Sunday, May 11, 2008
On Sept. 11, the fiancées and partners of many who died suffered a double loss. Lacking the legal status of spouses, they were denied public legitimacy and, in some cases, the support of a loved one's family.
Sep 10, 2002 | Theresa Lanzisero was one month away from marrying Tommy Casoria, a firefighter, when he died at the World Trade Center. Her engagement ring is one of the few tangible mementos she has of her man. Beyond that, there are a lot of memories -- his Robert De Niro impersonation, the number on his softball jersey (22, same as his engine number), the Blues Brothers skit he performed with his brother at their engagement party. "Tommy did a split," she says. "And he's a big boy, not very light on his feet."
What Lanzisero doesn't have is one of the few remnants of her relationship to Casoria she thought she would never lose -- his family. When she approached them with the idea of officially adopting Tommy's surname, his father, she says, told her bluntly that she did not deserve the family name. She found herself increasingly excluded from what remained of Tommy's world. And when he was honored at a special ceremony at Ground Zero, she was not even informed. Instead, she read about it in a local paper the next day.
"I don't know what happened," she says. "Everybody was running around having a ball three weeks earlier. We were having parties, everything was fine, everything was happy, we were part of each other's world.
"Now, it's as if I died in the World Trade Center too," she says. "I lost some of my life, I lost my future, I lost everything."
Across the city, women and men who were engaged to or living with victims of the Sept. 11 attacks find themselves in the same painful limbo. While spouses are legally classed as next of kin, the fiancées and lovers have no legal connection to their loved ones' families. And in many cases, they find the families uninterested in maintaining ties, a rebuke that they feel denies them legitimacy. "My whole life with his family for the last six years, was that a façade?" asks Lanzisero. "Were they just putting on an act for him because he loved me so much?"
Grief is a complex psychology, and there are probably half a dozen answers to the question, but for many of these survivors, the explanation for the sudden estrangement seems clear enough: money. And, of the nearly 3,000 people who died in the attacks, it was the 343 fallen firefighters, designated as heroes, who became the focus of a national outpouring of donations in the weeks after Sept. 11.
The selective generosity of the public created a bitter debate among the victims' families, and was characterized in a blistering satire by cartoonist Ted Rall in the Village Voice. Girlfriends and fiancées of firefighters, unrecognized by law (New York makes no provision for common law marriage), looked on from the sidelines as money flowed, many of them suspecting that their fiancés' families had frozen them out to avoid having to share the wealth.
Many of these women had shared mortgages and joint bank accounts with the men who died. In all cases they are trying to get by on one income where previously they were able to depend on two. Most of them, however, say money is not the issue; it's the sense of illegitimacy that rankles.
"Not having a marriage certificate has affected every aspect of my life now," says Gina Penos, who called her fiancé, Jimmy Pappageorge, the morning of Sept. 11 to tell him she was pregnant, only to find that he had just left the firehouse for the World Trade Center towers. "From not getting the financial support that a widow would receive, to finding myself taking a backseat in everything.
"All of a sudden I feel that that the past eight years with this man doesn't count," she continues. "My opinion doesn't count, I don't have the ability to make any decisions that relate to him, and on top of that I'm grieving for the loss of my future, for the loss of my child's father, for the loss of my husband. It's just hard that certain people can't see what our relationship meant. It feels like I don't exist anymore."
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