September 11 started as a normal day. At the time I was in the eighth grade. Got up regular time, took the bus to school. It wasn’t until third period that we found out about the attack. The guidance counselor from downstairs, Mrs. Passalacqua, walked into the classroom and told our science teacher about the attack. He just said that a plane hit the trade center. We all made assumptions that it was a Cessna or a small plane.
It hit me that she was in that building roughly a half hour after I found out about the attack. Something in my mind triggered it. I went to call my mother from a pay phone in the school, and I got a busy signal. I wasn’t sure if this had anything to do with the attack, but I thought maybe it did. I wanted to call my mother to see if everything was OK. Meanwhile the teacher was trying to explain to us what had happened.
I remember feeling worry and fear. I thought back to when my grandfather passed away. It was 10 years earlier and I remember how the family dealt with it. I asked myself, “You know, is it possible we could lose another family member?” I had no idea where my aunt was, what the chances were, what the probability was. It was all such a blur.
A Feeling of Doom
Then my sister and my father came to pick me up at school. Every classroom has a telephone, and they called, and I went downstairs, and I remember that feeling of doom, of trouble. I saw my sister and my father standing there, and everybody was just in shock. You could feel it in the air.
When my grandfather died, I was only 6. I really didn’t have an understanding of it at the time. But the one thing that sticks out in my mind was the way that the family reacted to it. How bad everything was for a couple of years there. When everybody’s healthy and everything is good, you never think about these bad situations; you never think about how they would impact you. It’s like an ignorance-is-bliss type of thing. When something like this happens, everything goes through your mind. I pretty much played out all of the situations despite not knowing where she was.
Personally I did not see the planes; I did not see the buildings fall; I did not see anything. We went in the car and I heard the radio reports. At first they said something like seven planes were hijacked. At the time there was a lot of fear. It was very like “a nation under attack” emergency. There was absolutely no music at all. It was like a doomsday type of situation—at least it seemed like one to me.
We went to our house, and I remember my mother was very distraught. Then I saw it. They just kept showing it over and over and over again. It’s one thing to hear on the radio that the trade center collapsed. To actually see it is a different story. That’s when it hit me that we could have lost a relative, that my aunt could have died.
We went to my grandmother’s house, and when we were in front of the house my father received a cell phone call from my cousin. Someone who worked with my aunt had seen her crossing the Brooklyn Bridge. In other words she had gotten out of the building and was safe. So we all breathed a sigh of relief. I remember thinking that maybe everything might be okay, but I also remember feeling like this is false somehow; something’s off here. But the general assumption in the family was that she was okay. We really wanted to believe it. It may not have been true, but we really wanted to believe it.
We went to my grandmother’s house to pick up my 95-year-old great-grandmother, who was sleeping at the time. I don’t believe she understood the severity of the situation until she saw it on TV. That really set it in. It doesn’t matter what language you speak or what you understand. When you see a building like that fall and you know that your granddaughter could be in there—it has an affect on you. Then we went to my other aunt’s house, and at the time everyone was there pretty much. All my cousins, everyone related to the family was there. A lot of friends were there. I remember it was a time when you kind of wanted those people there, but then again you didn’t.
There Was Hope
There was hope. Every time the phone rang it was a sense of hope. You wanted to believe that maybe this is her; maybe this is the hospital calling. We kept calling hospitals left and right, but we kept getting no’s and no’s, and it was rough.
Everybody was there. It’s a time in my life that I’ll always remember. I remember my cousin, the daughter of my aunt who was in the building—she was 7 or 8 at the time.
We went to go pick her up at my aunt’s house, and her father was home on the phone calling hospitals. I remember looking into the sink and seeing the dishes from that morning’s breakfast. They had Cheerios. It stuck out in my mind because it made me realize that she was here this morning. She was here three or four hours ago, and you just hoped that maybe she’d be able to return back here.
The world was upside down for the day. Panic all over the place. You turn on the news, and everywhere you look that’s all there was.
My cousin knew something was not right. But she didn’t know the buildings tumbled down. We really didn’t let her see the news. We didn’t want her to know at first because we really didn’t want to know ourselves to be honest with you. We thought that maybe everything was going to be fine, but hours went by. She knew something was off because her mother wasn’t there.
At first we told her that her mother got stuck in New York. We didn’t come out and say, “Your mother might have died.” We just kind of played it off because we didn’t want her to panic. And we kept calling hospitals, until 2 or 3 o’clock in the morning.
The Truth is the Truth
At first my grandmother was very calm. I believe she still had hope and still wanted to believe that my aunt was alive. We all wanted to believe and thought she was alive. We kept telling my grandmother that there was a lot of traffic and she might still be out there, hurt or unconscious. She was very stone-faced. I guess she didn’t want to cause panic. My mother was like that, my other aunt was like that.
We tried to make the best out of what we could, but there was a sense of doubt, a sense of doom. We made scenarios up in our minds about how she could be alive and not contact us. But in the end, the truth is the truth.
I slept over my aunt’s house. I woke up on the 12th, around 6:30, 7:00, and everyone was there--cousins, distant cousins, the priest from the local church. Maybe she did die. It hit you because during the 11th, the day, the afternoon, you had hope. Maybe it’s possible she reached a phone now—every time the phone rang everyone went quiet; everybody shut the TV off. It was all false. On the 12th, it settled into you.
Everybody was praying. It gave you some faith, and you were happy because you realized that people did care about the situation and were there to help you. Times like this you find your real friends, someone to talk to. Whenever someone close to you dies, you don’t cry for them; you cry for you because you no longer have them. I did find myself praying a little more because you needed God at this moment.
My mother knew what floor she was on—I think she told us the 42nd, but it might have been the 47th. How does the guy on the 85th floor get out and my aunt from a floor in the 40s not get out? I believe it was a week after when we got in touch with a gentleman she worked with named Tom. The building collapsed around him, and he crawled his way out. He said they were together most of the way, but something happened at the end, and the lights went out.
You never want to come out and say, “It’s done with.” Deep down you came to a conclusion, but on the outside you still wanted to believe that she did make it out, that she was in a coma in the hospital. The gentleman Tom told us that they made it to the lobby and that’s all we knew. There was no one else to tell us where she was.
The call about her being on the bridge could have been a case of mistaken identity. You know in the confusion of that day I don’t believe anyone made much sense. There were thousands of people trying to scramble away, and I’m sure it was an honest mistake. Who would do that on purpose? I wouldn’t say that I’m angry at it, more like I’m sad about it; I wish it were true, let’s put it that way. Maybe they saw the back of someone’s head and thought it was her and they made a call. After the information Tom shared with us, I still went along with the hope of the family, but deep down inside I believed that was the end of that.
My other aunt, Sylvia, had a phone call with the aunt that passed away in the attack. I believe it was roughly 10 to 15 minutes after the first plane hit. My aunt in the building told her that there was a big loud explosion; they said they were getting ready to leave, doing something for the bank. They said they saw papers flying out the window. I know she was the last member of our family who talked to her, not even a half hour before she dies.
We did have a funeral. It took place on January 3, 2002. They found her body during Christmas break. It was around three days after Christmas, and we received a call. We were upstairs painting my sister’s room. It was kind of bittersweet. At least we had some closure to the situation, something you could go visit at the cemetery. They did not find her whole body; they found her torso, and she was missing some extremities.
RoseMarie DiMatteo is an Honors College student at Rutgers-Newark. Peter DiMatteo is her brother. They live in Parsippany, N.J.
