The Woman Who Wasn’t There

by Jr. Robin Gaby Fisher; Angelo J. Guglielmo

  Six weeks later, on March 17, Tania sent an email to the network with astonishing news. Where everyone else had failed, she had succeeded in getting the private visit to the site that they so desperately wanted. “I have arranged a visit to ground zero for WTC survivors,” she wrote. “During the visit, those of you who are up to it will have the opportunity to descend to the bottom of the pit. I realize many of you still find it hard to go to the site, so please think about this carefully. Tania.”

  On May 7 she followed up with another message detailing the arrangements for the tour. Everything was set. They were on for the following Friday morning, she said. The supervisor of the site, a friend with whom she had been working quietly to make the visit happen, was putting himself out on a limb by accommodating them, and he had asked that they keep it low key, with no fanfare or media coverage. It was a small price to pay for such a huge victory. Many of the survivors had barely escaped from the towers with their lives, and they had hardly come away unscathed. Yet this was the first time since the tragedy that someone in authority had recognized that they had a rightful tie to the place, and it went a long way toward legitimizing their feelings of anguish and deep sorrow.

  Tania was clearly excited about giving the others the news. Before signing off on her message, she wrote, “We’re only a week away from the big day!”

  RETURN TO GROUND ZERO

  The day of the tour debuted with a brilliant yellow sun embellished on a bare, blue sky—the mirror image of September 11. As the group of twenty or so survivors passed through the tall, mesh fencing surrounding the missing twin towers—a fence that had come to symbolize the divide between those who belonged and everyone else—Gerry Bogacz felt oddly as if he had come home.

  Tania led the way into the urban wasteland, sixteen ruinous acres in the heart of the world’s premier financial center that had tragically come to be known as ground zero. This was her stage, and no one was about to begrudge her the lead role. Tania was stoic walking in. She had been to the site more than a year earlier, she said, with one of the first family tours. This time she would experience it not as a bereft widow whose husband had died there but as they would: as someone trying to cope with the battle scars of surviving.

  The small group of survivors straggled down the concrete access ramp leading from street level to the towers’ footprints, a pair of giant tetragons that had been built where bedrock begins, six stories underground, to support what were to be the world’s tallest buildings. No one spoke as they walked the long ramp to the sacred soil below. It hadn’t been long since the last of the body parts were pulled from the site. Tania picked up a handful of dirt and let it slip through her fingers. Like so many others who descended the ramp to the “floor,” some survivors felt what they believed to be the presence of the people who had lost their lives there. To some it felt like a warm breeze swirling up from the basin. Others sensed the air turn thick, as if with an oppressive kind of sadness, as they reached hallowed ground. Tania described the same sensation of comfort she’d experienced that morning in the south tower, when she felt Dave guiding her to safety. He was there with her, she said. She could feel him.

  In two months, on the Fourth of July, the city would sink the cornerstone for the replacement Freedom Tower in the northwest corner of ground zero—twenty tons of polished Adirondack granite with an inscription that read: “To honor and remember those who lost their lives on September 11th, 2001 and as a tribute to the enduring spirit of freedom—July Fourth, 2004.” It was a symbol of the city’s resolve to rebuild. Now there was just a dank hole with pockmarked concrete walls and a red-clay floor covered with gravel. Here and there, a weed poked through the grit. Life renewed itself even in places darkened by death.

  The survivors stood in a circle, each lost in his or her private thoughts. They had knots in their throats and tears in their eyes. Looking toward the heavens, Bogacz was suddenly struck by the vast interlude of empty space in the landscape where the towers had been. Someone once called it a hole in the city’s heart. It was an apt description, he thought. That gap was once occupied by an architectural marvel, thriving with people from all over the city and all over the world. Now it was air. It was still hard to grasp. He looked over at Tania, who was comforting another survivor. She had suffered a constellation of misfortune that would have shattered most people. Yet rather than submitting to her heartbreak, she had turned it into a crusade to help everyone else who was suffering. “What an amazing woman,” he thought.

  In some ways, her motivation was more selfish than selfless, Tania would say later. Helping others was a way to save herself; to hold onto her sanity, her will to live. For two years after the attack, she barely slept at night and she was still afraid to close her eyes. Most of the time when she did, she saw crashing planes and mangled bodies. Debilitating panic attacks and constant thoughts of dying plagued her. Sometimes her guilt—for leaving some of her coworkers behind; for not having coffee with Dave that morning, which might have spared his life; for saving herself—made her wish she was dead.

  Her sunny disposition and easy smile were a mask. “Make-believe,” she said. She still had days when someone lit a candle, and she was back on the seventy-eighth floor, crawling through flames and over dead bodies. There were still times when a plane flew overhead, and her fear was so intense that she blacked out—once even awakening to find herself sprawled on the side of the West Side Highway downtown. She was broken, and she didn’t have the glue to piece herself back together. So she pretended to be okay, and she made sure every minute of every day was filled so that she didn’t have to think or feel. It was the only way she knew how to cope. And if by helping herself she helped the other survivors, she was glad.

  The group members remained for an hour or so, paying their respects to the dead, remembering the day that changed their lives, and beginning to let go of pent-up feelings and emotions that could be released only by being there. Some left flowers and cards. Tania left a letter for Dave, saying how much she missed him and loved him, and how all that sustained her were thoughts of their time together and what life might have been.

  The visit to ground zero had gone a long way to helping the survivors take the next step toward the rest of their lives, whatever that was. Years afterward, a young woman named Carrie Coen Sullivan, who had worked in the south tower for only a month when it was struck, would remember the visit as the turning point in her healing—the singular event that gave her the freedom to start to forgive herself for surviving and think about living again. Walking out of the site, she felt a sense of peace that she hadn’t known since before September 11. It brought her to tears.

  Tania led the procession all the way up the ramp and back to the street, through the tall fence that separated those with a rightful claim to the tragedy and the rest of the world. The survivors were no longer outsiders looking in. They finally belonged. Before going their separate ways that day, they crowded around her, hugging her and thanking her for what she had done.

  Tania just smiled.

  Afterward, she wrote to her new confidante about the experience. Richard Williams was a survivor of the Oklahoma City disaster nine years earlier, when a disgruntled antigovernment army veteran named Timothy McVeigh parked a Ryder truck full of explosives outside the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building and detonated it. Williams was trapped beneath piles of debris, with only his left arm showing, when a rescuer discovered him and carried him out of the rubble. Critically injured, he’d spent two years recovering from both the physical and emotional trauma. He’d eventually turned his torment into action by becoming involved in survivors’ programs and memorial planning in Oklahoma City. After weeks of sharing nearly daily emails, and some of their innermost thoughts, Williams and Tania became friends.

  “The site visit with fellow survivors was very hard,” she wrote to Richard. “We all went down to the pit together and brought flowers and cards for our friends and colleagues who didn’t make it. It was the first time sur
vivors went to the site since 9/11, and seeing their pain was heart wrenching. After the visit, most of us went to September Space, and we sat around in a circle with a counselor and we described how we felt. It was amazing. It was the first time most of us opened our hearts and feelings to each other face to face. I was fascinated at seeing how even the guys I thought were the toughest had so much inside of them that they needed to share with the rest of us.”

  The visit, Tania wrote, made her grieve for Dave even more, if that were possible. “Next week I’ll be going down to the town where Dave grew up,” she wrote. “They are dedicating a garden for him and the four other victims from NC who died on 9/11. Although I’m glad they’re doing something like this and recognizing him, it’s going to be so hard to see his name etched in stone. I know I’m going to cry my eyes out during the ceremony and for days to come. My parents and some of my brothers will be there too. I know Dave would have liked that and would be glad we still all remember him and are as close to his family as ever. I love going to his house and going through the albums of his childhood with his mom. That has become a tradition, and it’s a moment she and I share every time I visit them.”

  In closing, Tania wrote about the recent kidnapping and murder of an American hostage in Saudi Arabia by Al Qaeda. She didn’t want to feel hatred toward anyone, but forgiving the murderers who had taken Dave and continued to kill innocent people was beyond her capability. “I miss him so much these days and feel I need him more than ever,” she wrote. “The beheading of Paul Johnson was so hard for me. It’s the same people who did this to us, and they are still free to hurt even more people.” In another email to Williams at around that time, she complained bitterly about a man posting on the forum who, it had turned out, feigned being a 9/11 survivor. In her eyes, that, too, was unforgivable.

  She wrote:

  Until now, our Yahoo group has had the policy to accept anyone who applied because we trusted in people’s good faith. I mean who would want to fake being a World Trade Center survivor, right? God knows how much I’ve been through and this guy is just here for the attention or whatever sick reason. He’s reading everything I write, which is quite personal stuff because we all pour out our most intimate thoughts.

  Well, after I found out about this guy, I immediately wrote to the other moderators of the online group and asked them to ban him and to change our acceptance policy. I know you’ve told me you had some problems with fakes before. So, yes, at some point, we’re going to sit down and establish a policy to define survivors. I think, the way things are now, there’s a slim chance it will happen again, but we need to be prepared.

  A FRIEND IN NEED

  Linda Gormley felt her heart hammering in her chest as she sat in the back of the crowded room. It was her first survivors’ meeting, and it had taken everything she had to get herself there. Linda was single and in her thirties, a pale-skinned blonde with signature bright red lips. She was pretty and personable, but as fragile as glass and willing to do almost anything for people to like her. She didn’t know where she fit into the 9/11 community, or even if there was a place in the chain of suffering for people like her. Others had lost loved ones in the attack, or had near-death experiences, or tales of narrow escapes. Linda hadn’t lost anyone, and she wasn’t in the towers that day. But she had seen things so awful from the sidewalk that, for months afterward, she would drink until the images finally blurred into oblivion. Now she was sober and grappling with those crushing, impeccable memories.

  The young woman had attempted to validate her struggle by attending an anniversary ceremony at ground zero as a volunteer for the American Red Cross, handing out tissues and flowers to family members and rescue workers. She felt compelled to be in the presence of the families, as if studying their grief would help her feel entitled to her own. As it was, the ceremony had the opposite effect. Seeing the grief etched on the faces of people who had lost husbands and wives and parents and children made her feel more like a voyeur than a victim. She just didn’t belong.

  She questioned whether she was worthy of being in the company of the survivors either, for that matter. Even if they did accept her, she was pretty sure that she wasn’t ready to bare her emotions to a roomful of strangers. As she sat there, crossing and recrossing her legs, waiting for the meeting to begin, Linda debated whether to stay or go home. Then she saw Tania.

  Tania swept into the meeting room with her summer floral skirt flowing behind her and a white blouse pressed to perfection, smiling and laughing as if she had the world on a string. The way she carried herself said that she was somebody, Linda thought to herself. People didn’t learn that kind of poise. They were born to it. Watching the others interact with her, Linda was reminded of a scene from The Wizard of Oz in which Glinda the Good Witch summons the Munchkins (“Come out, come out, wherever you are!”), and they flock to her, all happy and bubbly. “Who is that girl?” she wondered. And as if having read Linda’s thoughts, the woman beside her leaned over and whispered, “That’s Tania.”

  Linda knew something about Tania. She had met her online a few weeks earlier when she joined the survivors’ forum. In fact, it had been Tania who responded to her first post, suggesting that she come to a meeting of the Survivors’ Network. She was vaguely aware that Tania had escaped from the south tower but knew little else. So she watched, fascinated, as one person after the next jockeyed to get a word with Tania.

  One woman introduced herself as Amanda Ripley, a reporter for Time magazine. Ripley was in the process of interviewing survivors for a story. In her travels, she’d met another survivor who told her she should speak to Tania; that Tania’s story was bigger than all of the others. The other survivor, acting as a go-between, had approached Tania about doing the interview, and she agreed to speak to Ripley at some point; she just wasn’t sure when she could fit it into her schedule.

  Ripley, having heard that Tania was willing to talk to her, had come to the meeting simply to formally introduce herself, leave her business card, and perhaps set up a date to meet. But she’d barely had the chance to say her piece when the others stepped in. Tania was having a bad day, they said, rebuking the reporter for approaching her. Ripley was whisked out of the meeting and escorted from the building. By the time the evening was over, Linda was completely intrigued and wanted to know more about the special survivor.

  Linda didn’t approach Tania that night, except to briefly introduce herself, but she did race home to scope her out online. She didn’t have to look further than the group forum archives to find what she needed to know. She was stunned to read Tania’s powerful account from the previous November about her life-and-death escape from one tower, and losing her husband in the other. A more recent post, written just before Linda had discovered the forum that spring, was heart wrenching.

  “Today I got a promotion at work, and I still don’t know why,” Tania wrote. “Most of the time, my mind is miles away. I relive over and over the moments I shared with Dave, my fiancé who died in the north tower. After I heard about the promotion, I had this urge to call the store where the wedding dress I never got to wear was being stored and told them to go ahead and donate it to charity. This is a big step for me. It’s been accumulating dust for 21/2 years . . . and it’s time. Tania.”

  Sitting at her home computer, trying to take it all in, Linda felt as if she couldn’t possibly attend another survivors’ meeting or even post on the forum anymore. If Tania was the definition of a survivor, how could she deign to put herself in that category? She didn’t even deserve to share the same air with her. She wrote that in an email to Tania that night, and, within minutes, Tania responded most graciously, the way that she did with others who had expressed similar sentiments. Of course she deserved to be part of the group, Tania wrote Linda. Everyone’s story was of equal importance and value. They weren’t competing for best survivor, ha-ha. No one’s experience was any more or less compelling than anyone else’s. They were all wounded souls who needed to stick toge
ther. She ended her note with “Warm regards, Tania.”

  The next meeting coincided with the Time magazine story hitting the newsstands, and everyone was chattering about it when Linda arrived at September Space. As it turned out, Tania had been interviewed for the story after all. Accompanied by another survivor for moral support, she had met with Ripley for coffee a few days after the last meeting. She did it, she told the others, certainly not for herself—she didn’t even like reporters much—but because she recognized an opportunity for the survivors to have a national platform. Tania was glowing. “Not bad, huh?” she said, holding up her copy.

  Linda’s admiration for Tania intensified even more when she read the magazine story. Not only was it one of the very first articles to address survivors and the complex issues with which they still struggled three years after the tragedy, but this brave woman—despite all she endured and all she lost—had been instrumental in delivering the message.

  Ripley wrote:

  New York City is engaged in America’s first experiment with a mass-casualty disaster that has no end point. Manhattan residents say they are using more cigarettes, alcohol, and marijuana since 9/11, and they remain worried about new attacks, according to research by the New York Academy of Medicine.