A Decade of Hope

Toni Ann Carroll lost her husband on 9/11. He was a firefighter assigned to Squad Company 1 in Brooklyn, and he responded early to the attacks on the World Trade Center. It was a late marriage for both, and Toni Ann was grateful that she had finally found the love of her life. After losing her husband, Toni Ann went through years of suffering, both physically and emotionally. She is only now starting to find happiness again.

It was 1995 when I first met Pete, when he came and painted for me. Painting was his side job, when he wasn’t firefighting. I had heard his name years before through some connection of sorts, but we had never met. I initially hired a different painter, but he was a little expensive. My cousin called and said, “Toni Ann, there’s this guy, Pete the painter, who works in our development. Try him; he’s more reasonable.” I called Pete, and he came over for an estimate, which was fifty dollars cheaper than the other guy. So I hired him.

I was working in Manhattan at the time, as executive legal assistant in a maritime law firm by the World Trade Center, and my mom stayed and chatted with Pete the entire day while he painted the room. When I came home she said, “What a nice guy that Pete is. But he’s had a life like you’ve had.”

My first husband left me with two children when I was very young, only twenty-five. Then I remarried at twenty-nine, and my second husband was very controlling, so I got out of that relationship. Pete had similar difficulties with married life. He had been married twice as well. So I guess we had a past in common.

When he came back to be paid he saw that I had fractured a few of my fingers and gashed up my arm from a Rollerblading fall. Pete was very concerned and asked, “Oh, my God, what happened?” I told him, and he felt so bad. But that was it. I paid him, and he left.

Pete stopped by again the next day, but I wasn’t home. My daughter, Dana, spoke with him. He had flowers. “How’s your mom feeling? Please tell her to call me.” But he had so many problems, and was going through a divorce, that I didn’t want to get involved, so I didn’t call him. But then he called me and came by again. My father was outside gathering the mail, and he said, “Hi, I painted for your daughter. My name is Pete, and I just wanted to know how your daughter is doing.” My father told him that I was doing okay. And Pete said, “Well, please tell Toni Ann I was asking for her.”

In the meantime, he had split from his second wife for good. So I finally gave in and said yes when he called and asked to take me to dinner. And from that day forward it was like we were the best of friends.

By 1998 we were engaged, and we were married on February 17, 2000, in St. Lucia. We got married on the beach, and it was really beautiful. Then we came back home and had a little ceremony and dinner with a wedding cake and all, with the family.

This was the third marriage for both of us, and there’s an old line about marriages that goes: The first is for because you don’t know any better, the second is for money or looks, and the third is for love. And it was that way for us. We were really in love.

People could see our love—it was like that. Pete’s captain gave his eulogy at the funeral, and in it he said, “I’ve never seen Pete with such a smile on his face until he found Toni Ann. He came to work every day with that big smile, and he couldn’t wait to go home to her.”

There were a few who made comments about how we had only been married for nineteen months when Pete died. But the others who could see what we had would say, It doesn’t matter if it was nineteen months or nineteen minutes, the love that they shared was so strong that it’s immeasurable.

Everything that Pete and I did is just a memory now. Everything was just beautiful. We would take walks at night, and constantly talk, with never a lull in conversation. And it wasn’t just the wedding that was memorable—it was those smaller moments, like just taking a ride to visit his dad, a retired NYPD police officer who lived up in Neversink, New York. He had prostate cancer and was very sick. Pete was so happy, because he did not see his dad often, and when he met me, I used to love to go there. He enjoyed that.

Pete had called his dad from St. Lucia on the morning of our wedding, and he was so nervous. His dad said that he couldn’t have picked a better woman, and that he was going to be very happy. I didn’t meet his mom, because she had already passed away. But I loved his dad. I really did.

On Monday, September 10, 2001, I went to a tattoo parlor and had Pete’s name put on my lower back—just a no-frills tattoo that said PETE. When I got home he told me not to uncover it, because it needed to heal, but I said, “I really want you to see it.” When I showed it to him, he actually got tears in his eyes. He picked up the phone and called the tattoo parlor where I had it done, and he made an appointment for that Thursday to have my name put on him the same way. But he never made it in, and the tattoo artist was so touched by the story that he decided to give free tattoos to firemen after 9/11. If they wanted their shield or their company patch put on, he was doing it for nothing.

The next day was Tuesday, September 11, and Pete was going back to work at Squad 1 in Brooklyn. That was a tough job. Before 9/11, I had been pushing him to take the lieutenant’s test, but he said, “I don’t want to leave my house and be jumped from here to there. I just want to stay where I am.” At one point he transferred to Squad 288, HazMat 1, in Queens, as he wanted to be able to teach HazMat eventually, and there he could become an expert at it. But he missed Squad 1, and so I said, “Your happiness is what matters.” And so he returned to Squad 1 in Brooklyn, and he was a first-rate firefighter for nineteen years.

That Tuesday morning, Pete left for a day tour. I was sleeping upstairs, exhausted from a long weekend and not feeling well. At the time I was on medical leave because I had been very sick in 2000. I had fallen off my bicycle while we were on vacation at the cranberry festival in Cape Cod. It was a very bad fall, and we should have gone to the hospital. I was cut up, and the bone was sticking out of my leg—it was really bad. Pete took it kind of lightly, because he had seen so much gore in his life as a fireman that it didn’t seem like a big deal to him. I got an infection from the gravel and dirt and developed fibromyalgia. I was critically ill, bedridden for five months, and Pete literally had to carry me around. I also had herniated disks in my neck from the fall, for which I had to have surgery in 2004.

He went downstairs, where my daughter, Dana, was eating Cheerios, getting ready for her first day of school as a senior at St. John Villa Academy. She said, “Where are you going?” “I gotta go to the firehouse.” She said, “Stay home. Mommy doesn’t feel good.” He said, “I can’t.” And he wasn’t usually affectionate with the kids, but that day he kissed Dana good-bye, and left.

After I got up, I and my son, Anthony, were getting ready to go to the mechanic. I was trying to use my cell phone, and I had no service, and Anthony said that his phone didn’t have any service either. And so I thought, That’s weird, and turned on the TV. We saw the first plane hit the World Trade Center, and I said, “Oh, my God, do you know how many people just died? Anthony, do you realize what just happened?”

Anthony and I went to the mechanic, and as my car was being inspected we were watching TV in the shop. We saw the second tower fall, and at that point I felt like that was it. He’s gone. Pete’s gone. And we cried.

My father was supposed to have a meeting at 2 World Trade that day, but it had been canceled. He and my mom were still going to the city for some reason, though. Anthony was getting worried that something may have happened to them too, so when they walked into my house later that day, we were so happy and relieved to see them.

For the rest of the night everyone was calling for Pete: his father, his sister, his brother, his kids. His two older kids from his first marriage, Nicole and Michael, had come over to my house.

Pete had four kids in all. Nicole and Michael were around the same age as Dana and Anthony; from the second marriage, he had two little boys, Peter and Christopher. It was Christopher’s birthday that day, on September 11. He was turning six. I was saving Christopher’s birthday gift that we had bought for him.

I only found out later that someone had forgotten to change Pete’s contact number, so they called his second ex-wife that night and told her that they had found him. And that’s why she told me he was dead. She didn’t like me at the time, but I realize now that it was a traumatic thing for her as well, and maybe that is why she reacted the way she did.

On September 13, they finally came to my home. I was sleeping on the couch, still waiting. My boss, Simon, had come over. Even though I was on medical leave, we were very close, and he was truly there for me after 9/11, taking care of me, because I was not in a good place. The bell rang, and Simon went to answer the door, and it was like out of a movie.

“You found him?!” I was so excited. My face lit up, and I said, “See, he wasn’t killed. He must have been under a stairwell.” But then I looked at Simon, who was crying. I asked him why he was crying.

I had to determine where we were going to have his wake. I remembered, when we went walking one night, Pete said, “You see that funeral home, that’s been there for years. It’s a family-run business. And you see this church? I love this church. And I want to be cremated.” These things stuck in my mind. So I knew what Pete wanted. When his father suggested we bury him, I said, “No, I know he wanted to be cremated.” He had told another friend the same thing, so he was cremated.

The funeral was held on Monday, September 17, 2001, at the Harmon Funeral Home in Staten Island, followed by a mass at Blessed Sacrament Roman Catholic Church. At the funeral home we had a traditional wake with a casket. I was told that they found him intact, but they wouldn’t let me see him. I wanted to open the casket, and they wouldn’t let me. They just had a photo of Pete on top of it. And in my nerves, I tried to pry open the casket. I began to lift it, and they had to pull me off.

I never saw so many people in my life as at his wake. I used to say to him when he would have to go to a wake, “Why do you have to go?” and he would say, “Because they are firefighters,” and “Out of respect.” I couldn’t understand why he had to go to each and every one, because he didn’t know these people, and then I’m in a chair and these firemen are coming up to me, and I said, “Did you know Pete?” “No, ma’am.” And I said, “Oh, my God. Now I understand.” And I cried, because I had never really known what it was all about. And I got to experience it.

The older children came to the wake with the first wife. I didn’t want the second wife there after the way she had spoken to me on the phone on September 11. I said her kids could come in, but I wouldn’t let her in. She came after-hours and put some pictures on the Peg-Board. They both came to the funeral, though. I was distraught. People had to dress me. I remember having Pete’s dress cap on.

Pete wasn’t originally supposed to work on the eleventh. He switched his tour with someone at his firehouse, one of his best friends. We were very good friends with this fireman from the squad and his wife. After 9/11, I would go out to dinner with them, and he would never look me in the face. I couldn’t understand why. Finally, after three years, he looked at me and said, “I have to say something.” He was crying. He told me, “Pete came to me in a dream, and it was so real, and Pete said, ‘I want you to grab her, and I want you to look her right in the eyes and tell her everything is going to be okay.’” And that’s what this fireman did. A grown man crying. And his wife was hysterical. She said, “I’m so glad he finally did it. He couldn’t face you.” He then gave me this big kiss, and I guess it helped him come to terms with it. He felt so guilty that Pete lost his life for switching tours.

I thought for a while that Pete had been found intact. My mom finally told me that he wasn’t: He had been severed. I was in hysterics when she told me this. Later, I got a letter from the city medical examiner. So I called up the medical examiner’s office. I was by myself in the house, sitting on my bed, when I phoned. I said, “I’m calling about Peter Carroll. I got a letter from the medical examiner saying that if the person wasn’t intact to contact the office. And that you’ve been looking for me. For what reason?”

Well, I just went into hysterics again. I called the Fire Department, and they came to the house to try to console me. It was like 9/11 all over again. I had to cremate another body part, and now I have two urns. I spread the ashes from one of them. I wanted to give the second to Pete’s son Michael, because he had asked for it. After the fifth anniversary of 9/11, I met up with Michael, who had become a firefighter like his father, and I saw him in uniform. He held his arms out to me, and we exchanged phone numbers. I thought things would be okay again. After that he didn’t talk to me anymore. I tried calling him to say that I wanted to give him the ashes and he wouldn’t accept my phone calls.

And then, in 2006, the medical examiner called again, while I was in the middle of a birthday lunch in Atlantic City. They had found the top portion of his head. Everyone at the lunch was then crying with me. I called up the funeral home again, and they told me, “You can’t keep doing this to yourself. I’m going to have to step in, Toni Ann, because we have already given you two urns, and this is just not healthy for you.”

What happened was that we waited until December, and then accumulated whatever we had and put it into a single urn. The urn is in my bedroom now. And I also got back his wallet and his wedding band, which they found. The wallet has our wedding picture in it, and ten dollars and twenty-five cents. Pete always wore his wedding band, so I feel blessed to have gotten those items back.

I was so angry for a while, because Pete had said he would never leave me. I know it wasn’t his fault; he was killed. But I was angry, because I had finally found Pete after all these years of being miserable. I was left with two babies to raise on my own. Then I remarried and made another mistake. So many empty years before Pete, and then, finally, I find my soul mate, and he’s taken away from me. That can make a person bitter. But it wasn’t Pete’s fault. It wasn’t anybody’s fault except Osama bin Laden and the terrorists’.

I went through a depression, and I was hospitalized in 2006 for about ten days. I couldn’t find happiness for years—you know? I just couldn’t find it. And it wasn’t until 2006 that I was able to go on with my life a little bit more and let go. I was suffering from depression and post-traumatic stress syndrome. And that’s when I think I snapped out of it, when I learned I had post-traumatic stress.

After the hospitalization I realized that Pete wasn’t coming back. I used to look at people and think they looked like Pete in some way. It’s so hard. There is not a day that goes by that I don’t think about him. Still. I have a handyman who helps me out, and Dana says that he smiles just like Pete. You still relate people to him. It just doesn’t go away. It doesn’t go away.

I’m not like some of the other widows. I lost $517,000 in 2007 when the market had a big downturn. I was awarded $680,000, and I lost $517,000—almost my entire settlement—from a person who was highly recommended to help people. I saw it coming, and I wanted to jump ship, and he wouldn’t take me out of the funds. And yes, the market did crash. So I’m not a millionaire. I never was.

Most people I meet have this preconceived notion of the “9/11 widow.” The first thing they think of is money. I didn’t lead an extraordinary lifestyle ; money didn’t change me. If I could have Pete back, that would be my first wish. I didn’t care about the money. I didn’t marry him for money. And I found it upsetting that they had to put a price tag on someone’s life.

Healing is different for everyone after 9/11. For me, one of the things that helped was a letter I received from a woman, Ruth Rossi, who worked as an attorney for Morgan Stanley [on 9/11]. Ruth had seen Pete’s picture up in a gas station in Neversink, which was hung as a sort of memorial, because his family was known around town. And when she saw his picture she recognized him by his eyes, because he wasn’t in gear. She knew those eyes and said, “That’s my fireman.” So she asked who the parents were and got the address and wrote a letter to his father. And then his dad had called me and said, “I have a letter here. It’s from a woman that Pete saved on 9/11. And she wants to get in touch with you.” I have the letter she wrote to me framed in my home. And she wrote to me about exactly what he had done—how he led her to safety and saved her life.

Ruth had seen Pete standing in front of the rig, because he was chauffeur that day. She said she had frozen when she saw the blood that was splattered and body parts and bodies in the plaza, and it was Pete who went to her and put his hand on her shoulder and turned her away from it all. She looked at him—she remembered the sad look in his eyes—and he said, “Ma’am, you don’t have to look out there. Look at me and I’ll lead you to safety, we’re going to get out of here.” And she said he escorted her out and went right back into the South Tower. And then the tower came down.

Sal Cassano called me last year and asked me if I wanted to meet Ruth. She came really to thank me for giving up Pete to save her life. It was a very touching meeting. My son was there with me, and she was with a battalion chief, a woman who was friends with Sal. The four of us just huddled together and cried.

Ruth had to leave Morgan Stanley shortly after 9/11, because from their new location in New Jersey she could see the site across the river. And she could not look at it anymore. So she gave up her job and moved to Maine.

I met someone back in 2002. His name was Pete also, and he helped me a lot. He was very kind to me, but I wasn’t ready for a committed relationship then. I just couldn’t commit, and I felt guilty. I felt unfaithful. But this past year he came back into my life. He asked me to marry him, and I said yes. He’s a good man, and he understands when I talk about Pete.

So I’m moving on in life. It’s just a little harder to move forward when you’re not well. My fibromyalgia was actually Lyme disease that turned chronic as of last year, so it’s as if the Lyme disease is taking over my life little by little by little. Hopefully they’ll find something to help me get better. I can’t take antibiotics anymore. I just had the gallbladder taken out, and so the stomach became so badly inflamed that I cannot take antibiotics anymore. So I just have to be thankful for each day. The only thing is, I live each day in pain.

I love life, yes. And if I had at least my health, I’d be happier. Because if you don’t have your health you have nothing. I have to say that. You could have all the money in the world, but if you don’t have your health . . . So I don’t really know what’s going to happen.

I asked Pete to send a sign that he was with me: Send me a quarter. I want to find quarters. I don’t want to find pennies, nickels, or dimes. How often do you find a quarter? It’s more special, because it’s not that often. Well, now I find them constantly, and in the weirdest places—in the basement, even on top of the cuckoo clock. It’s just amazing, how little things happen.