All There Is

by Dave Isay

  Ann: You came out to tell us, and I had this stupid, big roast-beef dinner and I know you just could hardly breathe, and there was all this food, but you managed. You were eating your dinner, and you said, “Well, I have something to tell you.” And it was wonderful, because you so easily could’ve said, I’m just going to survive this thing within myself and my family and my close friends and be all right, but you let us be a part of this baby. You didn’t have to do that.

  Lisa: That was my first time out to the house. I remember seeing your field and the mountains there, and I said, “Our kid is going to have the greatest life out here!”

  And the birth itself—you were my coach.

  Ann: It was a wonderful day. It was this yin-yang, best and worst, but the best kept coming up on the top, because this child is perfect.

  Lisa: I tell little Mark about his father all the time. Once he said something about God, and I said, “Where does God live?” And he said, “He lives in heaven with Daddy, and he makes beautiful neon.”

  Ann: I love that. To me the worst thing you can do when someone dies is not talk about them, like they didn’t even exist. Little Mark is our first and only grandchild, and then we got an extra daughter out of it. Sometimes I have to tell you I just love you for you, not only because you’re my grandbaby’s mother. This relationship truly feels like a friendship, and that’s wonderful.

  Lisa: It’s true. I said at the beginning, “I can’t do this by myself.” And I didn’t have to do it by myself. I couldn’t do it without you—I know that. Thank you for being in my life.

  Recorded in Roanoke, Virginia, on October 18, 2008.

  PAUL WILSON, 93, talks to his daughter MARTHA “MARTY” SMITH, 61

  Paul Wilson: I was working for a radio station located in the tenth floor of the Lassen Hotel here in Wichita, so I was up and down the elevator two or three times a day. One day I was waiting in the lobby for the elevator to come down, and the door slid aside, and there she stood, the prettiest girl I had ever seen. She was the operator. That first meeting there were three or four other people on the elevator, and she took all of us up, and they got off at their floors, and I was the last one—floor number ten. She opened the door, and I said, “Thank you,” and she said, “You’re welcome.” That was the total conversation that first contact. I floated on down the hall thinking about her all that day.

  On about the fifth day, I guess it was, I was the only passenger on the elevator, and she said, “Do you know where you can get some good chop suey?” How about that for an opening line? Thank goodness she broke the ice. I said, “Sure, the Pan American Café across the street.” I said, “I eat there often.” She said, “Oh?” She knew very well: I come down at six every evening and disappear, and I come back. I said, “I plan to eat there this evening,” and she said, “Oh?” Then I realized I had an opening. I said, “What time do you get off?” She said, “Six.” Now that wasn’t true, but she arranged to have a bellhop relieve her, and we went across the street at six, and we had chop suey, and we got acquainted.

  I found out her name was Wilma—later she went by Louise. She found out my name was Paul. I found out that she was divorced and had a two-year-old girl. She found out I was about to be drafted; this was during the war. I couldn’t help thinking, Boy, if everything is okay when the war is over, and she’s still available, I’m going to have that girl and her daughter.

  I think it was two days later, she brought that little girl downtown. Barbara was two years old. She had a little red snowsuit, a white fur hat, and a white fur muff that she was proud of. When her mother introduced me to her, she had her arms out to me, and I was done for.

  I knew she was the one, I just knew it. And I know how—I’ll tell you something I’ve never told anybody.

  Marty Smith: There’s something I don’t know?

  Paul: Yes. We had been seeing each other, going out to lunch and all of that, for about two weeks when a situation arose. Because of a storm that night, we ended up in my apartment. Nothing happened—but that’s when I knew she was the one, and I think that’s when she knew I was the one. That was the beginning.

  Well, I did go away to war, and Louise waited for me for three years. She must have had plenty of other opportunities. I imagine she had to fend the guys off all the time. She was beautiful. She wasn’t a beauty-queen type; she was a next-door type, only prettier. Never used any cosmetics, never went to a beauty shop in her life. She was just naturally beautiful. I came back from the war, rendezvoused with her at my parents’ home, and we waited three days for a marriage license. We got married right there in my mother’s living room.

  I adopted Barbara immediately, and we had three more children. We had lots of good times together as a family, and we had some bad times. David, the fourth child, when he was about a year old we found out that he had cystic fibrosis, and it was a battle until he died at age nine. It was a long tragedy, but we survived as a family.

  After the children were all gone, Louise developed Alzheimer’s, and I was privileged to be her caregiver. She was brave, and she understood the situation. She still loved me. She really did. Your mother was the only woman I ever really loved. She was a wonderful woman, a good friend, a sweetheart, a wife, and a wonderful homemaker. We were real lovers, and we had a sixty-three-year honeymoon.

  I still sleep in our bed. Sometimes I reach over and pull her pillow . . . [crying]. She was unfailingly loving. Unfailingly. Every day is a memorial for her.

  Recorded in Wichita, Kansas, on October 23, 2009.

  GRANVILETTE KESTENBAUM, 63, talks to her friend DARLENE GRIGGS, 76

  Granvilette Kestenbaum: Howard and I met on Friday the thirteenth, 1969. He fell on me at a party, and I thought he was the goofiest guy I’d ever met in my life. He was a student at Columbia working on a PhD in astrophysics, but I didn’t believe him. He said he was twenty-five—he didn’t look twenty-five. He had a shirt that was so rumpled, and he had these old stovepipe jeans on and a pair of shoes, one of which had many, many, many rubber bands wrapped around it because the sole was coming apart. When I was going to leave the party he said, “I’ll walk you home,” and I thought, What did I do to deserve this? I don’t want you to walk me home! And so he walked my friend and I home—I lived at that time in a girls’ residence on West Eleventh Street in the Village—and my friend and I stayed up and talked about what a goofball he was. So some weeks later he called me, and he said, “Hello, this is Howie,” and I said, “Howie who?” And he said, “Fine, thank you. Howie you?”

  He later told me that he would come down after work in the lab up at Columbia and go up and down the steps, looking at the mailboxes to find my name, because he couldn’t remember where I lived. But I wouldn’t date him. I wouldn’t. I just thought, I can’t walk around with this guy.

  So he would sit on my steps, and when I came out with a date he would say, Hi, how are you? And he would introduce himself and say, I hope you have a really good time. And my date would say, Who is that? And I’d say, Oh, he’s just some guy. When I came back he’d still be sitting there. And I still wouldn’t date him. At one point he got some helium balloons and he floated them up—I was on the second or third floor—and they said GRAN, PLEASE COME OUT. The girls thought that was wonderful, but I was embarrassed to death. I thought, This guy is really crazy!

  Finally, the lady who was in charge of the residence said, “You’ve got to get that guy out of here!” She said, “Give him a date, for god’s sake—get it over with!” So I went out and I said, “I’ll date you someday.” He said, “No, you’ll forget me. You’ve got to date me now.” So he said dinner. I said, “Oh, no, no, I’m not dating you for dinner.” I said, “How about lunch?” He came on a Saturday for lunch, and we went to Washington Square, and he had a package of crystal mint LifeSavers and some seltzer, and he split the LifeSavers in half and he drank half of the seltzer, an
d then he handed me the can. But the next year, in June of 1970, we were married. And then for thirty-one years we were together.

  Howard at heart was always an astrophysicist. He got his PhD, but then some years later switched to business. Howard wanted to share what was happening in the skies with me, and it was always happening in the dead of winter. We would go outside at about three in the morning in the freezing cold, waiting for some phenomena. After the third time I learned to say, “Yes, I see it! It is wonderful!” and we got to go inside much quicker, and we stayed married.

  He started asking me maybe six weeks before 9/11, “Do you love me, honey?” And I said, “You will always have my deep and abiding love.” I don’t know why I said that. I’m glad I did.

  On that day, September eleventh, I got up with Howard at five in the morning. For some reason, we had a little tiff, and when he left, he said, “I love you,” but I didn’t say it. He rounded that corner and I never saw him again.

  Darlene Griggs: If you could say something to Howard right now, what would you say?

  Granvilette: I would say to him, “How dare you take yourself out of our lives? We didn’t need the money. I’d live with you in a horrible building with an elevator that didn’t work and we’d have to walk up eighteen flights of steps.” We were supposed to grow old together. We were looking forward to it.

  I picture him with his beautiful silver hair. I see him, and I love him still. That’s never going to change. And when I see him I try to just hold that picture in my mind. And he’s always going to be fifty-six in my mind. I’m going to be an old, shriveled-up mess, but he will be fifty-six.

  People talk about closure. There is no closure when you lose a loved one. I don’t care how you lost them, your heart is always open. Edna St. Vincent Millay wrote something that affected me. It says, “Where you used to be, there is a hole in the world, which I find myself constantly walking around in the daytime, and falling into at night. I miss you like hell.”

  Recorded in New York, New York, on July 16, 2010.

  BEVERLY ECKERT, 55, remembers her husband, SEAN ROONEY

  Beverly Eckert: Sean had warm brown eyes and dark curly hair. He was a good hugger, one of those people that are just comfortable to be around, and a favorite wherever he went. I used to tell him I thought my family liked him more than they liked me.

  He had a cerebral job, but in his spare time he liked to do really tangible things, like carpentry and plumbing, electrical, masonry—you name it. He loved to cook too. I keep rosemary in the kitchen now because the aroma reminds me of this marinade he made for grilled steak. He used our Weber grill year-round, even in the winter, even in the rain. He would be out there with an umbrella in one hand and his steak tongs in the other.

  There are things I can picture so clearly still. Early evening on a summer night: We’re relaxing before dinner, sitting next to each other on the stone step out back, and we each have a glass of wine. We’re just watching the fireflies rise out of the lawn, steak on the grill, and we’re talking and laughing.

  Sean and I were together for thirty-four years. We met when we were only sixteen at a high school dance. He died at fifty. I try not to think about what I lost but what I had. For Sean and me, fate, in a way, was merciful. I know what happened to Sean, because he was able to reach me by phone from where he was trapped in the South Tower.

  I was at home. I had left work when I heard about the towers getting hit. It was about 9:30 A.M. when he called. When I heard his voice on the phone, I was so happy. I said, “Sean, where are you?” thinking that he had made it out, and that he was calling me from the street somewhere. He told me he was on the 105th floor, and I knew right away that Sean was never coming home.

  He was very calm. He was very focused. He told me he had been trying to find a way out and what he wanted was information. So I relayed to him what I could see on TV, what floor the flames had reached and on what side of the building. I also used my other phone, my cell phone, and called 911 and told them where Sean was and that he needed to be rescued. Sean told me that initially he was with some people that tried to escape by going down the stairs, but they had to turn back because of the smoke and the heat. They headed for the roof, but when they got there they found that the roof doors were locked.

  He told me the other people were now in a conference room and that he was alone. I asked him to go back and try the roof doors again, to pound on them, and that somebody on the other side would hear him. I said, “The doors couldn’t be locked. They are emergency doors.” We both remembered the helicopter rescues from the roof at the ’93 bombing.

  Sean was gone for maybe five minutes, and then he came back to the phone. He hadn’t had any success, and now the stairwell was full of smoke—he had actually passed out for a few minutes while pounding on the doors.

  There was a building in flames underneath him, but Sean didn’t even flinch. He stayed composed, talking to me, just talking to me the way he always did. I will always be in awe of the way he faced death. Not an ounce of fear: not when the windows around him were getting too hot to touch; not when the smoke was making it hard to breathe. He will always be a hero to me because of that.

  By now we had stopped talking about escape routes. I wanted to use the precious few minutes we had left just to talk. I knew it was time to say good-bye. He told me to give his love to his family, and then we just began talking about all the happiness we shared during our lives together, how lucky we were to have each other. I told him that I wanted to be there with him and die with him, but he said no. He wanted me to live a full life. At one point, when I could tell it was getting harder for him to breathe, I asked if it hurt. He paused for a moment, and then said, “No.” He loved me enough to lie.

  In the end, as the smoke got thicker, he just kept whispering, “I love you,” over and over. I was pressing the phone to my ear as hard as I could. I wanted to crawl through the phone lines to him to hold him one last time. Then I suddenly heard this loud explosion through the phone. It reverberated for several seconds. We held our breath; I know we both realized what was about to happen. Then I heard a sharp crack, followed by the sound of an avalanche. It was the building beginning to collapse. I heard Sean gasp once as the floor fell out from underneath him. I called his name into the phone over and over. Then I just sat there huddled on the floor of our living room just holding the phone to my heart.

  I remember how I didn’t want that day to end, terrible as it was. I didn’t want to go to sleep, because as long as I was awake it was still a day that I shared with Sean, still a day where he had kissed me good-bye before leaving for work. I could still say, That was just a little while ago. That was only this morning. I knew there would never ever be another day where I could say that.

  I think about that last half hour with Sean all the time. It traumatized me to the core of my being, but it was also a gift. My last memory that I have of Sean isn’t about pain or fear, but it’s about bravery and selflessness and, most of all, about love.

  Recorded in New York, New York, on November 19, 2006.

  Beverly Eckert died when Continental flight 3407 crashed near Buffalo on February 12, 2009.

  Found at Last

  HILDA CHACÓN, 49, talks with her husband, PEDRO MORÁN-PALMA, 48

  Hilda Chacón: So tell me, Calvito, what did you think when you first met me almost twenty years ago?

  Pedro Morán-Palma: I saw there was a beautiful lady sitting in this party. At first I thought that you were with somebody. Then I saw that it was my roommate who was bothering you, and I tried to rescue you.

  Hilda: I was wearing a short skirt, and he insisted that I go up the stairs so he would see me from behind, and I got so mad that I was ready to beat him up. But you came to my rescue and pulled him away. I remember you apologized for him being so rude and drunk, and I just started saying, Ugh! Men! And you said
, “Not all men are like that.” “Yes, they are!”

  We sat there at the top of the stairs, and we started talking like no one else was there. I told you I was visiting from Costa Rica, that I was divorced, that I had a kid that I really loved. And then I started talking about men, saying, “I don’t know why people get married, you know? You marry a guy and you have to put up with so much crap!” How come I didn’t scare you?

  Pedro: You were fascinating. I was mesmerized, I think is the right word. You were the most intelligent, creative woman I’d ever seen in my life.

  Hilda: It’s funny, because when I met you I was totally sure that love did not exist. But there you were, with this exquisite sensibility and sensitivity. You came over with this calm attitude, very gentle, very sweet, and I felt like you could sense what I had gone through. Still, I thought to myself, this man is bald! I had always said I could never, never be with a bald guy. And there you were, becoming the most handsome man on earth. You have a little less hair than then, but I still think you’re the most handsome man alive.

  Pedro: It’s hard for people to believe that we only dated for ten days.

  Hilda: We cried profusely at the Phoenix airport when we said good-bye. I just thought, This man is great, but he’s here. My life is in Costa Rica: My baby is there, my friends are there, my family is there, my life is there. So it’s too bad.

  A week later you called, and you said that you had gotten a ticket to Costa Rica, and that you were coming.

  Pedro: My friends were saying that I was crazy. At some point I thought, Maybe this is too much. But suddenly I said to myself, This is my opportunity. Because it’s something that my whole body was telling me: You got to do this! This is the most wonderful thing that’s going to happen in your life—you cannot let this go! So that’s when I decided to visit you in Costa Rica.