I knew that Manhattan was covered with posters of the missing, including our mayor’s husband. Our minister volunteered at Ground Zero and referred often to his experiences in his sermons. The New York Times brought “Portraits in Grief” obituaries every morning, which were written to capture the beauty of everyday people before they became “no more.” I also read 9/11 accounts over the years, inspired by the heroic actions of ordinary people. Books such as 102 Minutes by Jim Dwyer and Kevin Flynn and The Looming Tower by Lawrence Wright helped me understand more about the people we lost that morning and the historical context of the terrorism.
I mourned, looking at the photos of the silenced smiling at graduations, at birthday parties, on vacations, and with their friends and families.
Every picture cracked a new facet in the unbearable lightness of being. Christine Lee Hanson looked at me from her bedroom, next to a pile of stuffed animals and against a wallpaper background of giraffes and lions. At two years old, she was the youngest victim of 9/11 and could have easily passed as my own daughter, a baby sister to my two boys who are also of Asian and European parentage. She had boarded United Flight 175 from Boston’s Logan airport with her parents and was on her way to visit her grandparents in Los Angeles. Christine Olender was the 39-year old Assistant Manager of Windows of the World, the restaurant at the top of Tower. She had placed several calls to 911-dispatch, maintaining an airtight professionalism over a surging desperation as she sought help for the restaurant’s staff and their 170 guests.
“We need to find a safe haven on [floor] 106, where the smoke condition isn’t bad. Can you direct us to a certain quadrant?”
No information is available. She is told to wait. In her final call, she asks,
“What are we going to do for air? Can we break a window?”
She gets permission to break a window.
At the 75th floor Sky Lobby in Tower 2, Karen Hagerty had stood in the elevator but allowed others to take her place after hearing them cry out that they had children to care for.
“I have only a horse and two cats,” she joked as she stepped out of the elevator.
She was killed when Tower 2 was struck only minutes after saying those words.
HVWP COMMONPLACE 19
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