| THE TIMES-PICAYUNE copyright 2001 Opinion by Steve Sigmund At 8:30 Sept. 11, all I cared about was electing a new mayor for New York City. I'd worked for 2 years as the press secretary to public advocate and mayoral candidate Mark Green, through a fight to stop changes to the city charter, through countless reports, investigations and reactions to news and events and through a long campaign. By Primary Day, the election occupied almost my every waking thought. By 9:30 a.m., all I cared about was that my wife and I would live through the day. Two planes had attacked the World Trade Center towers; one had crashed into the Pentagon. Rumors were rampant of dive-bombing planes headed for the Washington Mall, the State Department, the Empire State Building and even bomb threats to the Grand Central Station, above which our campaign office is located. By noon, all I cared about was that we were safe. My wife was home. My colleagues and I had gone to an apartment on the upper West Side. Many friends I knew who worked in the World Trade Center were OK. By 9 p.m., all I cared about was finding my 25-year-old cousin, Johanna Sigmund. She worked on the 93rd floor of the first tower struck. My brother phoned me to tell me she hadn't been heard from. We looked for days, going from hospital to hospital, making calls, waiting at the city armory for a centralized list, searching the Web (repulsively, at one point someone falsely listed her and others as "survivors" in a disgusting Internet hoax). A few days later, I sat with Johanna's roommates and a police officer as we filled out a missing persons report. I saw the incredible pain and anguish in the eyes of these young friends of hers, who could tell the officers every last detail about my cousin, down to the hugs-and-kisses bracelet that she wore that morning and the mole on the inside of her right foot. The terrorist attack turned New York upside down. I saw so many friends like Johanna's searching desperately, having to make terrible calls to parents they still knew as "Mr. and Mrs." in home towns many had never seen, to tell them their children hadn't been found, so many families with pain, confusion, fear and sadness worn on their faces, so many staff and volunteers with nothing to offer but a kind word, hospital phone numbers and a cup of coffee. My grandmother, Lindy Boggs, told me that out of terrible tragedies comes some good. She should know. She's lost a husband, a baby and a daughter. Yet she has kept going, taking over her husband's seat in the U.S. Congress after he died, then becoming the U.S. ambassador to the Vatican. We'll keep going too, my family, my city and my nation. Maybe we'll be kinder to each other. Maybe we'll have more perspective on what matters -- family, love and meaning in what you do with your time. We'll heal with time. And we'll rebuild. But we'll be seared with this forever. We'll never be the same city or the same nation again. The city and future I cared so much about at 8:30 Sept. 11 went up in flames. In their place are the pictures of Johanna I see in my mind's eye: a darling 2-year-old child running down the beach into my mother's arms; a beautiful 25-year-old whom I ran into at the 86th Street and Lexington station a few weeks ago while campaigning (now, I can only think if I'd been there Tuesday morning maybe I would have made her just late enough to work). I pray for that little girl, and that amazing young woman. And I pray for all of us to honor her and every other family's Johanna by making a better city and a better future. Steve Sigmund, a Princeton resident, is press secretary to New York City Public Advocate Mark Green. |