Living With Loss

Shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks, reporters at The New York Times began interviewing friends and relatives of the people whose lives had so suddenly been ended. The result was “Portraits of Grief,” a collection of brief sketches of the victims. These fresh visits with some of the families were written by Glenn Collins, Anthony DePalma, Robin Finn, Jan Hoffman, N. R. Kleinfield, Maria Newman and Janny Scott, all contributors to the original “Portraits of Grief” project in 2001.

He’s Always 31
LUIS EDUARDO TORRES

Alissa Torres has now lived without him three times longer than she was his wife, and sometimes, she admits, it’s kind of shocking to realize he actually existed. “I think of him every day,” Ms. Torres said, “but sometimes he seems like something I might have made up.”

When her husband, Eduardo, put in his first day of work at Cantor Fitzgerald on Sept. 10, 2001, Ms. Torres was pregnant with their son, Joshua, who was born a few weeks later, on Oct. 31. The death and the birth were so close it made rebuilding her life especially difficult. She found a new Manhattan apartment. She took Josh to a new park to play with new friends. She chatted with a new group of mothers. She even found herself lying to the women, letting them believe that Eddie still worked on Wall Street, just so she didn’t have to explain it all again.

Then she wrote a book about her experiences, a sometimes funny, sometimes acerbic graphic novel that she called “American Widow.” Talking about the book made it easier to talk about her widowhood and, when she was ready, her 9/11 story.

Writing the book also gave her a way to protect Eddie. “It felt good to stick him in a book; he’s safe in there,” she said. In her book, he’s always 31 years old. She’s now 44, a single mother of a curious 10-year-old whom she has tried to shield from the worst parts of the past. For years she’s refused to have a television in the house, and she met with Josh’s teachers at the start of each school year so they didn’t unknowingly bring up anything that might trouble him. “All those years I was protecting him and the story, but that’s changing now,” she said. “I’m no longer protecting him from everything, but finding the tools for him to cope.”

Tools that she, too, intends to use.

Read the original portrait for Luis Eduardo Torres here.

Honoring Their Father
KEVIN DOWDELL

In the grim early days, Kevin Dowdell’s sons, Patrick, then 18, and James, 17, would go to ground zero to dig alongside the firefighters. Maybe they would find the body of their father, a lieutenant with Rescue Company 4 in Queens. But his remains were never recovered.

But each time they stood in silence as another fallen comrade came out on a stretcher, RoseEllen Dowdell’s two sons felt they were honoring their father. The boys — Patrick on bagpipes and James on snare — would play in the Fire Department’s pipe band at the 9/11 funerals, sometimes two, three a day.

After graduating from college, James became a firefighter and is now in a master’s program in fire protection services at John Jay College. He volunteers for organizations that adapt homes for veterans who are amputees. He will turn 27 on Sept. 10.

After graduating from West Point, Patrick, now married, did one tour in Iraq as a platoon leader, and a second as a captain in Afghanistan. “Those years were so nerve-racking,” said Mrs. Dowdell, who still lives in the family home in Breezy Point, Queens.

Patrick came home for good in March and is now enrolled in a master’s program at New York University.

One day in May, James called his mother excitedly: “They got Osama!” Her boys grabbed the bagpipes and rushed to ground zero. Patrick played “The Army Goes Rolling Along,” “God Bless America” and, especially for his father, “Amazing Grace.”

“Both boys were really happy that he had been caught and killed,” Mrs. Dowdell said. “For Patrick, having been in the Army, that was their mission.” Then, she added quietly, “But it just didn’t do for me what it did for them. It didn’t change a thing.”

Read the original portrait for Kevin Dowdell here.

The Legend of Uncle F. T.
FRANK THOMAS AQUILINO

F.T. (which must have stood for Fun Times) would have insisted that his Staten Island family keep the party going, and his older sister, Tara Chiari, did her best.

She laughed during the video his friends edited of F.T. at a wedding, hogging the mike and calling hilarious shout-outs.  There were five years of a fund-raising golf tournament for a scholarship in his name at York College. There was the annual celebration of F.T.’s birthday, with his buddies taking her father out for steak and stories.

Rather than attending  9/11 family hearings or ground zero rallies, she determinedly focused on honoring F.T.’s  puckish spirit. It was an effort she embraced and cherished. And then she learned about her pregnancy.

Death at the twin towers? This, the Aquilino clan decided, was F. T.’s joyful retort: Mrs. Chiari was expecting twins.

So along with the birth of the girls, now 6, was born the Legend of Zio (Italian for “uncle”) F. T. — Frank Thomas Aquilino, 26, a vice president at Cantor Fitzgerald. Zio F. T., the patron saint of giggling, naughty children who toboggan down staircases, throw bread balls at restaurants and even put toddler cousins in large salad bowls and spin them across floors.

These days, the Aquilinos love sharing (tall) tales about Zio F. T. When Mrs. Chiari’s daughters were in Mommy’s belly, she told them, Zio F. T. came down from heaven, whispered that he loved them, and then said, “Shhhh,” putting his finger on their lips, leaving that sweet indent, so they would know he was always there.

“I tell them, ‘If you go to sleep, you can dream about Zio F. T. and he’ll play with you,’ “ Mrs. Chiari said. “And they say, ‘Can we jump on the furniture with him?’ And I say, ‘Of course!’ ”

Read the original portrait for Frank Thomas Aquilino here.

‘Never Turn Down an Invitation’
DENNIS M. CAREY

Jean Carey has never felt overwhelmed by the constant reminders of 9/11 and the loss of her husband, Dennis M. Carey, who was a firefighter. “I embraced it,” she said.

Mrs. Carey has at times been despondent at the loss of her partner of more than 30 years. She has not remarried, and she lives in the same house in Wantagh, on Long Island, surrounded by mementos of their life together. But you won’t find her sitting at home feeling sorry for herself.

“I’m so healed,” she said. “I really am so healed about the whole situation.” Mrs. Carey is in touch with several other widows of fallen firefighters, and she participates in every event she is invited to for the survivors of the victims, or events held by her husband’s old firehouse, Hazardous Materials Company 1 in Maspeth, Queens. Right after 9/11, she recalled, “I had an older widow say to me, ‘Never turn down an invitation.’ Believe me, I don’t.”

She has traveled to Europe and to Hawaii with other firefighters’ widows. She has been to the weddings of other firefighters’ children, and to company picnics and dinner dances and Mets games. “I attend everything,” she said. “I picked up where Dennis and I left off.”

Every year on Sept. 11, Mrs. Carey and several friends and family members follow a similar ritual: They rent several rooms at the Millenium Hilton on Church Street near the trade center site, and they attend Mass at St. Patrick’s Cathedral. They have lunch at Jim Brady’s, and then they go for drinks at McSorley’s at 3:43 p.m. — the hour a nod to the number of firefighters who lost their lives that day, 343.

This year, she donated some of the firefighting equipment that her husband had at home to the museum at the World Trade Center site. But she decided she would hold on to his helmet.

Read the original portrait for Dennis M. Carey here.

Flowers for Beth’s Garden
ELIZABETH C. LOGLER

When 10 years feels like one day, as it has for Claire Logler after losing her daughter, Beth, there’s no reason to rush. She’s thought about taking the clothes out of the closet in the bedroom that was — no, is — Beth’s room, but then she always thinks there’s no need to do so just yet. “Someday,” she said, “but not right now,” as though that last morning were just yesterday morning.

But the years have passed, and the pain, though still present, is less raw than before. Lives go on, and at the high school that Beth so loved, Sacred Heart Academy in Hempstead on Long Island, Mr. and Mrs. Logler recently had to describe to the new principal the character of the bright, ambitious and very beautiful girl for whom Beth’s Garden, in the back of the school, is named. Mrs. Logler regularly places flowers at the memorial on the Rockville Centre village green so that Beth’s name — one of 48 there — fulfills the words of the Scottish poet Thomas Campbell carved on the granite: “To live in hearts we leave behind is not to die.”

Every Sept. 10, the Loglers spend the night in Manhattan, in the two-bedroom Tudor City apartment that Beth, who worked at eSpeed, was decorating before her planned marriage on Dec. 30, 2001, to Doug Cleary. And early each Sept. 11 morning, before the Loglers head for ground zero, they meet Mr. Cleary in the building lobby. He hasn’t stepped inside the apartment for 10 years. Now 43, he has not married, though he hasn’t ruled it out. In 2002, he saw to it that a bench in one of Tudor City’s parks bears a plaque with Beth’s name on it. Her memory is with him always. “I don’t try to dwell on it,” he said, “but I don’t choose to bury the memory either.”

Read the original portrait for Elizabeth C. Logler here.

A Few Steps, Then a Walk
MARK MOTRONI

Mark Motroni was a self-made Cuban-born bon vivant, salsa musician and softball ringer who traded crude-oil options for Carr Futures and perished while attending a twice-a-year meeting on the 92nd floor of the north tower. Ten years later, all three of his sons have forsaken Wall Street for parenting.

The youngest, Christopher, 33, is the only child Mark had with his second wife, Emily; the three lived together in Fort Lee, N.J.

Chris said he “found out firsthand what he meant when he told me that if anything ever happened to him, he was counting on me to take care of my mom.” He quit his stockbroker job on State Street because he couldn’t bear the view of ground zero; for a while he worked at the Mercantile Exchange “in a spot in the pit that was literally five feet away from where my father used to stand.

“Time allows you to take that first step, and then you take two steps, and before you know it, you’ve gone on a walk.”

Chris and his wife, Jeanine, now have a 14-month-old son, Christopher Marco; they live a block from his mother, and he runs his own commodities brokerage in Hoboken, N.J.

The middle brother, George, 43, left his job as a commodities trader to become a stay-at-home father of two in Astoria; the oldest, Mark, 45, saw his job as a floor broker marginalized three years ago “when the pits went electronic.”

“I left the easiest job in the world to do the hardest job: raise my kids,” Mark said from his home in Manhasset on Long Island. “The worst thing about this, now that I’m a father myself, is that I know my dad would have been the greatest grandfather of all time.”

Read the original portrait for Mark Motroni here.

Amid the Challenges, Giving Back
ROBERT J. MAYO

“Keep moving forward,” Meryl Mayo’s mother used to tell her. “Remember what happened, but don’t keep looking back.”

So, after the death of her husband, Robert J. Mayo, a deputy fire safety director at the World Trade Center, Ms. Mayo carried on, the working mother of their young son, Corbin. On an online dating site, she met a widower, Craig Marshall, with two sons of his own. She sold her house. They married. They blended their families. Over time, Meryl Mayo-Marshall stopped wondering, “What would Rob have done?” And, after Corbin left for college, she became simply Meryl Marshall.

Life sometimes buffets you forward, as it happens. Ms. Marshall was found to have breast cancer; her husband was laid off; her mother died and her father followed. But now, 10 years after 9/11, Ms. Marshall is cancer-free. She and her husband have their own business, based in their New Jersey town. Her relationships with her family are strong. She follows her mother’s dictum. But she gives back — checks to strangers in need, phone cards for hospitalized veterans, notes of encouragement to soldiers.

“We are a 9/11 family,” she writes. “We appreciate your service.”

It makes her happy.

Read the original portrait for Robert J. Mayo here.

‘A Lot of Hope Out There’
JAMES LADLEY

It was a year before she stopped crying every day. It took nearly three for the bitterness to ebb.

The cascade of emotions, though, persists for Sheri Ladley-Calamusa, who lost her husband, James Ladley, 41, a bond broker at Cantor Fitzgerald.

“The emotional tidal wave comes up, and the current pulls you back in,” she said. “It’s always there. The anxiety, the stress, the worry that comes of having lost someone — it’s always there.”

She had two small children, Elizabeth and James, and with her husband’s full support, she had opened a dance academy in their town of Colts Neck, N.J. She contemplated closing it, but then decided that meant she would be “closing the door on my life. I had all these dreams with my husband, and I wasn’t going to end them.”

The academy goes on. Elizabeth, now 14, is an assistant teacher there.

Sheri Ladley didn’t date for three years. Then she met a man, Frank Calamusa, a product manager at a pharmaceutical company. Six months later, they got married. They have a daughter, Katherine, 4. Her middle name is Hope. “I found love again, and I realized there’s a lot of hope out there for me and my children,” said Ms. Ladley-Calamusa, now 43.

She keeps a hope chest of items that were important to her husband: quilts made out of his shirts, pillows made from his ties, his hole-in-one ball. Plus the one possession plucked from the twin towers residue: his watch. She was able to identify it because she had the serial number. The glass on the case is unbroken. It kept running until 2:47 on Sept. 12.

Read the original portrait for James Ladley here.

Healing Through Service
BRADY KAY HOWELL

She was subsumed in uncertainty and isolated from expectation.

“After 9/11, it was not clear to me what my purpose was,” said Elizabeth Howell, 35. “There were many nights when I was on my knees.”

This led her to a recognition: “People can take away your loved ones. But they can’t take away the way you respond to things.”

Her husband, Brady Kay Howell, 26, worked at the Pentagon as a presidential management intern assigned to the chief of naval intelligence. She was a staff assistant for the House Committee on Natural Resources, and had previously been a nurse. They lived in Arlington, Va.

After his death, she returned to school to become a nurse practitioner. A member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, she volunteered in 2006 to serve an 18-month mission for the church and was dispatched to Portugal.

When she finished, replenished, she moved to Salt Lake City to work for the church in its humanitarian department. She traveled throughout Africa and to Haiti after the catastrophic earthquake.

“I’m not an expert on grief,” she said. “I’m not an expert on trials and tribulations. But I’m acquainted with them. I felt I needed to do something for others.”

She said: “One thing I’ve learned is that it’s all about service. That’s what has healed my heart. Everyone has their own course. I don’t want it to seem — look at what I’ve done. This has just been my path.”

Read the original portrait for Brady Kay Howell here.

Fulfilling a Couple’s Plans
MATTHEW MCDERMOTT

Matthew Michael McDermott was born on March 22, 2002. He is named after his father, Matthew, 34, and his father’s boss, Michael Rothberg, 39. Both men worked at Cantor Fitzgerald, had the same birthday and died on Sept. 11, 2001. “We say that’s Daddy’s birthday in heaven,” said Susan McDermott, the boy’s mother.

Mrs. McDermott still lives in the home the couple built in Basking Ridge, N.J. In every room there are family pictures with him. But the life that Mrs. McDermott has created for her children, Matthew Michael, 9, Kelly, 12, and Kara, 13, feels less like a shrine than a celebratory fulfillment of the couple’s plans.

“I know what Matt wants me to do,” Mrs. McDermott said. “What schools he wants for the kids, the songs he wants to dance at their weddings.”

Mr. McDermott continues to be present to his children, through stories that she, his friends and even the parents of Mr. Rothberg, who treat Mrs. McDermott’s children as surrogate grandchildren, recount with such precision that even young Matthew Michael thinks he was there when they happened.

Every year on 9/11, she keeps the children in school, to the shock of some. The family finds some way through nature to mark Daddy’s birthday in heaven: one year a new kitten, another a puppy, a pond in the backyard, the 100-gallon fish tank.

She had never taken them to ground zero. But this year, May 27, Daddy’s birthday on earth, was the Friday of Memorial Day weekend. No school. With a deep breath, Mrs. McDermott took them into the city. The family stood in an office of a friend of Mr. McDermott’s that overlooked the site, which now includes a giant cascading waterfall and a life-affirming forest of trees. “They were mesmerized by the beauty,” Mrs. McDermott said.

Read the original portrait for Matthew McDermott here.

‘Still There Every Day’
JASON CAYNE

In the immediate sorrow and confusion, Gina Cayne was overwhelmed trying to keep things together. Her husband, Jason Cayne, had been a partner at Cantor Fitzgerald. She had three small children. The oldest, who was 7, said to her, “If we lose the house, Daddy’s spirit isn’t going to know where to find us.”

The world came to help the 9/11 families. But Ms. Cayne knew that wasn’t true for others trapped in tragedy. So in 2003, she started the Jason David Cayne Foundation to assist families in Monmouth County, N.J., where she lived.

The foundation helped anyone with children under 18 who lost a spouse suddenly — a situation that simulated her own — by giving emotional support and paying three months’ rent or mortgage, up to $9,000. One of its first recipients was the family of a man who died of a heart attack while playing basketball at a barbecue.

The foundation helped 35 families before Ms. Cayne closed it in 2009. By then, she had moved to Boca Raton, Fla., where she hoped it would be easier to begin a new life. “I felt satisfied,” she said. “I felt it was O.K. to stop it.”

She continues to feel her own loss. She met her husband when she was just 15. “Even though I’m here in Florida, he’s still there every day,” she said.

On her husband’s birthday and on Sept. 11, she and her children always write messages to Mr. Cayne and affix them to balloons and release them. Ms. Cayne plays their song, “Keep On Loving You,” by REO Speedwagon. And they go out for Buffalo wings and beer, his favorite meal. The children skip the beer.

Read the original portrait for Jason Cayne here.

Family Headquarters Remain
PETER J. O’NEILL JR.

Peter J. O’Neill Jr. was 21 and in the nascent stages of a career in finance that might very well have segued into a career as an E.M.T.: that’s how torn he was between making money and making people’s lives better. He would, as the family saying went, try out the new job for a year, working as a trader at his uncle’s firm, Sandler O’Neill & Partners at 2 World Trade Center, and then, if he wasn’t smitten, he could exit Wall Street much the way his father had a decade or so earlier. Peter J. O’Neill Sr. went back to Long Island to be a painting contractor and his own boss; still is.

His father and mother, Jeanne, both raced home from work on the morning of 9/11 after receiving a disturbing call from him. He promised he’d get out all right and call back when he did, but when they turned on their television and watched the south tower fall, Peter said to Jeanne: “Say goodbye to our buddy.”

They are constantly reminded of their lost son, the oldest of three children, often with laughter, at times with shared tears. “The five of us had been such a unit,” Jeanne said. “We each felt the same way about him. He was a gift.”

After their daughter, Bridie, now 29, and son Tommy, 26, went to college, the O’Neills downsized from a five-bedroom home in Amityville to a smaller place they refer to as their retirement home. Jeanne notes that Bridie and Tommy accepted the move, so long as family headquarters remains in Amityville. “We want to grow old with our two children and eventually with their children, our grandchildren,” she said.

When Tommy told them he was considering a Wall Street career, they did not dissuade him. “It wasn’t Wall Street that took my son Peter, it was the terrorists,” Jeanne said. But serendipity intervened: Early on, Tommy had been introduced to golf by the two Peters, junior and senior, and after college he earned his P.G.A. card and is now a teaching golf pro at an Illinois club. “The halos on all three of our kids were crooked numerous amounts of the time,” Jeanne said, “and so were ours, but we raised three really special people.”

Read the original portrait for Peter J. O'Neill Jr. here.

A Softball Legacy
ANGEL R. PENA

Many mornings begin the same way they did 10 years ago — Michele Pena hears the crack of a ball hit hard by a young girl filled with notions of game and glory in the softball field near the Pena home in River Vale, N.J.

Except now the name of Mrs. Pena’s husband, Angel, who coached there, who oversaw countless practice sessions there, and who even cut the grass there to make sure the field was good enough for play, is painted on the scoreboard. It is his name on every season’s Angel Pena Coaching Award. And it is his name that is attached to the River Vale Softball and Baseball Association’s annual Angel Pena spring tournament.

This year, Melissa Pena, now 20, decided to help coach a team in the tournament named for her father that she had competed in for so many years. At sunrise before the first game, she and her sister, Sara, helped their mother put up red, white and blue bunting around the field, just as their father had done.

“She was out the first round, which was fine,” Mrs. Pena recalled. What really mattered, she said, was the feeling of peace and pride that she and the girls felt that morning, with their decorations around the field, and a Pena coaching, just as it was a decade ago.

Despite being surrounded by so many reminders of Mr. Pena, the three women were long in denial about his death. Only recently have they started to fully come to grips with the fact that he is never coming back.

“We talk, we laugh and we smile more than we cry these days,” Mrs. Pena said. “And that’s a good thing.”

Read the original portrait for Angel R. Pena here.

Days of Tears and Laughter
ROSANNE AND BRENDAN LANG

Every time William Lang visits the grave of his son, Brendan Lang, who died at age 30, he pays his respect to others, too. “I always turn around and say a prayer for Rodney at the same time,” Mr. Lang said, referring to Rodney Wooten, a neighbor and friend, who also died on 9/11 and is buried near his son. Then, he says, “I go and visit the stone we have for my sister Rosanne.”

Grief came in big doses that day for the Lang family, which lost Brendan and Rosanne, and it came in a huge dose for their hometown, Middletown, N.J., which lost 37 residents.

Every Sept. 11, for almost 10 years, the Langs have attended their town’s 9/11 memorial, and a Mass that is celebrated in the name of those who lost their lives that day. Then the family has an open house. It’s two or three days of “tears and laughter,” Mr. Lang says.

Brendan Lang was a project manager for a company called Structure Tone, and he was doing a final walkthrough on a project at the World Trade Center on 9/11. He spoke to his parents after the first plane hit. In the years of going over that last conversation again and again, his father still thinks Brendan went to look for his aunt Rosanne Lang, 42, who was an equities trader at Cantor Fitzgerald.

Mr. Lang and Rosanne are from a family of 12 siblings who grew up in Brooklyn but eventually moved to Middletown, where his parents still live. William Lang had four children of his own, and Brendan was his second oldest. His oldest son, Sean, who was Brendan’s “Irish twin” because they were only about a year apart, feels cheated because he thinks his children should have grown up with Brendan’s children, Mr. Lang says.

Brendan had been married three years, and had no children.

“To be truthful with you, 10 years just marks the passage of time,” Mr. Lang said. “These deaths are so public, and they never go away. It’s 9/11 twice a day on the clock. It always seems like you’re looking at the clock at that time.”

Getting through every year is ultimately about letting go of the past. Brendan’s widow, Sandy, has since remarried and has started a family, and Mr. Lang hears from her every now and then, he said. Rosanne had one son, Michael, who is now 27.

“You know it’s something you have to go through,” Mr. Lang said about learning to live with loss. “You can’t go around it.”

Read the original portraits for Rosanne and Brendan Lang here.

‘He Always Dreamed of Being a Pilot’
CHARLES F. BURLINGAME III

How to comprehend one of the more heartbreaking incongruities of Sept. 11, 2001, when Capt. Charles F. Burlingame III, who had served 25 years in the Navy, was in the cockpit of American Airlines Flight 77? That morning it crashed into the very building where he had long worked during the Persian Gulf war — the Pentagon.

Captain Burlingame would have turned 52 on the day after the terrorist attacks, and his decade-long absence is deeply felt. Aside from the loss to his brothers and sister, to his wife, Sheri, and to his grandson Jack, now age 14, “he left a void,” Debra A. Burlingame, the captain’s sister, said. Her brother had long mentored pilots, Naval Academy students and airline flight crews.

It was unfathomable when Captain Burlingame’s only daughter, Wendy, was killed at the age of 32. That was in a fire in an apartment complex in Guttenberg, N.J., three months after the fifth anniversary of Sept. 11.

“He always dreamed of being a pilot; that was all he ever wanted to do,” Ms. Burlingame said of her brother.

She became an outspoken advocate for Sept. 11 families and was a founding board member of the original World Trade Center memorial foundation, and continues in that role. And she helped battle for her brother’s right to be granted a full military burial at Arlington National Cemetery, where he was laid to rest in December 2001.

“It’s so important to remember who he was,” Ms. Burlingame said. “To remember who all of them were.”

That’s why Tom Lombardo, an American Airlines pilot who was Captain Burlingame’s close friend, still wears his comrade’s surviving set of captain’s shoulder boards. On every flight.

Read the original portrait for Charles F. Burlingame III here.