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Four 9/11 Widows Recall What Helped — And What Hurt— Afterward
One woman sat in her husband’s closet ‘just to be near the smell of clothes that had touched his body’
Love You, Mean It came out just before the fifth anniversary of the attacks on the World Trade Center, and you can read it as strictly as a group memoir of the tragedy by four women widowed on Sept. 11, 2001. It works much better as memoir of traumatic loss, that unique form of grief that occurs when you have no time to prepare emotionally for a death.
The authors of Love You, Mean It are all intelligent professional women, who say little to say about subjects that have preoccupied some of the other victims’ families: the rescue efforts by police and fire departments, the financial settlements offered by the Victim Compensation Fund, the memorial at Ground Zero.
Instead they focus on the brutal cost of losing a spouse even when you have money and the world’s sympathy.
One widow had ‘a mini-breakdown’
Pattie Carrington kept her alarm clock set for two years to six a.m., “the same as it was on the morning of September 11.” Julia Collins sat in her husband’s closet, “just to be near the smell of clothes that had touched his body.” Claudia Gerbasi…
