Found and lost

I thought I was one of the lucky 9/11 relatives: I had the remains of my husband. But then the medical examiner informed me I was grieving over only 40 percent of Eddie's body.

By A.R. Torres

Jul 10, 2002 | Ten days after 9/11, the police came to my door. They wanted to tell me personally that they had identified Eddie's body. One week after that, I buried my beloved husband in Woodlawn Cemetery, in the Bronx. In March, I received some personal property -- his three ID cards. In April, I got more news: They had identified a piece of his muscle mass. Suddenly, I had to ask a difficult question that I had previously avoided: "How much of Eddie did I bury?" The answer was 95 percent -- I was short by just a foot or two.

I've reacted to all the news about Eddie, his body and his belongings in the same way: I am seized by an immediate and intense spasm of grief, which spreads throughout my body, until totally absorbed. After that, to my surprise, I feel peace.

I have tried to feel like a winner. After all, I was among the few who received so much from the recovery efforts at ground zero. According to the news, roughly two-thirds of the 2,823 dead vanished without a trace. Their loved ones still wait and hope that the medical examiner will call with the news that their loved one was "found" among the approximate 19,550 body parts still waiting to be identified. Meanwhile, of the 1,092 bodies identified, there were only about 300 whole bodies. Eddie, was one of them, less his feet.

As a winner, I was able to take control of Eddie's body, and in doing so, I could begin to retake control of my own chaos. Life left Eddie's body suddenly and violently. And, according to the grief literature, when someone you love dies in this way, you feel powerless and vulnerable. I did, and the rituals that came with possession of Eddie's body suddenly gave structure to my messy world. I compiled "to do" lists and relinquished very few tasks to others. By confronting the realities of retrieving Eddie's body, ceremonializing his death, and burying him, I anticipated some relief as payoff for my efforts.

But relief, and the widely advertised sense of closure, evaded me as I stumbled on my last duty. Since April, I've awkwardly tried to get a headstone for Eddie's grave, often losing the paperwork and forgetting to make the necessary phone calls. It's not that I haven't felt a certain urgency about getting this done. Whenever I visit the cemetery, I'm bewildered by the bleak dirt trail under which Eddie lays. The sight evokes the awful days when Eddie was equally ill-defined at death, identifiable only through dental records. My need to delineate his grave is so strong that I always end up ripping the heads off the roses I bring and throwing their petals all over his rectangular form. But the wind removes them and I am left where I began, with a dirt trail and a loss for words.

In May, I tried to take care of all the headstone business in one day. I came to the cemetery to look at other graves and their markers. The stone of one of Eddie's next-door neighbors, Ellen Jackson, 1874-1924, was the one I liked best. It was charcoal black, the kind of stone Eddie and I wanted to use for our kitchen counter but found too expensive. The marker was slanted and rough edged along the top, sides and back.

I wanted Eddie's stone to be different in just two ways -- I wanted to include the complete dates of his birth and death, even if this meant that passersby might wonder if he was "one of them." I also decided to leave space for another person on the stone, but not in a way that indicated he's expecting anyone else, just in case I don't get there.

Next Page: It turned out that I never had control of Eddie's body

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