Есдүгээр сарын 11-ний эмгэнэл: 9131 хоногийн турш үргэлжилсэн гүн гашуудал

Doug Mello found weddings to be especially tough. He could handle the first hour, give or take, but then the thought of never watching his son Chris dance with his bride would consume him and force him out of the room.

This is why Mello despised the notion that “time heals all wounds.” Time failed a father of a young man who, 25 years ago Friday, was among the first victims of the mass murderers who turned airplanes into missiles aimed at American pillars of economic and military might.

Mello’s boys, J.D. and Chris, were suburban New York football stars at Rye High and athletes at Princeton – J.D., the older son, was a member of a two-time NCAA championship lacrosse team, and Chris, a little undersized for Division I football, was a rugby man instead.

The father loved talking about Chris’s toughness as Rye’s leading tackler and as a senior co-captain who helped carry his high school to a state championship game at the Carrier Dome in Syracuse, where the Garnets lost to Caledonia-Mumford. Doug was prouder of that defeat than any victory that preceded it because, he said, Chris faced an opponent who had about 100 pounds on him “and he fought that sucker all day long.”

As a 25-year-old analyst at a Boston venture firm, Chris had been taking boxing lessons – and impressing his trainer as a natural – in the weeks before he boarded American Airlines Flight 11, bound for Los Angeles, on Sept. 11, 2001. He told his girlfriend and childhood sweetheart, Kristy Walsh, that he got upgraded into business class because the flight wasn’t packed. Kristy told him he had a beautiful day to fly.

Chris was sitting near three of the five hijackers who attacked passengers and crew and, at 8:46 a.m., flew the Boeing 767 into the north tower of the World Trade Center.

Days after the catastrophe, Doug told me, “There’s no doubt in my mind Chris struggled with them. Psychiatrist friends have tried to rationalize that it was the first one, that they had no knowledge, that the pilots probably said to keep cool. But if my son had any inkling this was do or die, he definitely wouldn’t have sat there. It wouldn’t have even been a battle if they didn’t have knives.”

Photos of a smiling Chris loving life – here in a pirate’s costume, there in a Mets uniform – graced the Mello living room. A white envelope addressed to the Mello family and sent from American Airlines sat on the table.

Doug and I kept in touch over the years, sometimes discussing his love for the Red Sox and, later, his disdain for the PGA Tour stars who took big Saudi money to play for LIV Golf. We spoke a lot about the 1993 bombing at the World Trade Center, an explosion that killed six, including a pregnant mother, injured more than a thousand and shook my wife’s office at Bankers Trust so violently that she thought the bomb went off inside her building.

Doug was a phone company executive and worked that Trade Center site with compassion and integrity. With power out and trapped workers inside constantly calling loved ones, Doug refused official advice to cut the phone lines to save what appeared to be a collapsing system. He wasn’t severing the only lifeline those people had to their families.

He met with federal agents after the ’93 bombing and did what he could to help cops, firefighters and displaced employees. “And the tragic irony of ironies,” Doug said more than eight years later, “is my son was killed at the World Trade Center.”

But as he continued to wrestle with his anger and sadness until he died last year at 82, Doug always circled back to the one thing the terrorists stole from Chris that hurt him the most.

“He would have been such a great father because he really loved kids,” Doug would say, “and they took that away from him.”

Doug and his wife, Ellen, and their son J.D. and extended family members felt that pain every day since 9/11. When the nation mourns the nearly 3,000 victims in ceremonies to mark the 25th anniversary (Is that even an appropriate word?), the families will be dealing with their unfathomable loss for the 9,131st consecutive day.

Theirs is not a once-a-year public observance, but a private daily reckoning that cannot be understood by anyone who hasn’t experienced it.

Carolee Azzarello understands. She lost her two brothers, Tim and John, the sons of longtime New York Yankees employee Hank Grazioso, while they were working for Cantor Fitzgerald.

Carolee said she will be staying home Friday with the TV turned off. “I can’t stand the visual of the North Tower with smoke coming out of it,” she said. “Everybody looks at that as a symbol of 9/11. I look at that as my brothers are in there dying.

“As much as I appreciate ‘Never Forget,’ I don’t appreciate the constant attention. It started so early this year because it’s 25 years since 9/11, and it’s so hard to have such a private and personal loss be so public. Nobody else has the anniversary of their parent’s or sibling’s death on a baseball hat or on a T-shirt. … People remind you all the time. You never get to crawl into a hole.”

Carolee’s father, Hank, who worked in the ticket office, was a Mickey Mantle fanatic and the rare baseball lifer who could say he had a conversation with Babe Ruth (as a child at a vegetable stand in Clifton, N.J.) and with Derek Jeter (at a Turks and Caicos restaurant, no less). Watching the coverage of the burning towers on the morning of 9/11, Hank knelt and prayed with the Yankees’ VP of ticket operations, Frank Swaine, who lost his son, John, another Cantor Fitzgerald employee.

I had a number of discussions with Hank before he died in 2023. In one, he detailed his sons’ recovered remains, descriptions that don’t belong in print. In another, we spoke the morning after U.S. special forces killed Osama bin Laden in 2011.

“I hope you’re having a great day,” I said when he answered the phone.

“I most certainly am,” he replied.

John, right, Hank, center, and Tim Grazioso. (Courtesy of the Grazioso Family)

Hank said he sat in his bedroom, alone with his thoughts, as he tried to process the bin Laden news. He cited “relief” as the most conspicuous feeling among the “eight million emotions running through me.” When he woke up that morning, he said, “I thought to myself, ‘Well, at least the boys have some kind of closure.’ I think they’re celebrating up there right now.”

For months after their murders, Grazioso kept seeing visions of his sons every time he opened his Yankee Stadium ticket window. Two years before he died, Grazioso said he saw another fleeting vision of Tim and John smiling in a bright light in his bedroom.

John’s wife, Tina, and their three children and significant others are scheduled to attend Friday night’s Yankees-Mets game in the Bronx. Hank loved bringing his boys and Carolee to the old stadium, in the old days.

Carolee won’t be attending the game or the morning ceremony downtown. “I don’t feel like facing the world on Friday,” she said. Like many 9/11 family members, she will honor her lost loved ones in private.

Jeremy Glick with his daughter, Emerson, on July 17, 2001. (Reuters)

Jed Glick was on the phone Wednesday to say that he has felt personal anguish every day for a quarter century, but that he was heading to a ceremony in Shanksville, Pa., because, in part, of how welcoming and kind that local community was after his brother Jeremy died a hero in the crash of United Airlines Flight 93.

“I do think it’s important to educate everyone who wasn’t alive or has no memory of 9/11,” Jed said. “People need to know the tragedy of it and the cases of heroism and unity on that day.”

Representing a school, Rochester, that didn’t even have a team, Jed’s brother won the 1993 national collegiate judo championship in the 86-kg division. Ncjajudo.org reported that “to everyone’s surprise” the top contender from Fresno State “lost to little-known Jeremy Glick.”

Jeremy Glick is now known to the world as one of the brave souls on the scheduled Newark-to-San Francisco flight who fought the hijackers and denied them a direct hit on a prominent Washington, D.C. target, bringing down the plane in a Shanksville-area field.

“As tragic as it was, it certainly does help that my brother went down fighting,” Jed said. “The fact that he was able to do it is not remarkable to me because that’s who Jeremy was. That was the first time we were able to fight back that day, and if that did save the Capitol or some other target and a lot of lives on the ground, there’s some good you can take out of it.”

Jeremy spoke with his wife, Lyzbeth, and told her to take care of their baby daughter Emerson before he left the phone and charged the terrorists.

“My son, Eli, is seven and my daughter, Birdie, is 10 months old, so I’ve had eight months more with my daughter than Jeremy had with his,” Jed said. “I think about things like that. This time of year, it all starts coming back, the shock, the suddenness of it all, where I was when I found out, seeing the rest of your family, how the weather is just like it was that day.

“I was 23 on 9/11, so it’s been a longer period than I was with my brother. It’s a very painful thing.”

In the early years after the attacks, Ellen Mello attended one 9/11 anniversary ceremony at the World Trade Center site but hasn’t made it back since.

“It was so large, so big,” she said. “I felt lost in it. I thought it was an incredible thing they were doing, but for me personally, I was just overwhelmed.”

Like her son, J.D., Ellen is most appreciative of the 9/11 memorial and museum, the annual ceremony and the foundation named after Chris and his Alta Communications colleague traveling with him that day, David Retik, which has distributed $4.2 million in philanthropic grants to develop young leaders.

Ellen is also thankful for those who have supported Doug’s pride and joy, the Chris Mello Scholarship Fund, which awards money to distinguished students on each side of the Rye-Harrison football rivalry.

“But we are private mourners,” Ellen said. “I’ve kept my mourning for the loss of Chris separate from the whole historic event. This was not just a catastrophe. Each person who died had an individual family life that was snuffed out.”

Ellen said her husband had an enormously difficult time dealing with his grief. “It haunted him,” she said. Doug wasn’t alone.

“Chris would have been my best man,” his brother said. J.D. and his wife, Gina, have two children, Jaden and Jack, who were born after 9/11. “It is tough to describe to them an uncle they have never met or never will meet,” J.D. said. “But Chris comes up often … and the really sad part is they would have loved him, and he would’ve been a wonderful addition to their lives.”

Chris was known for his easy smile and generosity of spirit, and his mother finds comfort in the fact that her younger son was so happy with his life. Ellen still feels joy when she looks at pictures of Chris, including one taken near the Statue of Liberty two decades ago, a framed photo that Doug took of his young sons.

J.D., left, and Chris Mello as young boys. (Courtesy of the Mello Family)

There is little J.D. on the left and little Chris on the right, with the Twin Towers right behind them, rising toward the sky. Ellen had the framed picture in her bedroom. She was walking through one day when the image stopped her cold.

“Oh my goodness,” Ellen said. “To think what would unfold there so many years later.”

A hell-on-Earth event for nearly 3,000 families who still suffer every single day.