The Shadow of 9/11: Since her brother’s death, Suzanne McCabe has watched over his children

The Shadow of 9/11: Since her brother’s death, Suzanne McCabe has watched over his children

Suzanne McCabe was on a commuter ferry when the first plane struck the north tower, where her brother was at work on the 104th floor
Millions of people around the world watched the twin towers fall, but only New Yorkers lived through the full horror. From Staten Island to Ground Zero to Brooklyn, they witnessed an apocalyptic scene. The National Post‘s Kathryn Blaze Carlson has returned with four onlookers to the very place where they watched the buildings collapse. How has their life changed in the past 10 years? Below, she takes a ferry with Suzanne McCabe.

MONMOUTH COUNTY, N.J. — Suzanne McCabe has steamed across these murky waters many, many times before — “10 years multiplied by, well … hundreds of times,” she estimates.

Each and every time, she takes the 15—minute drive from her mother’s home to the Atlantic Highlands marina, pulls into the seaside parking lot, and leaves her car behind. Whenever she is in Rumson visiting her family she does this, walking the planks of the boardwalk, ascending the rickety metal ramp and boarding the SeaStreak ferry.

She sits in the lower cabin, sips her coffee, and looks out the window. Traffic streams along Brooklyn’s Belt Parkway on the starboard side, and the sun disappears only as the vessel crosses under the Verrazano—Narrows Bridge, halfway to her office in Manhattan.

We embarked on this 50-minute commute together last weekend, drawing nearer and nearer to Manhattan as the white wake broke behind us.
On Tuesday, Sept. 11, 2001, Ms. McCabe — then in her early 40s and already grieving the imminent death of her father, who died two months later from brain cancer — boarded the 8:45 a.m. ferry.
One minute and 40 seconds later, the technicolour horizon revealed what looked like a toy plane T—boning into the World Trade Center’s North Tower, miles and miles away.
On this similarly warm, but somewhat smoggier Saturday, Ms. McCabe recalls the ferry captain’s announcement: “As you can see, a plane has just crashed into the World Trade Center.”
Standing in the same spot at the bow of the rocking ship, and feeling the same frigid air-conditioning on her body, Ms. McCabe described the mental gymnastics that ensued after the plane hit.
Her 42-year-old brother, Mike, had just started work at Cantor Fitzgerald, but where, exactly, were the trading firm’s offices?
Mike’s best friend, Tuck, had brought him over to Cantor. Tuck was in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Mike was with Tuck. Mike was with Tuck in the North Tower.

And there was nothing she could do. Nowhere she could go. Despite the tragedy, or perhaps because of it, the ferry plowed on, and on and on, bound for Pier 11 in Lower Manhattan.
She dialled Mike’s new cellphone, praying to hear his voice, but he did not answer. She then dialed his wife, Lynn, to find out what floor he worked on, but it rang until the line grew jammed.

She remembers trying to calculate how long Mike and Tuck — both fit men who loved to surf — would need to barrel down the stairs to safety. She knows now they had no chance. That they had worked on the 104th floor.
“Mike was returned to us in pieces,” Ms. McCabe said, her brown hair whipping in the wind as we stood together on the upper deck.
His wife finally asked the morgue to stop calling with news of retrieved body parts, Ms. McCabe said as she placed her hand over her heart as if to comfort it.
Her hand is bare. She does not wear a wedding band and she has no children.
“For the past 10 years, I have been living for another person — I’ve been living for Michael,” the Junior Scholastic magazine editor said. “I’m being there for his children in the way he would’ve wanted me to be there, in the way he would’ve been there for them.”
There are rumours among her brother’s surviving Wall Street friends that Mike and Tuck ran up the stairwell to the roof, only to find the door locked. Ms. McCabe’s brother, Gene, is still trying to determine what actually happened that day.
Neither thinks their brother jumped, she said. “We just don’t.”

Mike was father to Cassidy, then 12, Regan, then eight, and Liam, then seven. And he loved that New York skyline.
It was “pure gold” as far as Mike and his four siblings were concerned. Gene, Nick, Mary Ellen, Mike, and Suzanne had stared across the bay in awe as children, watching as the 110-storey buildings were constructed. They could see the towers from Monmouth beach, where Mike liked to bodysurf when the waves were worthy.
“To look out there now, and not see those towers — to not see that skyline we loved as little kids — that really hurts,” she said. “I’ve spent the past 10 years trying to forget that day.”
When she speaks of that day, her voice is mostly firm, but there are moments of breathlessness. Her hands tremble slightly. Her eyes do not water but they become glazed, and she admits they are tired these days.
The anniversary, which comes three days after Mike’s birthday, is approaching for the 10th time. “It’s always such a stressful time,” she said. “But this year has been particularly hard.”
Mike’s 18—year—old daughter, Regan, graduated from high school in June, and had been tasked with writing a reflective essay. She asked her aunt to tell her everything about the Tuesday her father died — about where he was in the tower, about his funeral. About her dad.
What Ms. McCabe said she remembers most is being focused on one thing: the burning North Tower and its metal casing, unfurling like a giant can of tuna fish.

As the ferry lumbered toward Pier 11, she scanned the shell—shocked survivors for her brother’s face. The captain told passengers to remain aboard, that they were only there for evacuation’s sake.
Part of her wanted desperately to disembark and run into the smouldering melee, to burst into the North Tower, at the time still standing, and rescue Mike. To save Regan from buckled knees and tears. To save Lynn from raising children whose “childhoods were blown up.”

“I really only remember one man next to me on the ferry, a man in his 60s or so, saying, ‘Damn bin Laden,’” she said. “I’m amazed looking back on that moment now.”

For the next 10 years, she could not stand to see photos or footage of the burning towers. She soon became sickened at the sight of Osama bin Laden’s face, too.

So when the mastermind of her brother’s death was captured and killed this year, Ms. McCabe could not escape. Images of the towers and the terrorist bombarded television screens and the ubiquitous Manhattan newsstand.

“Sure, bin Laden’s death brought relief, but there’s still an empty seat at the dinner table,” she said.
Ms. McCabe’s mother, Eleanor, still lives in the same Monmouth County home. Ms. McCabe still lives in her Upper West Side apartment. She still works at the magazine. Little has changed, including her desire for one last embrace.

“I just want to hold his hand, to hug him and say goodbye,” Ms. McCabe said. “I can’t even hear the Bruce Springsteen song Bobby Jean without crying: ‘I miss you baby, good luck, goodbye. I wished I could have talked to you.’ “

The first time she got back on the SeaStreak ferry was one month before her father passed away, about three weeks after the attack. It was the morning of Tuck’s funeral; his body was never found.

She was aboard the ferry hours later, bound for her job in Manhattan, when a crew member approached her and said he saw her at Tuck’s funeral.

“He asked me how I knew Tuck, and I told him he was good friends with my brother, Mike McCabe,” she recalled.

When she told him Mike had also died in the attack, the crew member cried, for he knew her brother and had brought him to and from Manhattan many times before.

http://news.nationalpost.com/2011/09/06/the-shadow-of-911-since-her-brothers-death-suzanne-mccabe-has-watched-over-his-children/