A shared tragedy

NEW YORK – Richard Collins still has days when memories of Sept. 11 paralyze him. John Ryan has mostly shut those memories away, but they come flooding back when he sees the name of a lost colleague, or watches politicians debate the war in Iraq. Sekou Siby finally has overcome his fear of making friends at work, but he leaves his house every day knowing it is possible he may not return.

Three New Yorkers, three years out – one who was there, one who was nearby, one who was miles away. They are like everyone else, moving forward, getting past it.

Yet they are not like everyone else, or even like each other. All they hold in common is that each was marked by that unspeakable, bright blue September morning.

Richard Collins, 47, loved being an engineer at the World Trade Center – the machines as big as houses, the tight relationships he formed there.

He was on the seventh floor of the North Tower at 8:46 a.m. when the first plane struck.

“I was alongside the 50 car, the main freight elevator for the building, and when the plane came through it snapped the cables,” he said. “I could hear (people) screaming when they were coming down the shaft.”

Moments later, flaming jet fuel and a steel beam smashed into the room, blocking the door. Collins broke it down with a heavy pipe and collapsed on the stairway; other building workers carried him outside.

He was across West Street, struggling to make his way back into the building to turn on its fire pumps, when the South Tower collapsed at 9:59, burying him in rubble, ash and debris. He took a deep breath – “like breathing the bottom of a vacuum cleaner bag” – and clawed his way out.

It took Collins 17 hours to make his way home to Circleville, N.Y., 73 miles from Manhattan, where he had moved his family after the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.

Today he suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder, knee injuries, hearing loss and lung damage that makes breathing difficult. Doctors have removed glass from his eyes and fragments of other materials from other areas.

After the attacks, he was withdrawn and morose, then angry. Even with therapy, his problems were serious enough that he and his wife almost divorced last year. He says their reconciliation proceeded like the punchline of the old joke about how porcupines make love: “Very carefully.”

Sept. 11, 2001, was the last day he worked. A settlement from the Victims Compensation Fund helps pay the bills.

“You have to understand, I had a kind of post-traumatic stress disorder that went right off the scale,” he said. “I couldn’t read. I couldn’t answer the phone. I had to learn to do everything all over again.”

Today, he will turn off the telephone and the television, and he will remember.

“I just feel so very, very terrible for all the people who are without sons and daughters, without spouses, without friends. The attack cut a hole larger than 3,000 people,” he said.

“I have my doctors and my wife, who has been so incredibly kind. I feel incredibly lucky.”

A loss of hope

In many ways, John Ryan’s life now is the same as it was three years ago. The 44-year-old lawyer still commutes from his Upper East Side home to his office five blocks south of the World Trade Center site. He still helps clients navigate the maze of employee benefits.

But every once in awhile something reminds him, and the memories return – the planes flying over the Hudson River toward the towers, the long trek home with thousands of others, their faces dusted gray, the stop at the barber shop that made his wife mad because it slowed his return.

He had called her to say he was all right before getting to the barber shop, but not after.

“She thought that was insensitive on my part, sort of like Nero, I guess,” Ryan said. “I didn’t think an extra 20 minutes was going to matter.”

He has largely shut those memories away, so much so that he almost forgot today would be the third anniversary.

“On a daily basis, you don’t really think about it,” he said. “I’ll come across a document signed by somebody who died in the tragedy, and it comes back. I think about them and what they went through.”

The moment of hope he felt in the aftermath – that a country riven by self-interest would unite – now has soured. Like many New Yorkers, he is angry that the Republicans held their convention here.

“It just reminds me of the Maine so much,” he said, referring to the U.S. battleship whose mysterious sinking in 1898 was used to justify the Spanish-American War. “They take a tragedy that really is painful to people and then use it as an excuse to create a war that as far as I can tell had nothing to do with the tragedy.”

Despite his anger, he describes himself as a “conservative Democrat” who is not opposed to the war in Iraq, just to the Bush administration’s justifications for it.

And while he plans to vote for John Kerry, he doesn’t have a lot of faith in Democrats, either.

“I think both political parties have lost the idea of what I feel America is all about,” he said, “the freedoms we are supposed to have, the freedoms in the Constitution, and the role government should play in our lives.”

Sustained by faith

On Sept. 11, 2001, Sekou Siby normally would have been working as a banquet cook at the Windows on the World restaurant on the 107th floor of the World Trade Center’s North Tower. But he had filled in for someone else on Sunday, so he had Tuesday off.

When he saw the towers smoldering on television that morning, he knew his cousin and co-worker, Abdoul Karim Traore, probably was dead. Nevertheless, for many moments he clung to hope.

His hope crashed with the towers. Now, he remembers Traore and he helps care for his cousin’s wife and children in the Bronx home their two families share.

After the disaster, Siby, a 39-year-old native of Ivory Coast, drove a cab and briefly worked as a security guard, both solitary jobs that allowed him to avoid connections.

“I didn’t want to make friends,” he said. “I didn’t want to go through a grieving process” again.

But his Muslim faith sustained him, and his fear of further sadness has eased enough to allow him to do outreach for the Restaurant Opportunities Center, created after Sept. 11 to help displaced restaurant workers.

Every day, when he leaves his house, he tells his wife and his daughter – born three weeks after the 2001 attacks – that he loves them, and he makes sure they know where he is going.

“In a certain way,” he said of Sept. 11, “it helped me understand certain things that I wouldn’t before.

“Now I know you may leave your home and never make it back.”