On the morning of September 11, Ginny had been at our home, sitting in our breakfast nook, drinking coffee and reading a book.
Ginny knew firefighting was a dangerous job; statistics show it is more dangerous than police work. But like every spouse of a firefighter, she pushed that reality to the back of her mind. I loved the FDNY, and she was secretly happy to have time alone when I was working a twenty-four-hour shift. She had some time to herself, to relax from the demands of her job as a nurse at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and her involvement with our children’s schools and competitive swimming schedule.
We live in a very close-knit neighborhood with attached houses, and our neighbors are like family. A little before 9 a.m., our neighbor Reta waved at Ginny from her yard and said she should go down to the park and watch the fire at the World Trade Center.
“Joseph is working there today,” Ginny told Reta. Instead of walking down to the park, she turned on the TV and saw the top of the North Tower engulfed in flames.
She knew I was assigned to Battalion 1 in lower Manhattan and would be the first chief to arrive at the WTC, since I was on duty. Ginny was not too concerned since I had twenty years of experience fighting big fires and I taught about high-rise fires to new chiefs at the academy.
But when the South Tower collapsed, she went numb.
“This can’t be happening,” she told herself. The nightmare Ginny never allowed into her thoughts erupted into anxiety. By the time the North Tower collapsed, she was in full-fledged panic. What if her husband of seventeen years didn’t come home?
Was she a widow?
In her nursing career working with seriously ill patients, Ginny had learned to project outward calm so that patients and family members didn’t get upset, and to focus on what she needed to do next. She did her best to marshal all that training now as she faced the loss not of a patient, but of her husband. Our children were safe at school, but she wanted them near, to hold them close. She tried to call the school, but couldn’t get a dial tone. She finally got a call through to her older brother, Frank Schneider, a priest.
“Please help me, Frankie,” she said through tears. “I don’t know what to do. I know Joseph is there. I think he’s dead.”
Frank tried to reassure her. “Remember, Ginny, Joseph is very smart and he will figure out how to come home to you and the kids.”
Ginny ran six blocks to St. Margaret’s School, where Gregory was in eighth grade. She knew the principal, Sister Bridget, after years of giving hearing and eye tests to kids as a volunteer. Ginny knocked on the school door. When Sister Bridget answered, she explained that all the children had been gathered in the auditorium; many of the kids had parents who were firefighters, paramedics, or police officers. Ginny’s determination to remain calm crumbled as she fell into the nun’s arms, sobbing.
“I need to take Gregory home because I think my Joseph is gone. I know he is at the WTC. I don’t know what to do.” Sister Bridget held her as she cried.
Ginny and Greg walked back to our house. Christine was still in her high school class, five miles away. My wife and son sat on the sofa hugging each other, not knowing what to do or think. Hour after hour passed, and there was no message or call from me.
In the late afternoon, my father arrived. He and Ginny had always had a close relationship. A quiet, humble man, my father now looked to her “like a piece of him had been broken off.”
“We heard from Joseph,” he said. “He’s okay, but we don’t know where Kevin is.”
She rejoiced to hear I was safe, but knew my father’s heart was shattered at the thought his youngest child might not have survived.
About this time, a classmate’s mother brought Chrissie home from high school. My wife and kids huddled together, knowing very little except that I was alive. She felt relief, but fears remained. Had I been injured? What about Kevin, her brother-in-law, our kids’ favorite uncle?
That night, President George W. Bush appeared on television to speak to the nation. “Good evening. Today, our fellow citizens, our way of life, our very freedom came under attack in a series of deliberate and deadly terrorist acts.”
For Ginny, it was much more personal than that.
We’d met when I was three months into firefighting. I had raised my right hand on September 5, 1981, and was sworn in to the FDNY in front of City Hall by then Mayor Ed Koch.
After the FDNY training academy, my first assignment was to Engine 234, a busy firehouse in Crown Heights, Brooklyn.
As a new firefighter, I cleaned the tools on the rig and the pots in the kitchen. My job was to learn from other firefighters, so I listened carefully to their fire stories and asked a lot of questions. I was curious to learn as much as I could from every fire and emergency. We were very busy, and I had at least an occupied structural fire or two every tour along with other small fires and emergencies. I was thrilled to be a firefighter, but considered it a temporary job.
I was in the middle of seminary, studying to be a Catholic priest. But I had requested a two-year leave of absence. I had applied to the FDNY four years earlier, while I was in college. I’d gone through a rigorous application process that included physical fitness evaluation and tests on fire department procedures and protocol. I had gotten high marks, but the job was so competitive, I hadn’t been accepted until 1981.
I loved serving in various capacities in the community—prison and hospital ministry, working with folks in impoverished areas of New York. But once I heard I had been accepted by the FDNY, the adventure of being a firefighter was hard to resist. As much as I loved working with people, I wrestled with God over my vocation, over forgoing marriage, over the nature of good and evil and how I could make a difference when people are in need.
I figured I’d work as a firefighter for a couple of years, to enjoy the adventure, and return to seminary to finish my master’s degree. Then I’d commit wholeheartedly to the priesthood.
After about three months of being a firefighter, my seminary classmates invited their families and me to attend their annual Christmas party, highlighted by the “end-of-semester skit,” where they made fun of their professors. I was excited to return and see my friends.
The play was hilarious, and in the cafeteria later I caught up with classmates, assuring them I was coming back, but meanwhile having a ball as a firefighter.
One of my classmates, Frank Schneider, the play’s director and an academic star, introduced me to his family, including his sister Ginny. We gazed at each other for a moment, and I wondered why I had never met her before. With dark brown hair down to her shoulders, hazel eyes, and a shy smile, she was cute and looked like a kind person. I could not keep my eyes off her and knew I wanted to get to know her better. I was twenty-five years old; she was a year younger and had an apartment in Manhattan. I was still living with my parents when I wasn’t sleeping at the firehouse.
A couple of days later, I convinced Frank to give me his sister’s phone number and to put in a word for me. I called her and left a message. Her brother told her to return the call. She finally did, and we made a dinner date.
We dined at a restaurant in Bay Ridge, an upscale area of Brooklyn, and fell in love.
The wrestling with God intensified. I drove Ginny crazy. She would ask, “Well, what do you do for a living?” “Oh, I fight fires, I save lives. Try to be a hero. But my life belongs to God.” I guess I was caught up in the romance. She’d just laugh, knowing how much I loved her. Later, I told Ginny that she “stole me from the hand of God.” The truth is that God had other plans for me. Better plans.
Every year, the St. Patrick’s Day parade in March is a big deal for the FDNY. It stretches some thirty blocks up 5th Avenue from midtown to the Upper East Side. All the firehouses have people who march in the parade.
That year, since Ginny had an apartment on the Upper East Side, after the St. Paddy’s Day parade, twenty firefighters crashed her place for a party. Ginny took the firefighters’ bravado and jesting in stride and became a big hit with the guys.
We dated for a year and a half. At the end of what would have been my third year of seminary, my classmates were ordained deacons and made the commitment to celibacy. For me, it was Ginny and the FDNY, or the priesthood. I knew the answer in my heart was Ginny.
All that wrestling with God was over. I was in love with a beautiful and wonderful woman.
I proposed to Ginny and told the seminary I would not be returning. We got married on June 3, 1984. Her brother, now Father Frank Schneider, a diocesan priest, performed the ceremony. In fact, seventeen of my former classmates, now priests, concelebrated the wedding with us.
Living in Manhattan was very different from Queens. We went out to eat at least once a week, which was easier than cooking. All my spare time was spent studying FDNY manuals and building codes to earn a promotion to lieutenant. The FDNY was so competitive, 85 percent of people who took the test didn’t make rank; if you failed, you wouldn’t have a chance to retake it for four years. After my daughter was born, I rocked her crib with one foot while studying.
Ginny took my crazy schedule and constant studying in stride. As an oncology nurse, Ginny understood working under pressure. And together we worked out our schedule, with its emphasis on family, which was as important to her as it was to me. She had seven siblings. One sister married Richard Hogan, a firefighter she’d met through me. Rich’s sister also married a firefighter, Hank Banker. Depending on our work schedules, three of us related by marriage might be on duty at the same time, in the same firehouse.
Ginny and her sister entered into the FDNY extended family with gusto. Like most FDNY firefighters and their spouses, we had an optimistic bias, even when a firefighter died in the line of duty. That will never happen to us.
Now, as Ginny watched TV on the night of September 11, her husband, brothers-in-law, firefighter friends, their wives and children—everyone in her extended family was under assault, facing unthinkable loss.
Kevin was a big part of her life as well as mine. He lived six blocks from our house, and half a block from our kids’ school. Almost every day after school, the kids would stop by the three houses where he, my parents, and my aunt lived. They’d chat and get a snack. During the summer, Kevin would take the kids out on his sailboat or to play on the beach.
On the night of 9/11, emotionally exhausted, Ginny went to bed but was unable to sleep, tossing and turning as she wondered when she would see me again. When she heard the front door open and me walking up the creaky stairs of our seventy-two-year-old house, she rushed to the hallway at the top of the stairs to embrace me, weeping uncontrollably. Christine and Gregory burst from their rooms with cries of “Dad!” We hugged, cried, and desperately clung together, all of us drenched in tears of an emotional reunion, filled with love and disbelief.
Covered in light gray powder, with eyes so red they appeared to be bleeding, I must have looked like a ghost of myself. My body ached, and I could see in the mirror my face was filled with sadness. Ginny was overjoyed I had come home, yet she was afraid to hear any details of the horrors of the day. We climbed into bed and tried to sleep. I was never so happy to be home with my family and next to the woman I love.