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12.16.2001 00:16
Cherished memories, deep and lasting sorrow
• Three months after flight attendant Amy Jarret died in the World Trade Center attack, her family and friends struggle to rebuild their lives.
BY JENNIFER LEVITZ
Journal Staff Writer
First of three stories
Along the northern edge of Rhode Island, 190 miles away from ground zero, tragedy has been muted by the ordinary.
The Elks Lodge holds a Hayloft Jamboreeto benefit the Twin Towers Fund. Rojack's runs a special on Peanut M&M's, with some of the proceeds going to the "Sept. 11 fund." Cars with Student of the Month stickers fly tiny American flags.
And on a Sunday at St. John's Catholic Church, the priest refers to "the incident" of Sept. 11.
From the back of the choir, a middle-aged man wants to stand up and shout.
Incident?
He wanted, he now says, to scream, "It wasn't an incident -- It was an act of war!"
He is the father of Amy Jarret, a flight attendant on the second plane that crashed into the World Trade Center.
THREE MONTHS
after Sept. 11, Amy Jarret's memorial service is long over. The opening of the University of Connecticut's hockey season has passed, dedicated to Jarret because her brother was a standout player there.
United Airlines, Jarret's employer, has presented her family with tiny wings, framed. Schoolchildren in Detroit have sent poems; St. Anthony's Basilica in Padua, Italy, said a prayer for her.
The 1,500 or so condolence cards are bundled in rubber bands and categorized: college friends, churches, strangers . . . They are stored under the kitchen counter, in a Yankee Candle shopping bag.
Now, sayJarret's relatives, is the really hard part
: everyday life without her.
Now, remembrances can be sudden and sharp, like broken glass on the beach.
Her father calls them "Amy moments."
Aram P. Jarret Jr. says that sometimes, from a TV, the United Airlines commercial will break into his consciousness. And once he put his hand in a pocket and found the tickets to the Notre Dame - Air Force game, which he and Amy had attended.
"The reality sets in," he says.
"All of a sudden you realize, Amy's not coming home. Her presence in this house isn't there anymore.
"I keep thinking: 'This has got to be a dream -- I'm going to wake up and it's going to be a dream.' But no, it's real."
JARRET'S MOTHER
sees signs at the store, asking for contributions to a fund for those affected by Sept. 11.
Once at the mall, Marilyn Trudeau had to rush out when she saw a skirt and thought,
Amy would look cute in that.
"It just hits you: 'Oh my god -- there is no more Amy.' "
So she does not often go to the mall.
This is what she does now.
Each morning, before she makes the coffee, she lights the tall white candle next to a picture of Amy.
"Good morning, honey," she says. "I miss you."
JARRET
and her mother were buddies. The 28-year-old flight attendant used to get off work at Logan Airport and drive her silver Honda straight to the cozy condominium that her mother shares with her husband, Bruce Trudeau, in Lincoln.
Marilyn Trudeau was laid off her job, as an investment-firm temp, in August. She says this has proved "a blessing," because now she can concentrate on "what needs to be done."
Upon getting up each day, she says, she makes her bed, so that she won't be tempted to crawl back into it. She dresses carefully, sometimes with a flag pin on her lapel. She sits at her kitchen counter, with her cordless phone, her coffee cup, and her computer, against which rests a small picture of Amy.
She fills out paperwork and sends e-mails to other people who lost loved ones on Sept. 11. There is a support group, based in Massachusetts, and they discuss such things as how to navigate the bureaucracy of aid to Sept. 11 victims.
"We try to grieve," she says, "but there are so many important decisions to be made."
She also talks to agencies that help families of the victims.
On a recent morning, cigarette smoke curls from her ashtray as she talks on the phone. News from Afghanistan drones in from the television.
"We're really adrift here," Trudeau says into the telephone. "I'm really interested in counseling -- traumatic stress, rather than just talking to some random psychologist or psychiatrist . . . I'm really at your mercy."
As a mother of five, she has always been a collector and organizer of details. Working to help all of her children reach their goals, she would often be driving them to 5 a.m. hockey practice or coaching them on their songs for school musicals. And hers is the kind of family that does Christmas with a theme. Last year, they re-created Providence's picturesque Benefit Street -- complete with a snowmaking machine.. This year, it will be doves -- peace.
Trudeau does not easily suffer the disorganized -- especially when it comes to the death of her daughter and of so many others.
When she had not received calls, offering assistance, from an area charity and a legislator, she called their offices and asked why.
It irritates her, she says, to hear of politicians "running around, talking about Sept. 11," while she sits in her kitchen laboring to do such things as downloading the affidavit needed for her daughter's death certificate. She believes there should be some sort of family-assistance contact for survivors in Rhode Island, as there is in New York.
"They have to know that we are in a major mess as a family," she says, rapid-fire. "They have got to know that. Give us some direction. Help us. What do people do who had to return to work? People who don't have a computer? I'm college-educated and I'm working on this eight hours a day. What do people do who don't speak English well? You would just give up. Give up. I tell you I work at it day in, day out. Everything is a toll call. There is frustration you wouldn't believe."
Trudeau says she has suffered because she and her daughter have different last names (Marilyn Trudeau and Aram Jarret divorced 14 years ago). Amy's father filed the first missing-person report; her mother filed the
second, then learned that she wasn't even listed as a contact.
She had to make three calls to New York to get herself so listed, should any of Amy's remains be found.
"I'm not into a battle," she says. "I'm into the honoring of my daughter's memory. She died for all of us. She's a hero, just like all the other people who died for this."
MARILYN Trudeau tries to send off three thank-you cards a day. She is also trying to contact the families of each of the other people who were on United Flight 175. She wants them to know that her daughter was tiny but brave -- if she could have, she would have protected her passengers.
To show Amy's size, Trudeau takes a navy-blue United Airlines uniform out of the hall closet. The dress, short-sleeved with maroon piping, is a 2 Petite.
Trudeau says that when visitors see that she and her husband are not "thrashing around on the ground," they touch her arm and say, "You're doing good."
"But we're not," she says. "The sorrow is so deep that tears don't even cut it."
Her husband, Amy's stepfather, has taken stress leave from his work as an electrical troubleshooter. He doesn't trust his acuity since Sept. 11.
Sometimes, Marilyn Trudeau does cry.
"And then I come out here," she says, glancing around her kitchen, "and I do something else."
JARRET'S
mother put on Thanksgiving dinner this year. Amy's sister and three brothers, took a vote that day, deciding -- though just narrowly -- to continue their tradition of drawing names for Christmas presents.
Meanwhile, in North Smithfield, Jarret's father recently
told two of her brothers -- the twins: "I don't want a tree this year. How about you guys?"
Says Matthew Jarret, 24: "We actually had to take a vote."
The twins overruled their father.
"It's going to be hard," says Matthew Jarret, "but on the other hand, it's Christmas. We have to do something."
He last saw his sister Amy on Sept. 6.
That was when the two of them sat on the back porch and talked about their futures. She discussed her relationship with her boyfriend. Matt was leaving for Norway -- that very night -- to play professional hockey, but he didn't want to leave his girlfriend behind.
On Sept. 11, in Norway, he received an e-mail from Amy: Stay and see how it goes, she advised him. If you don't like it, maybe I can get you a job with United Airlines.
He gave up his hockey plans when he returned to Rhode Island. He has two jobs, to stay busy. He doesn't know what he wants to do with his life; Amy would have had some ideas.
"I'd always ask Amy: 'What do I do? What do I do?' " says Jarret.
Jarret has experienced anxiety so bad that his chest has tightened. He has fears he's never had before. He does not want anyone in his family to fly.
Out with friends, he'll suddenly wonder: What if I die,
too? What if someone kills me? My family will have to go through this all over again
-- my mother would die.
What's hardest, says
Jarret, is seeing his father go to work -- he's a lawyer -- when sometimes, the son can tell, he doesn't want to. And his mother, says Jarret -- "it's tough to see her like that."
In October he traveled to ground zero. At one point he thought: What am I doing here, looking at this?
"Then I realized: My sister is in there."
He flinched when he saw a group of anti-war protesters.
You wouldn't feel that way if it had happened to your sister
.
"If Osama bin Laden was walking down the street," he says, "I'd be the first to smack him."
"You know what I worry about?" he says. "I worry people will forget this happened to people here. I mean, I know it will be in history books . . . but I worry that people will forget."
KYLE
Rusconi, Amy's boyfriend, has tried to organize Amy Jarret's things so that he won't be constantly reminded of having lost her.
"Even the pictures," he says, speaking from Philadelphia. "Maybe, in time, I can have them around the apartment, but it's too tough for a daily reminder."
Rusconi, 28, and Jarret had been romantically involved ever since meeting, five years before, at a Villanova University reunion.
He talks now of the complete senselessness of what happened on Sept. 11, and gets angry when he thinks about what was taken from him, much less Amy.
Rusconi says he feels guilty that they didn't marry. Amy had planned their wedding, down to the centerpieces of blue hydrangeas, and they were close to engaged, but for Kyle, he says, marriage seemed like something that could wait.
A handsome trader on the Asian stock market, Rusconi spent two years in Australia. Jarret would stack up her work shifts so that she had stretches of days off to visit him.
"Everything was so perfect for so long," he says. "I think that because things were so perfect, perhaps it was taken for granted.
"You spend so much time trying to line up things just right, and then when they are just right, you lose the most important thing in your life."
Amy spent her last weekend at Kyle's, restoring an old baker's rack for his kitchen.
On Saturday night, Sept. 8, she called her father to commiserate about Nebraska's clobbering Notre Dame at the half (Aram Jarret still wears his Notre Dame ring).
The next night, Jarret and her mother sent each other Internet messages. Near midnight, Rusconi retunred from work to find Jarret sleeping. She lifted her head, and he slid his arm around her. They lay there discussing when in the morning she should leave, and when they would see each other next. She told him she was worried about him -- that the hours he worked were keeping him from his friends. "Mister," she said, using her nickname for him, "I hate the thought of you being alone."
Later he awoke to find her nose to his in a good-bye kiss. She honked her horn as she drove off.
"If she was married," says Rusconi, "she probably wouldn't have been flying -- she wouldn't have been in Boston.
"I think about that all the time."
THAT SAME
day, Sept. 10, Jarret drove from Philadelphia to North Smithfield, to the home of her big sister, Alicia Curran.
Alicia had a new baby, born just
the week before.
"It was the best week of my life," says Curran.
The next morning, Curran saw the second plane hit the World Trade Center. Frantic, she called her mother. Marilyn Trudeau had heard that the hijacked planes were American Airlines'. But she called United, just to be sure.
Trudeau recalls falling to the kitchen floor, wishing someone would shoot her. She wanted out of her body. She wanted to throw herself through the sliding glass doors.
Jarret's father was driving home from Connecticut when he got a cell-phone call with the news.
In Norway, Matt Jarret was just getting out of hockey practice when he learned. His twin, Marc, was landscaping in North Smithfield.
"The hardest thing for me now," says Marc Jarret, "is going to my room -- I pass her bedroom door every night."
Alicia Curran sometimes swears she sees her sister in the grocery store, or driving her silver Honda. "It just pops in my head:
There's Amy!"
She often wonders what others think about the families of those killed on Sept. 11. She recalls how, before Sept. 11, she would hear news of a tragedy and feel sad -- but then get on with her life.
"I wonder," she says. "Do they think that our lives are back to normal?"
Digital extra
Look back at previous Journal reports on local victims of the Sept. 11 attacks and search a memorial database of all victims at:
http://projo.com/extra/terror/
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