Remembering, From a Distance

RICK CAHILL has gone back once, just once, since that bright, terrible day five years ago when he stood a few blocks away and watched the north tower collapse and take his eldest son with it. He does not plan to go back again tomorrow. He has someplace else he would rather be, nearer to where his son lived than to where he died.

Mr. Cahill and his son Scott were in the municipal bond business, commuters to Lower Manhattan from their home in West Caldwell, and he was working at his office on Rector Street when the first plane hit the World Trade Center. Scott was on the 104th floor of the north tower, in the offices of Cantor Fitzgerald. Mr. Cahill kept trying the cellphone, but got nothing. He made it back across the river to New Jersey by ferry that day, then home to the town where he had raised his family, and where he found comfort in his sorrow.

Before a year had passed, Mr. Cahill was standing in Crane Park, the central green by the West Caldwell municipal building, speaking at the dedication of a memorial to Scott and the two other town residents killed at the World Trade Center. “Let us remember how we felt when we became one as a community, in caring thoughtfulness for one another,” he said that day.

That memorial is where he’ll be Monday evening, laying a wreath at a bronze plaque engraved with his son’s name on a shin-high brick pedestal beside a flagpole.

“I’m sure there will be plenty of people going to the events at ground zero, but that just hasn’t been our style,” Mr. Cahill said. “It was the local community that came out and supported my family during those weeks.”

And it was local communities that were the quickest to find ways to remember the victims of the Sept. 11 attacks. While the place where they died remains empty, the center of often rancorous debate, the places where they lived — the places they left that morning for what turned out to be the last time — now abound with memorials. Hundreds of statues, monuments, gardens, walls, athletic fields, street signs, post offices, parks, road races, charity walks, golf outings, scholarships — these are the links in a necklace of grief that encircles the trade center site.

“Ground zero seems like the last place anybody is getting a memorial,” said Blaise Batko, a sculptor in Hamilton Square, N.J., who designed 9/11 memorials for five New Jersey towns. “It seemed like the smaller the town, the greater the sense of community. You might be just one person removed from the person who was lost.”

The small communities, Mr. Batko said, “were on this mission — we have to do this, and we have to do this now.”

DORINE TOYEN is a first-grade teacher, the kind of person who regularly checks in at the local library, and every time she visits the one in her hometown, Avon, Conn., she passes a bronze statue of a small, pigtailed girl sitting cross-legged on a pink granite bench, holding a teddy bear and reading a book.

“It’s the only thing we have — there was nothing found of her,” Ms. Toyen said of her daughter, Amy, who had flown in from her home near Boston to attend a trade show at Windows on the World, at the top of the north tower. Amy E. Toyen was 24, and engaged to marry her college boyfriend the following June.

The student government at Avon High School collected money and wanted to do something; Ms. Toyen saw a small sculpture of a reading girl by a local artist and gave photos of Amy at 5 years old to the sculptor. “It’s the size of what a 5-year-old would be, and it’s positioned so you can sit next to her,” Ms. Toyen said. “Little kids are just drawn to it.”

The statue was dedicated at the library a year after the attack. “It’s a little hard,” Ms. Toyen said about seeing it so often, “but it’s kind of a wonderful kind of hard.”

Amy Toyen’s name is also engraved on one of the 152 stone tiles set in the ground at the Connecticut state memorial — more greenery than granite, and accented by a lone, dignified black cherry tree — that occupies a grassy point between two beaches at Sherwood Island State Park in Westport. One recent morning, a cathedral light fell from the clouds to the east, but haze hid the Manhattan skyline across Long Island Sound. Some of the tiles had small offerings — flowers, stones and, on Judith Hofmiller’s, a single earring.

“It’s right where she used to bring her son when he was young,” said Rosemary Hofmiller, her sister-in-law, about the memorial’s location. Judith Hofmiller grew up in Orange, Conn., lived in Brookfield, and, at 53, worked as a software consultant for Marsh & McLennan. “Now I go there and it’s kind of ironic, how things come full circle.”

The families of the 109 Westchester County residents who died will dedicate their memorial this afternoon at Kensico Dam Plaza in Valhalla — 109 gleaming stainless steel rods rising individually from a circle of engraved granite blocks, twining up in a lattice vaguely shaped like the Eiffel Tower, then straightening at the top and joining into a soaring column like a rocket blast. Visitors can walk inside, where the inverted funnel pulls their gaze up to a heart-wrenching glimpse of a circle of sky.

“I’m waiting to watch the first child walk in and look up to heaven,” said Frederic Schwartz, the Manhattan architect who designed it, and who has perhaps thought more deeply and more eloquently than almost anyone else about the ways of giving shape to the memories of Sept. 11. He also designed the New Jersey state memorial — construction has just started at Liberty State Park in Jersey City — and was part of a team that was the runner-up in the competition to design a plan for the trade center site.

“Ground zero is very complicated, with all the different constituencies involved,” he said. “Here in Westchester, or in New Jersey, we don’t have those issues. We’re dealing with one thing here — with helping communities remember these lives.”

Rosaleen O’Neill of Rye was one of the family members on the committee that selected Mr. Schwartz’s design. “I’m not an artist, but I knew which one I liked the moment I saw it,” she said. “Memorials are for the living — isn’t that right?”

Her son, Sean — the youngest of her four children — was an equities trader for Cantor Fitzgerald, newly married, awaiting his first child, when he died at 34. “This is a hard time of the year,” Mrs. O’Neill said. Her husband died not quite a year later, and was buried on Sept. 11, 2002. “He gave up after Sean died. He died of a broken heart. People say it’s not possible to die of a broken heart, but yes, it is. I saw it happen.”

On Long Island, Nassau County hopes to dedicate its memorial, at Eisenhower Park in East Meadow, sometime this fall; it wasn’t ready in time for the fifth anniversary. Another large memorial is planned for the campus of Farmingdale State University, which straddles the border of Nassau and Suffolk counties.

“We want to have something that honors everybody on Long Island,” said Kenneth G. Dolan, one of two retired New York City firefighters who are leading the committee to build the Farmingdale memorial for the 455 Long Islanders among the victims. They have the land on campus and a design, but they need money, about $10 million. “Everything’s ready to go,” Mr. Dolan said. “We just need that oomph a large donor would give.”

One of those 455 Long Islanders was Kenneth J. Marino, a firefighter in Manhattan, where on the morning of Sept. 11 his wife and two young children surprised him with a brief visit not long before he was called to the trade center. A section of Weidner Avenue in Oceanside, where he grew up and where his parents still live, was renamed for him — an unmistakable red sign that crowns the green street sign.

“I just got married,” said his sister, Lynda Nislow, “and when the D.J. came to the house, the first thing he said was, ‘Who’s Kenneth Marino?’ The biggest fear is that people will forget, and here you look up for a second and you remember.”

Of the places where her brother is remembered, she’s especially fond of the memorial bench in Long Beach, which she often bikes past. “He was really happy when he was living there,” she said.

Long Beach, where Mr. Marino once served as a volunteer firefighter, has 700 benches along its two-mile boardwalk, and early in 2001 the city started offering a chance to claim them: In exchange for a donation, a brass plaque bearing a message would be affixed. After the attacks, many of the benches were claimed in honor of the dead. “My dad goes up there a lot and walks, and he stops and sits there,” Ms. Nislow said.

WHEN Rick Cahill landed back in New Jersey on the day he watched the towers fall, he found himself at Liberty State Park, a place he has kept going back to as a member of the committee for the state’s memorial, which has proven much harder to make a reality than the plaque in Crane Park. “The higher up you go, the more and more difficult it becomes,” he said.

Two stainless steel walls inscribed with the names of New Jersey’s 740 victims will cut through a grassy knoll to point directly at the spot where the towers once stood. “Your focus is on the trade center site, on remembering where your loved ones breathed their final breaths,” said Frederic Schwartz about the monument, which takes its name from a Bruce Springsteen song, “Empty Sky.”

Some Jersey City residents and officials recently protested the start of work at the site, arguing that the monument would block the view of Manhattan. Bruce Kane of Englewood, who was also on the committee and whose son Howard, 40, was the controller at Windows on the World, defended the monument at a recent public meeting. “I told them the names here don’t see the view of the New York skyline,” he said. “They can only look up.”

Jersey City’s own memorial — a granite slab on Grand Street engraved with the names of city residents who were killed — was at the center of a controversy recently, too, when it was removed to fix some errors, and the chairman of the committee that had raised the money for it filed a theft complaint against the city. The memorial was quietly returned this past week, corrected, and the charges were dropped.

Farther south in New Jersey, out on the crooked, beckoning finger of Sandy Hook, an unmarked gift quietly remembers Kenneth F. Tietjen, a Port Authority police officer who grew up in nearby Middletown. “He was born on the Fourth of July,” said his sister, Cindy Tietjen.

On the morning of Sept. 11, Mr. Tietjen led people out of the north tower, then grabbed a respirator and headed into the south one just before it fell. His family had an annual tradition of trying to brighten the Christmas of a needy family — he was the one with the truck big enough to deliver gifts like bicycles — and after his death, they established a foundation in his name to continue it. Three summers ago, they had an idea for another project.

“There were some people we knew who really loved the beach, but it was hard for them to get down to the water,” Cindy Tietjen said. The foundation gave $5,000 to the National Park Service to build wheelchair ramps onto the beach at parking area E.

As the lifeguards were tipping over their stands one recent evening, the stragglers reluctant to let go of another day at the beach were finally filing off. No wheelchairs were in sight, but everybody instinctively headed to the low, flat strips of boards. It’s hard to walk on shifting sands. The weathered wood put something solid beneath their feet.