The Woman Who Wasn't There

Just before 8:30,

I got a phone call, and it was Dave,

and he said that that he just wanted to go

and get some coffee,

and he asked me if I wanted to meet him,

and, um... I, I said that I was just about to go into the,

into a meeting, and that I couldn't, I couldn't do it,

and I said, "I love you and talk to you later."

And that was the last time I, I ever spoke to him.

It was amazing, and you know,

it was that kind of crazy love story where we would finish

each other's sentences...

We were so alike,

like but some people say opposites attract,

but for me, it was different.

It was like he and I were almost the same person.

Sometimes he was explosive, but it was,

it was definitely a love story.

That day, I didn't just lose Dave.

I lost myself.

How are you?

I get hot when they do this.

We have like...

FEMALE VOICE #2 I don't know, eight? Eight left?

It's the morning of September 11th,

and we're all gonna go to the official ceremony at the site,

and we hope to make it there by the first moment of silence at 8:46.

It's one of the hardest experiences of my life

to go down that ramp every anniversary,

but I do it for Dave because I, I knew he,

he wants me to be there, but let me show you something.

Dave and I met outside the World Trade Center

when he stole my cab.

So, every year when I go to the site,

I bring a New York City cab with me,

and I put it in the reflection pool

so that he knows that I remember that day.

Some of my co-workers had families,

they that had little kids, and they died, and I didn't.

So, why?

Why? Why am I special? Why, why was I spared?

Why didn't they make it? Why was, why did I make it?

Was it God? Was it faith?

Was it because we have something to do?

Was it because we were sheltered by the elevator machinery?

It just makes you go crazy.

You go crazy asking yourself why, why, why?

People kept saying how blessed I was,

and I didn't feel blessed at all.

I felt like it was a curse.

Survivor guilt made me feel that,

made me actually go from the question,

"Why did I survive?"

to "Why did I have to survive?"

I don't know how to describe it.

It, it's sort of a pain in my, in my, my, gut, you know,

and I remember actually doubling over realizing,

"Oh, my God, those three people were all on my side,

and I didn't get them out."

It's so hard to get past being alive

when all these people aren't, and I've had people say to me,

you know, "Oh, you're so lucky.

You got out of there. You must feel great."

You don't.

I woke up thinking about 9/11, went to bed thinking about it,

dreamed about it, just couldn't get out of it.

I mean, I just kept replaying that day over and over

and over again.

Before I met Tania, I had talked to, you know,

a couple of professional people,

and it really wasn't helping me.

I searched online,

and I joined the support group that they had for survivors.

We started as an online peer support group

where you could go into a Yahoo group

and connect to other survivors 24 hours a day.

So, one day, you were having a bad day,

and you would post it online, and within 30 minutes,

you'd get 40 replies of people saying,

"I know what you feel," you know.

"It's okay to have those feelings.

I'm here for you.

Just call me. Anything you need."

Many people were having economic problems,

health problems, just a lot of that sense of parallel reality

that people were heavily living through, and I think,

to a large degree, still do, and I think it was just,

just being with other people

and talking about this stuff helped.

I had many conversations with Tania,

just one-on-one conversations,

but she gave me a lot of support like nobody else had.

I admired her from the very beginning

how strong she seemed, and at the same time,

once I started to get to know her,

then I realized this whole strength thing that she shows

is really a facade.

She's really in pain.

She's, she was, she seemed to be really in pain, um,

and really, really distraught, and, and I, and I said,

"Well, of course.

How could she not be?"

When I first heard Tania's story,

she did not talk about it much, and then one day,

she just wrote it out in its entirety,

and it blew me away.

I mean, you know, we had all been through horrible things,

but Tania's was just, just head and shoulders

above anything else that any of us had gone through.

I started seeing these flames, and I was like,

"Something's happening in the other tower."

And I, I started thinking about Dave right away.

I, I, the first thing I did was starting to count floors

down from, from the top.

He was on the hundredth floor, and I was like,

"Oh, my God, his floor is one of the floors that has been hit."

A woman started screaming, "There's another plane coming.

There's another plane coming."

The first thing I felt was,

was the, the air was sucked out of my lungs like a,

like a change in pressure.

I, then I was flying.

I was flying through the air from the impact.

I was just flying.

I remember very well the pain of hitting the wall,

the marble wall, and then I,

then I remember the warmth from,

from the explosion, and then I passed out.

My back was, was on fire and my arm, and I was,

I was smelling my own skin burning.

I remember Welles Crowder, the man with the red bandanna.

He had some type of cloth,

and I felt him use that to, to put the flames out,

and um, he hugged me, and he said, um,

"Just stay awake. Stay awake. Help is coming."

I was, I was in the hospital until Thanksgiving,

November, 2001, and my back was really burned

and my arm was burned and I couldn't walk.

So, I was in a wheelchair.

I couldn't even pull myself on the wheelchair

because I only had one good arm.

So, you know, between the wheelchair, the trauma,

the loss, I, I didn't know where to start.

It was just too hard.

It was like looking at a mountain

that was 20,000 feet tall.

My story was so insignificant

to what she went through that my first reaction

writing to her was, "That's horrible,"

and, "I don't belong in this group,"

and a lot of people wrote that, and she was very supportive,

saying, "No, you do.

You know, what we all went through was equally important."

She was fabulous.

Here's this person who went through so much

that who in the world could possibly survive this,

yet she's a survivor.

Here she is. She's a survivor!

I think you find that by talking to other people

and helping others, getting involved,

it helps carry your own burden,

and I think that's how you mask it.

You, you kind of, um hide your pain

by getting involved helping others.

I became aware of Tania,

and I was very curious as to how she got through all that.

It was a story that pulled you in, obviously.

But I did notice that her arm was, looked like it had been,

I don't know, it almost looked like skin grafts

on her right arm,

and I remember thinking that it didn't look like

it had been burned.

I had felt mad at myself for even thinking

that there was something amiss,

but I often wonder why I was even asking the question.

I first encountered Tania Head

on the Internet group.

We began having an email conversation,

and she shared her story with me,

and I shared my story with her,

which is kind of normal for survivors to do.

I was struck by how dramatic her story was.

It was pervasive.

It was this idea of this person who had gone through so much,

and, and people try to protect her a lot,

and I think I probably had a protective feeling

right from the start.

I had met Gerry Bogacz,

and Gerry was also meeting with survivors.

He had started having dinner with people in his office