Free The Woman Who Wasn’t There by Robin Gaby Fisher, Jr. Angelo J. Guglielmo

filled so that she didn’t have to think or feel. It was the only way she knew how to cope. And if by helping herself she helped the other survivors, she was glad.
    The group members remained for an hour or so, paying their respects to the dead, remembering the day that changed their lives, and beginning to let go of pent-up feelings and emotions that could be released only by being there. Some left flowers and cards. Tania left a letter for Dave, saying how much she missed him and loved him, and how all that sustained her were thoughts of their time together and what life might have been.
    The visit to ground zero had gone a long way to helping the survivors take the next step toward the rest of their lives, whatever that was. Years afterward, a young woman named Carrie Coen Sullivan, who had worked in the south tower for only a month when it was struck, would remember the visit as the turning point in her healing—the singular event that gave her the freedom to start to forgive herself for surviving and think about living again. Walking out of the site, she felt a sense of peace that she hadn’t known since before September 11. It brought her to tears.
    Tania led the procession all the way up the ramp and back to the street, through the tall fence that separated those with a rightful claim to the tragedy and the rest of the world. The survivors were no longer outsiders looking in. They finally belonged. Before going their separate ways that day, they crowded around her, hugging her and thanking her for what she had done.
    Tania just smiled.
    Afterward, she wrote to her new confidante about the experience.Richard Williams was a survivor of the Oklahoma City disaster nine years earlier, when a disgruntled antigovernment army veteran named Timothy McVeigh parked a Ryder truck full of explosives outside the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building and detonated it. Williams was trapped beneath piles of debris, with only his left arm showing, when a rescuer discovered him and carried him out of the rubble. Critically injured, he’d spent two years recovering from both the physical and emotional trauma. He’d eventually turned his torment into action by becoming involved in survivors’ programs and memorial planning in Oklahoma City. After weeks of sharing nearly daily emails, and some of their innermost thoughts, Williams and Tania became friends.
    “The site visit with fellow survivors was very hard,” she wrote to Richard. “We all went down to the pit together and brought flowers and cards for our friends and colleagues who didn’t make it. It was the first time survivors went to the site since 9/11, and seeing their pain was heart wrenching. After the visit, most of us went to September Space, and we sat around in a circle with a counselor and we described how we felt. It was amazing. It was the first time most of us opened our hearts and feelings to each other face to face. I was fascinated at seeing how even the guys I thought were the toughest had so much inside of them that they needed to share with the rest of us.”
    The visit, Tania wrote, made her grieve for Dave even more, if that were possible. “Next week I’ll be going down to the town where Dave grew up,” she wrote. “They are dedicating a garden for him and the four other victims from NC who died on 9/11. Although I’m glad they’re doing something like this and recognizing him, it’s going to be so hard to see his name etched in stone. I know I’m going to cry my eyes out during the ceremony and for days to come. My parents and some of my brothers will be there too. I know Dave would have liked that and would be glad we still all remember him and are as close to his family as ever. I love going to his house and going through the albums of his childhood with his mom. That has become a tradition, and it’s a moment she and I share every time I visit them.”
    In closing, Tania wrote about the recent kidnapping and murder of an American hostage in