Moving forward, thinking back
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Most Americans have their private memories associated with that fall morning when terrorism descended, altering a city skyline, a military stronghold, a parcel of farmland, and the national ethos. But for some people more than others, the date represents a stark divider between disparate lives: one lived before Sept. 11, 2001, and one lived since.
Last year, the Monitor sought out a handful of those most directly affected by the events of that day, chronicling their Sept. 11 experiences and their first 12 months of recovery.
Today, with another year gone by, we revisit those individuals. Their stories, updated, offer evidence of further healing, and of areas where more progress remains to be made.
- Editors
'Now it is so different'
When Cameran Sadeq speaks of his life now, a brightness enlivens his Kurdish-accented speech.
He shows no fatigue, despite having just returned home, at 9 p.m., from a 10-hour shift as a cook at a local pizza joint in Winnipeg, Manitoba.
Instead, Mr. Sadeq seems to revel in his industry. His 60-hour work weeks are a means to a life that he has so desperately wanted for more than a decade now - since the Iraqi refugee first fled the terror campaigns that Saddam Hussein waged against his people.
Now, for the first time, Sadeq can see that life within his grasp - with his job, a car, and a baby on the way.
It is an almost complete reversal from his life of one
year ago, when his words rasped with frustration and anger toward the United States.
He had come to America seeking safety from Mr. Hussein, gaining refugee status. Instead, he said last year, the 4-1/2 months he spent in a federal detention center after being caught up in the post-Sept. 11 antiterror roundup "destroyed my life."
As he sat behind bars for weeks after he was cleared by the FBI, a trucking job vanished. So, too, did his car, and his clothes and furniture - tossed out by the landlord of his Detroit apartment.
All he had left was his wife - a woman he had met long ago in a Syrian refugee camp, lost, then located in Winnipeg years later through a friend. They had married only weeks before he was detained, and when he was eventually freed he abandoned any hope of a life in America and joined her in Canada. Vowing never to return to the US, he arrived in Winnipeg with the clothes on his back, a $10 bill, and thousands of dollars in debt.
"Now it is so different," he says.
The sense of injustice that colored every phrase a year ago has been replaced by the excitement of expectation. With his working papers in order, he has a job that has filled him with hope. He has all new furniture for the apartment. He has a computer with an Internet connection and a 1995 Chevy Cavalier. More than anything, he once again has pride. He has whittled his debts from more than $7,000 to about $2,000, with some help from Monitor readers who sent him $1,600 in unsolicited donations.
"My English is not that much good, so I don't know what to say to them," he says. "But I so much appreciate that."
His views of America are perhaps more conflicted now. He is grateful that the US has ousted Hussein. But, he adds, "it is not nice that there is no government. People are killing each other; stealing, breaking, and there is no answer." Likewise, he doesn't reject the idea of returning to America. If he did, though, he says he would sue the government to get back the money he lost while in detention.
Today, though, his thoughts are elsewhere. Sadeq has already started looking at furniture for the baby, and he's considering a move to Calgary, where the Kurdish population is larger. But that's a year or two down the road. For now, "I'm continuing the life," he says warmly, and "I am so, so, so, so happy."
- Mark Sappenfield
An activist parent
Who would she be now if her husband hadn't died on that plane? Not a single mother of five, says Sue Mladenik. Not alone at night when the kids are asleep.
Certainly not a driving force behind a campaign to move ashes from New Jersey's Fresh Kills landfill to a memorial at the footprint of the World Trade Center towers, so that her husband and some 2,800 others can have a real resting place.
She would, though, have been one thing she is today: the new mother of 2-year-old Hannah Qing Yu, who's made the past year's transition from a Chinese orphanage to her suburban Chicago home at a run, slowing only to master the word "mine." Ms. Mladenik and her husband, Jeff, had put the adoption process in motion together.
Like all parents she has been in a whirl. Caught up in daily rounds of 6-year-old Grace's soccer and ballet and birthdays, Mladenik admits she might have been one of those Americans who finds Sept. 11 relatively easy to forget.
"I often find myself wondering, if Jeff wasn't on that plane, would I be as focused on it as I am," she says. "Of course now I think everyone is too quick to move on, to get the buildings built, the office space, the bus terminal. But could that have been me too?"
Last September, Mladenik would recoil when acquaintances called up, reached out to her in stores - drawn, she feared, by her grisly celebrity. Today, she's turned that angry energy to giving her husband's death meaning.
She's met with senators, organized a support group for the families of Midwestern victims, and helped mobilize the national petition drive for the World Trade Center Families For Proper Burial. She lobbied for an independent Sept. 11 investigation and weighed in on the design of the memorial. She's appeared on the CBS early show and the John Walsh show, and spoken to newspapers.
Still, she's a mom first. So she worries about Daniel, her third oldest, who went off by air to college this year in Colorado, despite his vow never to fly again. And about Gracie, who a
year ago could hardly express her grief. Now it catches Mladenik by surprise at birthdays, graduations. At the end of Grace's first ballet recital last spring, when all the other girls' dads were running to them, swinging them in the air, the child became hysterical.
At breakfast one morning this summer, Gracie turned to her mother and asked, "When are we going to bury Dada's body?"
Mladenik tried to answer calmly: "I don't know, Gracie," she recalls saying. "We have to wait until all the identifications are made."
"What are those?" Grace asked.
"When they know who all the people who died are," Mladenik told her, and Grace went back to her Cheerios.
"I don't know what to do for my children," Mladenik says. "That's where I'm failing." These days, she says, it's easiest to comfort baby Hannah, who never knew her father. Hannah will point at photographs of Jeff, or the necklace with the hologram of his face that Mladenik always wears, and say, "Dada."
"But I don't think she has any concept of what a Dada is," Mladenik says.
- Mary Wiltenburg
Next:
Staying close to Mom
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