Lyz Glick - Your Fathers Voice: Letters for Emmy About Life with Jeremy—and Without Him After 9/11

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Contents

For Jeremy and Emmy

Redemption of Sky

Soaring through the clouds

Arms spread, wind whisking on the back.

Unaffected by the laws of gravity,

One symbol of soul and freedom.

Disrupting the peace with a

Crack like thunder,

Lead whistled through the air.

Piercing pain,

Arms fold in,

The graceful glide metamorphoses

Into a chaotic dive.

The life meets the ground

And movement is no more.

But once again, Free.

Jeremy Glick

First Light

Napping with Daddy. Emerson, one month old.

Dear Emmy,

I remember the morning after your father died.

When I awoke, I was upstairs at Grandma and Grandpas house in the Catskills, a big, old, white clapboard farmhouse. I was in the brass bed and you were in your crib, right next to me. The first thing I saw when I opened my eyes was a pile of your daddys clean clothes in a wicker basket. On the night table were a couple of his favorite CDs. I just started wailing. I could hardly get my breath I was crying so hard.

I sat up, put on my robe, trembling. The bedroom door was closed. I hoped I hadnt woken up the whole house. It was very early. Light was pouring in, the golden light of the sweetest part of the morning.

A close friend who lost her mom and dad in childhood had called the day before with advice: Get up quick, she said. Dont lie around in bed thinking remembering crying

It was good advice and Ive followed it ever since, but I never counted on seeing so much of your dads stuff lying around. So I managed to swing my feet onto the floor and wobble over to the railing of your crib, but I just kept crying harder and harder, because the daddy who loved you so fiercely, as fiercely as any man ever loved his tiny baby girl, was gone forever.

As I looked at you there, tucked under your little blue blanket, a mobile of white lambs turning slowly above your head, I was sick with anxiety, thinking you would know only a sad mother. I didnt want to imagine what it would be like for you to grow up without ever knowing your father. I felt like youd truly lost both your parents the day before.

You were still tiny, just three months old. Born prematurely, you were small even for that age. So small! Who would protect you? Who would make you grin like your daddy did?

You lay on your back, eyes closed. Just then, from the bottom of a dream, you let out a delicate sigh, as though finishing a thought. Your cheeks crinkled up and you smiled ever so slightly at me. I cannot explain it, but at that moment I felt the power of something higher pulling me into something bigger than my pain. Your little shadow of a smile just took me overlike the sunlight from that window had gotten inside and warmed me. Like your fathers energy was burning through the window. Your smile made me feel good enough to believe that maybe life could be good again. And then I remembered that the last time your father spoke to me, he said that for him to be at peace he needed us to be joyful.

By the time youre old enough to read this, everyone will know the story of the men and women who tried to take back United Flight 93 from a gang of assassins who had already murdered people on the airplane and were bent on using it to kill a lot more people on the ground. What your father did in his last minutes of life made him a legend. Youve heard that legend. Now Im going to tell you your daddys story. I mean the whole story of your very own father. Not just the ending, the part where the rest of the world found out about him. Because the truth is, the ending wasnt the best part or the worst part, it was just an ending.

I know your daddy wanted you to have his story. Pieces of it were scattered all over the place, as though it were inevitable that someday Id go out and find them. Some were scribbled on legal pads in his room at home, or were tossed into the bottom drawer of the desk he had when he was a little boy, or were imprinted on film at Grandma and Grandpas house. Some were little secrets his friends knew about him and never would have told me if he hadnt died. The world is seeded with traces of him. And in the year since he left us, Ive been piecing it together, sometimes just by sitting here on our front porch thinking, like Im doing now, looking out over Greenwood Lake while you sleep in your crib. And sometimes way off in places I didnt know even existed.

Since youre still too little to understand all this, Ive put these letters into a book, like a birthday present you cant open for a long time. This is the master key, a gift of meaning. Here is your daddys story.

* * *

As the days rolled by after September 11th, I told myself that Id done the hardest thing already: Id said good-bye to your father, my soulmate, the only man Ive ever loved.

Ill tell you more about our last telephone conversation later because its meaning will change once you know the whole story. But I can tell you that when your father called from Flight 93 and told me it had been commandeered by some bad men, we knew exactly how to speak to each other, and we kept our headsexcept for when he said, I dont think Im going to get out of this. He started sobbing so quietly that only I, who knew him so well, would have known he was crying. It made me feel terribly helpless because, except for the night you were born, Id never heard your father cry.

Emmy, what I need you to understand is that your daddy and I managed to say enough to each other in twenty minutes on the telephone to bring our life together to an orderly conclusion. It didnt matter that in the few moments I had been awake Id learned that airplanes were being rammed into the very center of government in Washington and the tallest skyscrapers in New York in an attack orchestrated by bloody-minded fanatics; or that four of those men were on Flight 93 and we both suspected, though we would never admit it to each other, that your daddy was probably right and would not survive.

Later, reporters asked me how we were able to help each other so effectively when we should have been paralyzed by fear. I told them I didnt know, and I didnt. Maybe now I have a better idea. I know that the most important thing about that last telephone call wasnt the information I gave your father about what had happened in New York and Washington, although your daddy needed to know those things before he could decide whether to try to break into the cockpit and kill the hijackers; it wasnt even the few minutes we were able to spend talking about you and the future we would never have together. It was a few words said over and over, like a chant we repeated until it hung like a frozen rope between us. We said, I love you. We said it so many times, I hear him saying it still.

I think your daddy always suspected he had a higher purpose. I dont believe it was any accident that Jeremy Glick was on Flight 93, although an accidenta fire at Newark airportput him there, rather than on the flight he was to have taken the day before. It wasnt mere luck that an airline passenger with precisely the right physical skills to abort one of the 9/11 terror missions happened to be on the only plane hijacked that day where there was an opportunity to do so. There were four, five, six, maybe a dozen other passengers who fought the terrorists on Flight 93, and they all had plenty of nerve. Only your father had been taught the art of hand-to-hand combat from boyhood. To put it crudely, he had been trained to kill.