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New Yorkers Struggle to Heal After 9/11

By DNAinfo Staff on August 22, 2011 12:47pm  | Updated on September 10, 2011 9:21pm

By Julie Shapiro and Jennifer Weiss

DNAinfo Reporters

LOWER MANHATTAN — The last memory Charles G. Wolf has of his wife, Katherine, is giving her a goodbye kiss as she left their apartment on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001.

Katherine, 40, was so anxious as she got ready for her third week of her new job on the 97th floor of 1 World Trade Center, she had almost rushed out the door without embracing him.

Wolf never heard from her again.

Now, with the 10th anniversary of the terror attack looming, Wolf and thousands of others whose lives were upended are caught in a conflict between holding on to their cherished as well as painful memories and letting them go.

"There's never any closure," Wolf, 57, said on a recent afternoon from a shaded park bench near his Greenwich Village apartment.

"But with 9/11 there can be healing," he added. "That healing is remembering without reliving."

Wolf can still hear his wife's lilting Welsh accent, and he can picture the outfit she was wearing the night they met, with a wide black belt encircling her slim waist.

Every night, he still falls asleep on the right side of their bed, leaving room for her on the left.

But other memories have slipped away — Katherine's smell is gone, even from the clothing Wolf saved in plastic bags. Also gone are some of the most painful moments that followed the attack, like the details of the hours Wolf sat by his phone, waiting for a call that never came.

For Wolf, this anniversary is about looking toward the future, rather than turning back to the pain. He likes to watch the new towers rising at the World Trade Center site, a sign of life at a place that saw so much death.

"I'm hoping we'll begin leaving 9/11 farther and farther behind," he said. "I have more chapters to live."

For others, though, the line between past and present is not so clear. 

Louis Ferrara, a Rockland County EMT who is sick after spending 72 hours at Ground Zero treating recovery workers, said he could not forget 9/11 even if he wanted to.

"I still feel the same way: very angry and agitated," Ferrara said. "People who say, 'Move on,' I'm sorry, but we can't get over it. We were there. We experienced it."

Ferrara still flinches when he hears low-flying planes, and when he closes his eyes to go to sleep, he sees firefighters holding each other for support and children gripping photos of their loved ones, begging rescue workers to find them.

He also bears physical scars: After inhaling a toxic cocktail of pollutants at Ground Zero, Ferrara lost more than a quarter of his lung capacity. He developed the early stages of esophageal cancer and complained of sudden, blinding headaches. After a seizure in 2008, doctors discovered a brain tumor.

Ferrara said that it's bad enough that at just 40 years old he has already lost his health, his job and his independence — but what's even worse is that many New Yorkers seem to have forgotten that for some people, the trauma of 9/11 is ongoing.

"Hopefully, with the 10th anniversary, everyone remembers," Ferrara said.

Soon, though, this anniversary will pass, like all those before it, and the focus on 9/11 will inevitably wane.

That's where Lee Ielpi comes in.

Ielpi founded the Tribute WTC Visitor Center, a small museum across from Ground Zero, after his 29-year-old son Jonathan, a firefighter, was killed in the attack.

Now, Ielpi is pushing schools to teach children about 9/11, with an emphasis on tolerance.

"War is not just won on a battlefield," said Ielpi, 67, who splits his time between Long Island and the city. "People need to understand, and then maybe we can move forward in a positive way."

While Ielpi has taken on the public role of an advocate, he is also confronting the much more personal meaning of this anniversary.

"It means I haven't seen my son in 10 years," Ielpi said. "There's no way to describe the way you miss a child."

Ielpi misses taking his oldest son fishing and going on camping trips, but most of all he misses the phone calls. Even as an adult, Jonathan called his father three, four, five times a day, always describing his work at the FDNY with pride.

It was no surprise, then, that Jonathan Ielpi called his father on the morning of Sept. 11, telling him to turn on the TV.

"Hey, Dad, we're going," Jonathan Iepli, a father of two, told Lee Ielpi, excitement in his voice.  

"I said, 'OK, be careful,'" Ielpi recalled. "He said, 'OK, Dad.' That was the last time we spoke."

As a retired firefighter, Lee Ielpi also rushed to Ground Zero on 9/11, arriving shortly after the towers collapsed. He spent the next nine months searching the scalding rubble for bodies.

On Dec. 11, 2001, Ielpi and his younger son, Brendan, who had joined the FDNY four months before 9/11, carried Jonathan's body from the ruins.

Looking back, Ielpi takes comfort in remembering Jonathan's excitement to respond to the Trade Center attack, his eagerness to help the people there. That comfort, though, does not fill the holes left by Jonathan's absence.

"There's always an empty seat at the table," Ielpi said.

While each year that passes since 9/11 has dulled the pain slightly for some who survived, this year's anniversary will be the hardest yet for Patricia Moore, a fashion designer and community activist who has lived across the street from the World Trade Center for more than three decades.

This is Moore's first year without her husband, Andy Jurinko, who fled their apartment alongside her on that chaotic September morning just minutes before the South Tower collapsed, blowing in all 17 windows of their Cedar Street loft.

Jurinko died of pancreatic cancer last Valentine's Day, at the age of 71.

While federal officials have not found a link between 9/11 toxins and cancer, Moore wonders if all the months she and Jurinko spent shoveling dust-coated debris from their ravaged home contributed to his illness.

Moore and Jurinko thought their protective masks would keep them safe.

But after wearing them dutifully for three months as they swept up the singed checks from Cantor Fitzgerald and Windows on the World that had landed in their living room, they learned that the mask filters were supposed to be changed every few hours.

"At first I didn't even have time to think if [Jurinko’s illness] was connected [to 9/11]," Moore, 58, said recently in her loft.

"But when you realize he's not going to live, you do spend some moments dwelling on: Why did this happen?"

Now, 10 years after the attack, Moore is struggling to rebuild her life yet again, this time without her husband. She is pouring energy into community causes, her work and her friends, fighting the pull of despair.

As she does so, Moore remembers the last promise she made to her husband, before he slipped into a coma. She promised him that she would survive.

"It's painful," Moore said of the past 10 years, "but we've lived through this. To look and see where we are 10 years later, where the city is — it's an observation of the human spirit."

Julie Shapiro and Jennifer Weiss reported this story. Shapiro is the author and Weiss produced the video.