down had been made in complete darkness. It had taken nearly four hours to get out of the building that day, and the stress had taken its toll. This time seemed far worse, and he wondered if the tower was stable enough to withstand whatever had happened. Or was it about to fall down?