Much Earlier
It was a gorgeous, clear, blue-skied day but Margaret Anne was inside her new (to her) condo while a work man replaced the thin-legged original sinks in both her bathrooms with sturdy, wood cupboard-style ones.
She had moved in the end of August and her whole life had changed with the move from her four bedroom, three bath, den, rec room with sub basement house in upscale Bethesda. Not that she ever felt upscale. At the time they bought the house, stretching to do so on her husband’s moderate government salary, they were expecting their third child and wanted a home closer to his work. Besides, he’d never liked their first house, a three-story stucco, semi-detached 75-year-old structure in the District.
She found the sun-filled, three-bedroom, two-bath condo six months after her husband died and knew immediately that it was the right move. Her (and especially his) beloved house needed a lot of work and was too large for her alone. So, when she walked into the sunny, spacious condo not too far from her old neighborhood, the price was right and she felt it was meant to be. Selling her house would leave her with some money to spare, to invest, despite the high condo fee. The expenses and normal upkeep of the house would be considerably more—with no cushion.
So, in her new home for just a few short days, she was slowly adjusting to the change, while still mourning the loss of her husband, the love of her life. She was watching the building’s handyman bring in and install her two new bathroom sinks when the phone rang.
“Turn on the TV, Mom,” her youngest daughter said, without preamble, calling from her law office in Wisconsin. “Hurry.”
“Why,” she said, never inclined to be told what to do without an explanation. “I’m pretty busy here right now,” she said, and in fact she had just had her TVs hooked up the previous day. But, hearing the urgency in her daughter’s voice, she dutifully turned on the large, black-bodied Sharp TV her husband had said was “just too big” when their son and daughter-in-law brought it home a few years before to replace the one that had died.
“A plane has just crashed into the North Tower, one of the twin towers in New York City, the one I stayed in last month when I was there on business,” her daughter said, sounding breathless.
And even as Margaret Anne sat down on her sofa to watch, another plane came soaring through the clear blue September sky, crashing into the second tower, the South Tower, and all she could say in disbelief and horror was, “That’s deliberate. That plane flew into that tower on purpose.”
Thus began the horrible terrorist saga of September 11, 2001, the year her husband died, even as another plane crashed into the Pentagon while another was brought to ground before reaching it’s destination in Washington because some courageous passengers stopped it, dying in the process in Shanksville, Pennsylvania.
Her personal world had changed dramatically with the death of her husband and now the whole world was changed dramatically and forever by a man named Osama bin Laden and his crew of terrorists. Nothing and no one in the whole world would ever be the same again.
After her August move into the condo, that October she would bury part of her husband’s ashes in the Columbarium at Arlington National Cemetery, sitting through the somber, beautiful service facing the blackened hole in the Pentagon where the terrorists had flown into it with, as they say, malice aforethought, wrecking havoc, leaving in its wake a whole new era leading to something called “Homeland Security.”
Hers was only one of many grievous goodbyes, leaving in their wake a whole maelstrom of grief, pain and agony, suffering that would never again find peace and harmony in a world gone berserk, shock filling every nook and cranny, a lot of love lost love forever.
Meanwhile, she laid her husband to rest in the nation’s premier cemetery. He had served for almost four years in the Army in World War II, saying once, “It was the biggest thing that ever happened to me.”
Because her artist son had drawn and painted many pictures of and for his father which she hung after her move, Margaret Anne often felt her husband was more with her there in her condo then in the cemetery. Part of his ashes resided in a beautiful mahogany box on a bookcase under one of their son’s drawings of him in her third bedroom.
As a writer and a new widow, words were her comfort, her main resource to assuage pain, “…there are no goodbyes, only accommodations to reality.”