Out Of The Ashes
By Gail Sheehy
11 September, 2003
The GuardianFor weeks after terrorists took down the World Trade Centre, Kevin Casey sneaked into the site late at night and crawled around the smoking pile looking for some sign that his wife, Kathy, was still alive. All he wanted to do, he said, was lie down beside her and go to sleep, to stop the pain. Kevin continued to work nights as a construction manager on the New York subway system. In the morning he would go home to Middletown, New Jersey, a sprawling suburb 20 miles south of what came to be known as Ground Zero. He would sit across from his 14-year-old son, Matt, while they pushed takeaway food around the plate and spoke in monosyllables. Kevin was at a loss over how to offer his son any physical or emotional consolation. Although the new widower was only 42 and coached all the ball sports, he moved like the walking dead.
One night in late October 2001, Kevin took his son to a charitable agency that was offering a support group for adolescent boys who had lost a parent. There were many such children in Middletown. Nearly 50 people from the area who had commuted to the twin towers on that terrible day never came home. In the agency waiting room, five stony-faced, suddenly single parents sat as far apart as possible. Kevin hung back by the door with his baseball cap on backwards and two days' growth of beard. He clearly was not looking to make small talk.
A green-eyed woman who was sitting on the bench said hello. Her face was open and engaging. She introduced herself as Terry Fiorelli. She, too, had brought her son. Terry told Kevin that she was relieved when she was notified that her husband's body had been recovered, but that was the trigger for her son, Stephen, to smash a hole in the living room wall with his fist.
Kevin and Terry began talking about their spouses, identifying them first by the floor they had worked on in the towers. In no time, they were reminiscing about their missing partners - in the present tense.
As the weeks went on, Kevin started shaving before he showed up on his son's meeting nights. He took off the baseball cap and revealed his receding hairline. He found himself looking forward to talking to the green-eyed woman. They had a great deal in common. Fiorelli, a school secretary in her early 40s, also coached recreational sports. He could tell that she was a remarkable mother, the kind of person who took care of everyone else before she thought of herself. Kevin got up the nerve to ask Terry for her home number. He didn't call.
A few months after 9/ll, the numbness began to wear off. On the day of his wedding anniversary, which was also the anniversary of his father's death, Kevin hit a wall. "I reached in my pocket and found a lumped-up piece of paper - Terry's number," he remembers. "I called her up and we talked. And talked. Until my portable phone died. I called her back on another phone and we went on talking for hours. She was better than any therapist."
"You can't die with the dead," Terry told him. "You're still living, and you have to think of what Kathy would want for you. She wouldn't want you to stay in bed all day. Remember, you have a son."
They talked about their marriages; both had had loving marriages. They talked about the folly of thinking there is always time. "My husband liked to work weekends on the house," Terry confided in Kevin, "and I always wanted us to spend a weekend together at a bed-and-breakfast. I never made the reservations. The kids got older and it would have been easier to leave them. But I never made the reservations. You take for granted that they are always going to be there. We never spent that weekend alone."
They cried together about having made the same mistake.
One night when Kevin walked into the social agency, Terry was not sitting on the bench. He found out that she was ill. He was deeply disappointed. It occurred to him that she was the first real friend he had ever made. At the next session, Terry arrived dressed in a silk overblouse and something leopardy - Kevin couldn't recall the particulars of her outfit but for the first time he was aware of the physical attraction. As Kevin describes it, "Our relationship went the opposite way to normal. First we filled the married role; we'll get back to the dating scene later!" The two single parents began doing for each other the most mundane chores that only housebroken husbands and docile wives usually do without complaint. If one was dealing with an adolescent tantrum, the other would take care of the laundry or getting the car fixed. They depended on each other.
They both had to struggle with guilt. Terry questioned herself: How can I have feelings for this man and still miss my husband so much? Her answer came when Kevin first kissed her. She closed her eyes and for once did not think of her husband. She and Kevin were in the land of the living, and it was so very good to feel the rumble of life again.
Shortly after the first anniversary of 9/ll, some of the widows and widowers felt ready to take off their wedding rings. Terry decided that the time had come to broach the subject of, "Uh, well, my close friendship with a man" with her support group. It didn't take long for her peers to put two and two together.
"You're having sex!" one widow yelped.
Terry blushed and put her head in her hands while everyone else laughed raucously. Most of the others murmured their approval. "Terry, we want you to be happy," said one young 9/ll widow. "You're giving us all hope!"
"Once we started getting into it," Kevin says shyly, "we worried about what our parents would think." Grief-stricken themselves, both sets of parents had reasserted their protective roles. Kevin's mother would either fail to give him messages from Terry, or, worse, dismiss the invasion with "Some lady called."
Terry had the same problem with her father. When Kevin called to see if she was ready for their first date, her father answered the phone. Immediately, the grilling began and it was worse than the grilling about her first date in high school. "Who's this Kevin?" her father wanted to know. Terry explained how she and Kevin had met in a waiting room while their two sons were attending a support group.
"Does he drink?" was the first question.
"Dad, we're just going out for coffee."
"How do you know this guy isn't trying to take advantage of you? He might think you're a rich widow. It's easy for a man to get that idea 'cause you have life insurance. It's a trap."
"Trust me," Terry said firmly. "I'm not going to let anybody take advantage of me."
She tried to assure him that Kevin was in just as much pain as she and her father were. He had lost his wife.
"Dad, more than anything else, we're friends to each other."
She knew her father was devastated, so much so that he could not talk about what had happened to his son-in-law. But as the months passed and the ganglia of guilt spread through both families, Terry decided to risk inviting Kevin to her father's house for lunch. It was a meeting of two territorial alpha males that Kevin would not forget.
Terry's father is a 70-year-old lung cancer survivor. That is not what he looked like to Kevin when the older man stomped in from working on the lawn to meet this not-so-young man who was courting his widowed daughter. His ropey chest stood out under his sweaty undershirt, his biceps twitched, his height almost equalled Kevin's - and he is a tall, hefty Jersey guy. The two men shook hands.
Over lunch, the conversation focused exclusively on Terry's missing husband, Steve. Afterwards, Terry's father expressed regrets. "I feel bad that we didn't talk at all about Kathy, Kevin's wife. She's got to be just as important to him as Stephen is to us."
That was the breakthrough. The second one was more physical. They worked together to build Terry a bicycle room. The father barked orders and worked the younger man mercilessly. Kevin passed the test. Their bond began.
The unique aspect of their relationship, the element that won over their children and their parents, was the way the couple included their lost loves in all they did and said. Kevin keeps a photograph of Terry's husband beside the picture of his wife. Terry wears her husband's wedding ring on a chain around her neck - "I keep him with me, always" - and next to it she wears a necklace given to her by Kevin. "It's a blessing to find the love of your life just once in a lifetime," says Terry. "I've been twice blessed."
· This is an edited extract from Middletown America: One Town's Passage from Trauma to Hope by Gail Sheehy, published this month by Random House in the US