He proposed to her on their first date. He told her they would be together for the rest of their lives. She didn't believe him. After 10 years of marriage, she never believed they would be separated. Ever.

***

Reality hit Ina Adbrabu like a storm yesterday when she saw a fragment of a jet aircraft at Quonset Point. On the piece, from the plane's tail, was half the wing of a falcon, the symbol of EgyptAir.

Her mind raced to exactly a week ago in Los Angeles, where she had stood behind a glass window at the airport and waved at the intact image of the falcon on the jet taking her husband, Sami Ahmed Adbrabu, into the sky.

Recalling that image today, she gave out a scream. She wailed, sobbed and cried, "Is this what happened to my husband?"

Ina and a bus full of other Muslim families spent 10 minutes inside a tent where the debris retrieved from the wreckage of Flight 990 was spread out in front of them.

An imam had accompanied them to read passages of the Koran and offer prayers, but his voice could hardly be heard through the cries and shrieks of the relatives.

"Everyone broke into pieces right there and then just like the airplane had. We all thought if the airplane was in pieces, what happened to human flesh?" said Ina later in the afternoon, dressed in a long black robe and head scarf and sitting at the Masjid-al-Islam in North Smithfield, where families were taken directly for a prayer service.

"For me," she continued, holding a Koran close to her heart, "reality hit right then and there, I knew it was all over, that Sami was gone."

Ina, 42, remembers the phone ringing at 3:30 last Monday morning in her California home. Half asleep, she reached over and picked up the receiver from the stand next to her husband's side of the bed. Even then, she said, she felt his empty space.

"Turn on the TV, we have lost our husbands," screamed Fordusa Salleh, whose husband, Abdullah Ali Salleh, 42, and her four-year-old son Naseem, were aboard the plane. Abdullah was Sami's nephew, who also lived in California with his family. They were traveling to Egypt to catch a YemenAir connection flight in Cairo.

Ina stumbled downstairs in a daze and turned on the television. As she watched the news, she kept telling herself that Sami was not on that flight, that this was all a terrible mistake.

Meanwhile, her husband's favorite cat - the couple have three cats — kept crying loudly.

"They say animals sense things, when I heard the cat crying, I broke down," said Ina. "A nagging feeling inside me told me it was true."

On the other side of the world in Yemen, a mother and 11 siblings, prepared the coming home of their youngest son, Sami. When news reached Yemen, phone call after phone call came to Ina. Sami's relatives cried and spoke in Arabic. She responded in English. Neither understood what the other one was saying but grief had broken all language barriers.

The events that follow all seem like a blur, said Ina. She recalls her friends streaming into her house the next morning. One held her as she sobbed, another made flight arrangements for her to join the other families in Rhode Island, another friend packed a suitcase for her.

On Tuesday she arrived in Providence with her niece and friend Susan DePace Shaikh, a convert to Islam, with one thought: to see Sami and touch him one last time.

INA AND SAMI met while shopping at a supermarket in Los Angeles. She reached to pick up something from the aisle and he looked at her and said, "you remind me of my mother."

They stood there holding their shopping carts and chatting for half an hour. The connection, she said, was instant. He asked for her number. They got married five months later.

He was a devout Muslim who came to the United States in 1988. In California, he operated his own import and export business.

She was a baptized Christian from Florida who performed as a back up singer for a reggae band.

As the years passed, she became more and more immersed in her husband's culture and her American upbringing seemed to fade.

"My husband introduced me to Islam from the beginning of our relationship," said Ina, now herself a practitioner and devout believer.

She converted to Islam five years after her marriage and exchanged her western style of clothing for modest long gowns and a scarf. She quit her job as a singer and became a legal assistant.

"Islam has given me guidance and direction in life," said Ina on Friday, sitting in the prayer hall of the Doubletree Islander hotel after a prayer service. She comes to the hall to pray five times a day.

IN NEWPORT, the days have been long and the wait agonizing. Ina, like so many other victims' relatives, traveled here hoping to return to California with Sami's body. As the days evolved it became clear to her that she had not accomplished what she had come for.

"In a matter of a day it went from search-and-rescue effort to search-and-recovery effort," she said, echoing a statement from one of the twice daily briefings given by National Transportation Safety Board to the family members.

Like the other relatives, her thoughts revolved around what was happening to her husband as the plane went down.

"All sorts of things go through my mind," she said. "Were they conscious? Did they feel it?"

Those questions remained unanswered until Thursday night when a doctor bluntly told the families that their relatives may very well have been aware when the plane hit the water.

"That itself was like another blow," said Ina.

CAROL MAJOR, a registered nurse for the Providence Center for Counseling and Psychiatric Services, who specializes in crisis situations, has been helping families deal with their grief.

Major explained that when a person loses a loved one, especially in a tragic accident, he or she goes through four stages.

"The first thing they will feel is denial. How can this happen to me?" she said. "Then comes anger. Anger at God, at fate, at the pilot, but who do you direct the anger at in this situation?

"What most of the families are experiencing now is the third stage, which is the sadness and depression, but the hope is that eventually and gradually they will accept it and move on."

Ina thinks she is in a "total state of denial." On Wednesday, with a friend and a volunteer, she went to the T.J. Maxx nearby to buy a pair of shoes and some other necessities that her friends had not thought of while packing her suitcase.

She spotted a black pair of high-heeled boots and automatically thought, "I can't buy those, Sami won't like them."

Then she remembered where she was and why she was there. Her heart sank when she realized that Sami would never see those shoes on her feet.

WHEN DESCRIBING her husband, the first adjective that comes to her mind is "humorous." She smiles thinking of how he made her laugh at every little thing.

"I'll miss his jokes and his friendly nature," she said wiping away a tear that trickles down from under her sunglasses.

Besides dealing with her loss, Ina is also preoccupied with some of the complications that arise from sudden deaths, especially because Sami had no relatives living in the United States.

She said that she is trying to arrange through EgyptAir to fly her husband's brother, whom she has never met, to this country for a blood sample, in case the rescue team ever finds a body and needs a DNA sampling.

The couple also owns a house in Yemen, which Sami had built for them so they could spend their retirement with his family back home. With the question of a permanent death certificate still ambiguous, she does not know what the legalities will be.

"Yeman is different than the United States," she said. "It's an Islamic country and affairs are settled according to the Islamic laws."

Nevertheless, Ina is planning a trip to Yemen in January for the next Islamic holiday -- the Eid-al-Atta. She has never met any of Sami's family members and believes a visit would be comforting for both sides.

Her husband, she said, was very close to his family. His father had died many years ago and he had taken it upon himself to support his mother. He sent her a check every month, Ina said, adding that Sami's loss will be felt in many different ways.

In Los Angeles, Sami taught Arabic to teenage boys at the local mosque and played soccer and basketball with them.

"Amou Sami, Amou Sami, they used to call him," said Ina. In Arabic, amou means uncle. When news reached the boys that Sami's plane had crashed, they sat quietly and prayed for the man who had helped keep them straight, said Ina.

INA SAID that the support system, -- her friends and relatives and counselors present in Newport -- have helped her get through these days. However, she wonders what will happen once she gets home.

"Now I'm okay because everyone is around me, but it will be very difficult when I'm back in L.A. and all alone," she said.

She said she will seek comfort in her faith and the teachings of Islam. Stressing that her husband was an extremely pious man, she wants to follow his footsteps and "live in the way that he wanted me to live."

What she dreads most are the coming weekends. Sami had a ritual of buying her a mocha coffee drink from Peterson's coffee shop in Los Angeles.

"It's all these little things that I will miss most," she said.

After today's interfaith memorial service is over, Ina will be ready to leave. Tomorrow morning, Ina will fly home to California. She said that she may come back to Rhode Island once again because here, the place near where Sami died, she feels closer to him.

The only regret that Ina has is that the couple was not able to have children. She said he had promised her that once he got back from his trip in Yemen, they would go "full force" into infertility treatment.

"Inshallah, (God willing) maybe there is a baby inside me. That would be a miracle," Ina said.