The Woman Who Wasn’t There

by Jr. Robin Gaby Fisher; Angelo J. Guglielmo

  In many ways, I feel Welles and I keep each other alive. He took charge on September 11 and saved my life, and now I keep him alive with my memory of him. Welles, you are my hero. I live my life to make you proud.

  THE BURNED JACKET

  For months, Tania had promised to donate her burned and bloodied Armani jacket to the new Tribute Center for a special exhibit of artifacts from September 11. The jacket was to be displayed in a custom-made glass case, between the torn and shredded turnout coat and helmet worn by Lee Ielpi’s son when he was killed, and a window from one of the airliners that was found intact on the street after the crash.

  Lynn Tierney, the president of the Tribute Center, and members of her staff had concerns about all of the donated relics. There was a fine line between respectful reality and what might trigger a family member or a survivor, or seem macabre to the viewing public, and the staff was profoundly mindful of that when it chose what would or would not be exhibited when the center opened that September. Many of those discussions centered on what effect seeing that jacket every time she led a tour would have on Tania. But she had insisted that she wanted the jacket displayed, along with the dead young firefighter’s coat and the other mementos from that day. Not only could she handle it, she said, she was proud to have it there. But getting it was another story.

  At first Tania said that the jacket was stored 120 miles away at her beach house near the end of Long Island, and that she would collect it the next time she was there. Weeks passed with no jacket, but no one from the Tribute Center pushed for it. Everyone was so fond of Tania, and nobody would do anything to upset her. Her ambivalence was understandable. She would get the jacket to them when she was ready. It was Tania who usually brought up the subject of the jacket. She had different excuses for not turning it over. She forgot it. It was still at the beach house, and she hadn’t had a chance to get it yet. Her mother had it at her house in California.

  Weeks turned to months, and the Tribute Center ribbon cutting was just around the corner. All of the exhibits were ready, but they still didn’t have the jacket. Someone from Tierney’s office called Tania and left a message.

  Tania called Linda, who knew all about the jacket, as Tania had mentioned it a dozen times. It had been part of a blue Armani suit that she’d bought just before the attack, and it was stored in a garment bag in the house in the Hamptons, scorched and bloody. When she had mentioned wanting to donate it to the Tribute Center, Linda encouraged her. Now Tania was upset that she had ever offered to give it away. She couldn’t bring herself to see it again. “I can’t do it!” she cried. “It’s too horrible. I can’t go out there to get it. There’s blood all over it. You have to call them, Linda. You have to go there and tell them.”

  Linda did as she was told, but she was upset with herself for doing yet another thing she didn’t want to do. She went to the Tribute Center and broke the news that Tania wouldn’t be donating the jacket after all. Tania wanted more than anything to continue her volunteer role as a docent and as a gallery guide, Linda said, and she feared that looking at the jacket in the exhibit hall every time she was there could set her back emotionally.

  Everyone understood, of course, and the Tribute Center opened on September 6, 2006, without the jacket but with great fanfare. Angelo filmed Governor Pataki and Mayor Bloomberg helping to cut the ribbon. Tania stood in the background, quiet and smiling. After the perfunctory speeches, the event moved inside to the center’s four galleries, where the visitors and reporters were led on a tour that took them from the building of the towers, through the day of the attack and its aftermath, to a pictorial commemoration of the dead.

  The glass case that had been made for Tania’s jacket held a cell phone used by Chuck Meara, who worked for the Port Authority, during his death-defying escape from the north tower. But a plaque engraved with a quote represented her story: “I made it from 96 to the 78th floor. Suddenly, I heard a sound like I was standing on a tarmac and hearing an engine. People started yelling, ‘Another plane!’ Then I felt the pressure, all of the air being sucked out of my lungs. Tania H.”

  PART 6

  2007

  EXPOSURE THERAPY

  It was shortly after the Crowther memorial, during a docent tour at ground zero, that Sam Kedem met Tania. He had seen her on panels and at meetings for the Red Cross, the Tribute Center, and other 9/11-related organizations, and, of course, he had heard all about her, but they were never formally introduced.

  Kedem was a trauma therapist who was in New York City on September 11 and got in on the ground floor of a free counseling program for people affected by the attack. He had planned to stay with it for a year and then return home to Miami to resume his career. But nearly six years later, he was still there, enmeshed in the floundering community. He had come in contact with hundreds of survivors during that time but had never met anyone like Tania.

  The New York Daily News had gotten it right in a story it published on the official opening of the Tribute Center. Mike Daly, the tabloid’s crusty columnist, was at ground zero when the towers collapsed. He noticed two of his friends’ fire trucks parked nose to nose outside of the north tower, and, watching the building collapse, he knew he’d lost them. When he met Tania during a tour at ground zero, he was instantly taken with her.

  “One way that Head has learned to cope with her own loss and horror is to tell her story to those who come to the Tribute Center, whose permanent exhibits opened with appropriate fanfare yesterday,” he wrote. “She stood by the entrance with a beautiful smile that is her ultimate message to everyone these five years later. To behold Head’s smile is to know the terrorists did not come even close to winning. To see that smile is also to be challenged to be as decent and positive as this true survivor.” Tania really was an anomaly, and Kedem wanted to get to know her—perhaps glean something about the secret of her incredible resilience that could help his clients recover.

  They hit it off right away as they walked from the Tribute Center to the World Financial Center and took a table at a small café in the indoor courtyard on that April day in 2007. Kedem was as easy to talk to as Tania was. He told her about his work, and she told him bits and pieces about herself. An hour or so passed, and he’d suggested they walk toward the river and talk. The courtyard had served as a temporary morgue in the days after the towers fell, and he felt uncomfortable being there. She seemed surprised by that. Walking along the Hudson, she told him about her constant struggle to close that terrible chapter in her life, and she admitted that her trauma symptoms were as frequent and as fierce as they had been right after the attack. She still wrangled with obsessive thoughts and survivor’s guilt and flashbacks, she said, and her sleep was constantly interrupted by nightmares and intrusive memories. She had bought self-help books and DVDs and spent hours reading and watching experts rally on about remedies and treatments, but nothing had helped. As they prepared to part ways, Tania proposed an idea.

  “I don’t want to live in the pain anymore,” she said. “I want to move past 9/11. And I want you to help me.”

  They began meeting once a week at Kedem’s office on Eighth Avenue. By their third or fourth session, he realized that Tania’s confident, happy exterior masked a deep and abiding sadness. She was suffering from as serious a case of post-traumatic stress as he had ever seen. The most mundane things triggered her. Just talking about a subway ride, or sleeping in the dark without a light, could bring on debilitating panic attacks in which she would become so hysterical and disoriented that they had to stop. Sometimes the hour was more conversational than remedial, and they talked about her travels around the world, or her lucrative career, and her connections to influential people in politics and the financial world. He’d learned a lot about her life that way. But even after their toughest encounters, she was able to pull herself together and go back to work. Sometimes he would offer to walk her the few blocks to the World Financial Center where Merrill Lynch had offices. The Craig MacPherson mural of Rio de J
aneiro on the south wall of the lobby was a favorite of his, and he’d wait for her to pass through security, to the bank of elevators, leading to the office floors, then stand and study the piece for a few minutes before walking back to work. Treating the most famous survivor felt like a privilege. He was impressed with her political and economic stature, and he believed that the community needed someone like her: a stand-proud figure who was going forward and advocating for all of the other victims. He would do whatever he could to help her deal with her trauma.

  Kedem was a practitioner of exposure therapies, where the idea is to repeatedly subject patients to anxiety-provoking situations or traumatic memories for as long as it takes for the brain to learn that any perceived danger is an abstraction and not real. Thomas Stampfl pioneered the controversial practice in the 1960s as a treatment for phobias. The psychologist found that patients who were barraged with details of the situations they feared eventually lost their fear. It was used frequently by the United States Department of Veterans Affairs to treat soldiers returning from combat, and, in some circles, was considered controversial and risky because a percentage of patients suffered setbacks from reliving the traumatic event. Tania was willing to give it a try.

  On April 23, in an email to her friends Richard and Lynne Williams, apologizing for cancelling a trip at the last minute to see them in Oklahoma City, she wrote excitedly about her new therapist and his ideas for treatment.

  “Last year I gave up on everything,” she wrote. “I was so tired of the memories, the flashbacks, the grief, that I gave up. But now I found a new therapist that I like, and we just started working together.”

  Kedem was proposing a form of exposure therapy called flooding, Tania said. She would record her experience in the south tower on tape and listen to it every day. The goal was that she would eventually become desensitized to those debilitating memories.

  She posted:

  It’s going to be hard, but I’m excited to finally be able to tell someone what happened to me that day. I’ve been carrying these memories with me for so long that I literally cannot live with them. This is probably going to be as hard as being there that day, and all of my awful memories and all of the guilt is going to come out. I’m scared at the prospect, but I’m also excited, and this is all I can think about. I feel like I’m bracing myself for this battle, one of the most important of my life, and that’s all I have the energy for.

  I don’t even know if I will be able to do this, but I want to give it a try. When I’m not missing Dave, I have flashbacks, or nightmares, or a friend’s baby reminds me of the life I lost. I can take it most of the time and pretend I’m OK, but other times, like this past week, it all becomes too much, and I need this so much because I don’t know how much longer I can hold it together.

  Tania had a habit of cancelling plans at the last minute. The Williamses had made several trips to New York to spend anniversaries with Tania, and she had promised to visit Oklahoma City several times but never made it. Once, she had invited the Williamses to vacation with her at her beachfront house in Amagansett, and then cancelled when they already had their plane tickets in hand. She was always apologetic and usually had a very good excuse, and her friends were always quick to forgive because, after all, look at all she had been through. Lynne Williams, whose own life had been torn apart after Richard’s rescue from the rubble of the Murrah Federal Building, was even more understanding about the effects of trauma on survivors.

  “My dear, dear friend,” she responded. “You have no idea how much I hope that this therapy will be of help to you. As much as I would love to see you and share some hugs (some of that Okielove!), I’m glad you’re not coming if it means you’re making progress. We could see that activity was your defense against the pain—you weren’t giving yourself time to feel it. Our simple lives didn’t afford us a means of escape—mental or physical—after the bombing. That was the greatest blessing that we could ever have imagined. We met each memory, each obstacle, and each storm of dark emotion head on. It didn’t come in tidal waves threatening to drown us; it came in like the tide, sometimes reaching way too far, sometimes at a safe distance. But we faced it every day, and now it’s a tightly woven thread in the makeup of our lives. Richard and I have had each other to lean on. I don’t know how I would have coped if I’d lost him. Your loss is so great that you’ll never be the same person you once were. You still have so much love to give, and so much love being returned. Healing will follow. I will pray for your therapy, as I pray for you every day.”

  The first session took place in Kedem’s office on Tuesday, May 1. With a tape recorder on the table beside her, Tania started at the beginning. The subway ride to work with Dave that morning. The meeting in the conference room. People screaming. Counting down to Dave’s floor in the north tower. The trip down the stairs to the sky lobby with her colleagues. Waiting for the elevator with her assistant Christine. She seemed to be having an out-of-body experience. The violent crash. Windows breaking. Walls crashing. People flying through the air. She was sobbing and rocking back and forth in her chair. Hitting the marble wall. Waking up on fire. Christine is gone. “Oh my God! Oh my God!” Climbing over body parts. “Help me! Somebody please help me!”

  Tania’s memories were so raw and so real that Kedem’s colleagues knocked on his office door to make sure that everything was okay. The tape ran for forty-five minutes. When it was over, she slumped in her chair, dazed and confused about what had just taken place. Kedem gave her some water, and she sipped it slowly. Her homework was to take the tape home and listen to it every night as many times as she could handle it until they met again.

  Tania stood to leave. Her hair was damp and stuck to her head, and black mascara ran down her cheeks. Placing his hand on her shoulder, Kedem warned her that things would get worse before they got better.

  CAPITOL HILL

  We were very pleased to learn that the committee is looking into the growing problem of nonresponders falling victim to 9/11-related illnesses, because there has been a disparity to date between the resources devoted to rescue and recovery workers, as compared with the health and financial resources available to other groups . . . We recently polled over 1,000 of our members and found that for the overwhelming majority, their number one concern today is health issues affecting survivors. And health issues affecting nonrescue survivors are not limited to physical problems alone. A large majority is still suffering from various degrees of trauma.

  Tania’s trip to Washington, DC, to testify before a congressional committee was a coup d’état, and a milestone for the network that no one could have imagined when a small group of people began meeting in a church hall to cobble together a support group in 2003. The hearing of the US Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions about the long-term health effects from September 11 was scheduled for the morning of March 21, 2007, in the Hart Senate Office Building on the Capitol Hill campus. The subcommittee was made up of a posse of political heavy hitters, chaired by Massachusetts senator Edward M. Kennedy, and including Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York, Orin Hatch of Utah, and Barack Obama of Illinois. Mayor Bloomberg led the list of presenters. Tania was to be the witness on behalf of survivors, and network board member Richard Zimbler helped her to prepare her statement.

  “My name is Tania Head, and I am the president of the World Trade Center Survivors’ Network,” the speech began. “Our members are World Trade Center evacuees, workers from nearby buildings, Lower Manhattan residents, witnesses of the attacks, rescue and recovery workers, and volunteers.”

  The nine-page speech was a pointed and eloquent summarization of the hardships suffered by the segment of the 9/11 community that had been overlooked, and the first such manifesto on the survivors’ behalf to drop into the laps of the US Congress.

  Getting survivors funding for medical care was yet another of Tania’s projects, and she was excited to have the chance to lobby the senators and their staffs on behalf of her group.
She had even arranged to fly back early from a business trip to Savannah, Georgia, to be able to deliver the speech herself rather than ask someone else on the board to fill in for her. “Ms. Head goes to Washington,” she joked to some of her friends.

  Zimbler and the rest of the board had waited anxiously for Tania to return with a report. When no one had heard from her by that evening, Zimbler sent her an email.

  “Hey, Tania. So how did it go today? I didn’t see your name on the witness list on the committee’s web page. Did you get a chance to network with Hillary or Obama’s aides?”

  At 10:57 p.m., Tania responded. She had just gotten home from the airport, she said, and she hadn’t had a chance to report back before then because the day had been so full with meetings and networking and pushing the survivors’ agenda. She hadn’t gotten to testify, but her statement had been read into the record of the proceedings, she said. Reading her email, Zimbler could almost hear the excitement in her voice, and he was excited too:

  I did meet a lot of people, including Dr. Reibman, who heads the program at Bellevue. She has agreed to come and speak at one of our meetings and would like us to help her prepare a report about long-term care and serve on an advisory committee that will advise the committee that works with city hall.

  I got a lot of business cards and did network with Hillary’s staff. I even reprimanded them because they still don’t use the word survivors right. Much of what was said again focused only on rescue and recovery workers. Residents were mentioned, and I guess we are now referred to as “workers.” Survivors of Sept. 11 are such second-class citizens that no one even mentions us.