After the tour I found myself downtown, close to the Wall Street corner where Eddie and I had often met for spur of the moment kisses and end of the day encounters. I went to the corner and waited for several minutes. I looked down the long street and remembered how Eddie would walk toward me. I stood there until I felt like a jerk, having been stood up for a date.

I am angry with Eddie for dying on that day, a common reaction that fills me with guilt nonetheless. "To die at 31, without saying goodbye, without ever seeing our baby!" I think. "How dare you!" During one hypochondriacal moment long ago, when I claimed, half in jest, that I was dying, Eddie replied, also half in jest, that I should go to hell if I died now and that he'd certainly hate me forever for it. Will I hate him forever for disappearing from our lives? As I now consider adultery as revenge for his betrayal, I pity the man who will be trapped in this awful love triangle.

Really, I am angry with both of us, that we had no paranormal contingency plan, a place and time to meet after death, a celestial Wall Street corner similar to that one where we frequently met in life. We should have made arrangements for this, along with a promise that every night, at midnight, the dead person would say hello to the living one by flickering the lights. I hate that we wrongly assumed that we would be healthy and happy and together for many years to come, and wasted so much time because of this false sense of abundance.

Sometimes I am angriest at myself for being angry. I berate myself for my rage and then laugh like a madwoman, amused that I've wasted so much time choking on the venom of such an unproductive emotion. And in my laughter I release my anger and take great pleasure in the beauty of each day, as a tribute to Eddie, and to everyone who isn't here to experience it. And I laugh extra hard at people like Rall, so angry with me for not living up to their expectations of what a proper 9/11 widow is supposed to be.

Like Rall's terror widows, I am "eerily calm, [I] smile and crack jokes and laugh out loud." But not because I am an evil person. I laugh because sometimes I have to stop crying. I am calm to sustain my family. And I smile because, angry as I am, I am deeply grateful. Working for the Cantor Relief Fund, sorting through the letters that accompanied donations, I read about sacrifices that donors made in order to send their money: There were children who gave up birthday presents, families that gave up a month's income, people who gave up unemployment checks, a small dairy farm that gave up one of its 24 cows.

Go ahead: Read the hype, but don't believe it. Those of us who were wounded to the core by this tragedy are sad and angry and frequently lost. But we are not ungrateful opportunists who have welcomed the death of loved ones as an opportunity to get rich. That person is Ted Rall, and I pity him, more than anything else.

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