Remember Vanessa: A visit to the 9/11 Memorial in New York City

She was just two years old.  On the way to bring her to my mother's so I could go to work, I had a flat tire.  Her father came to meet me and fix the tire, while I entertained a two year old by the side of a country road in Lyman Maine.  The tire fixed, I got her buckled into her car seat.  The radio came on when I started the car and its then that I heard it.  I had been listening to Imus in the Morning.  Don Imus was talking about how many people worked in the World Trade Center, how many could be affected, how many hurt.  No one knew how far reaching this was going to become. 

We all have our memories of that day.  I wasn’t born when Kennedy was shot.  I was too young when Armstrong stepped onto the moon’s surface.  I have a vague memory of Nixon’s resignation, only because my father told me that I’d read about it in my history books. 

My little daughter doesn’t remember that she was asleep on the couch when I sat with my parents in their living room and saw the south tower crumble.  I can recall my father’s long low whistle, the one he uses when he sees something incredible, natural devastation or an unfathomable horror.

Here we are, so many years later, and watching the story unfold again as the anniversary nears reminds me not only of how fortunate I am to have been able to sit safely with my parents that day, with my little girl, my vibrant, sweet, healthy little girl, asleep within sight.  I’ve been able to watch her grow up and have enjoyed the every day things with her.  I have lived my life seemingly unaffected by the day.

But aren’t we all affected?  Its not just the changes in airline regulations or the New York skyline, yet those are regular reminders.  The mindset of the world is different.  We as Americans came together to mourn and then set out for restitution.    

In August, our family vacation was off to a wonderful start.  A beautiful Saturday morning, we left Maine, heading for New York.  We had plans to visit Ellis Island, the Statue of Liberty, and with enough time, the 9/11 Memorial site.  We found out that although free to visit, you must make reservations to enter the grounds.  We took to ferry from Liberty Island to Battery Park and walked the few blocks to the site.  The line to enter the Memorial wound around and through several security checkpoints.  Once cleared, the clamoring of the crowd in line was hushed in reverence.  Entering the park like setting is unsettling in a way.  How can one person possibly absorb everything this space means?  The waterfalls that mark the footprints of the buildings seem to have been designed so that no matter how tall, a human cannot see the bottom of the falls.  It just pours endlessly.  I think that the sound of rushing water is an appropriate diversion from the sounds of the city around it.  How else to create a silence of sorts?  Piped in music would not have worked here.  Who could decide what would play?  What is right for one is not for another. 

We walked around and read names.  Someone had left flowers near one of the victims names.  It made me wonder whether that was a regular occurrence, whether somewhere in a room at the Port Authority offices, there is a collection of items left in remembrance.  

The names of all of the victims who were killed that day are there; the people in the buildings and those who went in to save them, those in the Pentagon and those killed in Pennsylvania.  Some of the names sounded familiar; perhaps they had been singled out for their actions or their strength. 

The names that made me stop and take a breath were trailed by “and her unborn child”, like this one.  Many women died here.  Many of them were mothers.  None so clear to me as those women. 

Maybe to me, it helps to find one story to focus on in this post.  This is what I found out about one of the women who died “and her unborn child.” 

 Vanessa Lang Langer was 29 years old and from Yonkers, NY. (Born: Bronx, New York). Vanessa worked for Regus Plc on the 93rd floor in the South Tower of the World Trade Center.

On September 11, 2001, Vanessa, who was four months pregnant, escaped from the South Tower. However, her quest for survival had fallen short. She ran as the South Tower collapsed. She did not make it. Her body, and in it the small body of her unborn child, was pulled from the rubble of the fallen tower on September 24th, just ten feet from an alley between Towers IV and V.

Vanessa's husband, Tim, fell into a spiral of alcohol abuse after the death of his wife and unborn child. He died of liver failure in 2005. He was 34.

The phrase "and her unborn child" follows the names of the expectant mothers -- who also include Monica Rodriguez Smith, 35, of Seaford, who was working her last day before maternity leave when she was killed in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, and that of Jennifer L. Howley, 34, of New Hyde Park, who was expecting her first child in January 2002 when she died in the towers.

Vanessa’s story is so sad in so many ways.  Not only was she killed as she was so close to escaping, the story goes on to destroy her husband as well, years later.  Vanessa’s mother has been a vocal advocate for the 9/11 commission and investigation of the disaster.  How far does the web of pain thread in her family, amongst her friends?  What might her child have gone on to do in his life?  How would this world be different?

Today let’s honor Vanessa, her child and her husband for all that might have been.