When I went to visit Mary Ann Christopher at her home in Avon-by-the-Sea, N.J., she was sitting at the table helping her daughter with her high school chemistry. Her large, warm, comfortable home displayed many pictures of her family and her four children. Mary Ann was nicely dressed for church, which she planned to attend right after the interview. Her shoulder-length hair was tucked behind her ears, showing off gentle features and a welcoming smile.
With her glasses, formal posture and elegant speech, Mary Ann looked like a businesswoman. In fact, she is the head of an organization of visiting nurses that has worked to repair lives damaged by the attacks of 9/11
I’m the president and CEO of the Visiting Nurse Association of Central Jersey. We are a large community-based organization that provides care on an annual basis to over 100,000 people residing in Middlesex and Monmouth Counties. We have a staff of 1,000 nurses, social workers, rehabilitative therapists, clergy, some physicians, home health aides who go throughout the community to administer people’s variety of complex needs whether they be home based or clinic based.
Initially, we were preparing to take care of people who were injured in 9/11. But the reality was that there were very few of those patients who actually came to us, although there were some. Our role from then, actually until today, was to provide stability and whatever comprehensive health-care services people needed.
There was nothing of this magnitude to draw on in terms of really professional expertise, so the head of our Mental Health Board, Charlie Brown, actually flew in the experts who managed the Oklahoma City aftermath so that we could participate appropriately for families.
We began to do a couple of things in Monmouth County. We participated in the Liberty Park Center, which became the clearing house for information for many of the family members who were at that point waiting for news about whether their family members had survived and then also provided support to the relief workers who were attempting to first find survivors and then find remains. The other thing that we began to do, because we’re a recognized safe entity for people in the community, is we began reaching out to religious organizations, in particular, to see if there were people in the community who might need our presence for whatever reason.
We began running a series of bereavement support groups for the family members and that continued for well over a year. One was specifically a widows group. Young widows who were pregnant or actually gave birth soon after 9/11 were trying to cope with an enormous tragedy in addition to managing households. One woman had a premature baby. So we actually placed home health aides in those homes around the clock so mothers could sleep, still take care of their children and still try to figure out what they were going to do moving forward with their lives. We got to know their families and their children, just to assist them through the mile markers that are so significant—remains being found, memorial services, funerals, first Thanksgiving, the first Christmas—all of those things that are so overwhelming for people.
As time went on we came to open care for several burn victims of the 9/11 disaster. We actually had them open for well over a year, first, of course, stabilizing their medical conditions with their burns once they were discharged from the hospitals, and then instituting very aggressive physical and occupational therapy so they could maintain some type of normalcy in terms of movement because of the severity of their burns.
We became a subcontractor to United Way, which became a real central point for financial support to families. United Way actually paid for some of the services that these families needed, because obviously insurance coverage was not a reality in many of the cases. They also had funding to assist people with mortgage payments, like widows who all of a sudden had no income. We became the disburser of payments for insurance policies, school tuitions, car payments—whatever people had that became so overwhelming that they couldn’t manage. So, we began to work very closely with a coalition of organizations in Monmouth County headed by the Mental Health Board to kind of outreach to families in this way.
The lesson for me, and it’s probably because of where I sit and what we did, is that there is a tremendous spirit of compassion that really sustains local communities in terms of tragedy that enables people to go on. I am thankful in my journey of my professional career that God brought me to the VNA of Central Jersey 21 years ago because to be a part of something where you can make a difference to people is really extraordinary. Just to see how people come together to kind of lift people over almost unimaginable horror and tragedies—that you can kind of get them through that, I think, says a lot. The spirit of the country happens in local communities and local neighborhoods every day. The outpouring of support from my perspective was just enormous and very gratifying.
It’s important that there be significant enough leadership at a community-based level that people can mobilize and initiate action. I would say that probably is one of the most compelling lessons, in addition to which that people have the capacity to really empathize and provide compassion and normalcy. As we build infrastructure moving forward, I think that the community-based organizations need to be recognized as key players. There are many natural events that transpire; there are hurricanes and earthquakes and everything else, and all of those require that the community-based network kind of pull people up and sustain them during these times of just unforeseen need.
Mary Ann and I talked about the storm 13 years ago that caused major destruction to most of the coastal towns in Monmouth County. Today, the damage has been repaired. “It just helps prove,” Mary Ann said with a smile, “that when communities come together, then they can overcome anything. Just look how wonderful our little town looks today.”
After the interview, I drove through all those coastal towns. For the first time ever I thought about all the work and effort that must have gone into making the county beautiful again. Maybe there is a lesson in that as we recover from the attacks of September 11, 2001, maybe just the idea that we unite together, clean up, fix and rebuild the devastation tells a story in itself: that we as a society will go on and that we will continue life no matter how hard we are hit. When communities work as a team, we push the country forward, covering the scars of disaster but never forgetting them.
Mary Ann Christopher is president and CEO of the Visiting Nurse Association of Central New Jersey. Eric Zaccone is an Honors College student at Rutgers-Newark.
