In somber remembrance

Living honor the lost and sanctify the past

By Joanna Weiss and John Ellement, Globe Staff, 9/12/2003

Two years after the terrorist attacks that shook a nation to its core and jolted Boston with the pain of lives lost and security breached, a region that has returned to a cautious normalcy paused to recall a day when everything went wrong. On a morning much like the one two years ago, with clear blue skies and a crispness in the air, memories lingered in moments of silence, as flags flew at half-staff.

At Logan Airport, the departure point for the two planes that hit the World Trade Center, airline workers held a somber ceremony, and officials said business was down by 25 percent.

Elsewhere in Massachusetts, people found ways to sanctify the past: creating labyrinths and quilts, playing bagpipes and bugles, taking part in community service projects to honor the victim's memories.

Last year, such memorials were full of raw emotion, a sense that for families who lost loved ones in the tragedy, time had stopped. Yesterday, some appeared to be taking steps toward closure.

At the Public Garden in Boston, victims' loved ones gathered to break ground on a $500,000, horseshoe-shaped wall that will be inscribed with victims' names and ringed with flowers.

One participant -- Stephen Campbell of Arlington, who lost a close friend, Christopher Zarba Jr., in the first plane that hit the twin towers -- said he is now making plans to marry Zarba's wife. "It gives us a new life," Campbell said. "It puts the focus on something joyful and happy. It will always be tinged with sadness, but that's part of the richness."

For the most part, yesterday's official ceremonies focused on the past, the lives of the 197 Massachusetts residents lost in the attacks and those who died in New York, Pennsylvania, and Washington, D.C.

On the front lawn of the State House, Governor Mitt Romney and Lieutenant Colonel Jim Ogonowski of the Air National Guard raised the American flag, and then lowered it to half-staff. Ogonowski's brother, John, was the pilot of American Airlines Flight 11.

At 8:46 a.m., the time when the first plane hit the World Trade Center two years ago, the crowd of 100 fell silent. Afterward, chimes played while a dozen white doves were released.

At the same moment, at Logan Airport, passengers and staff members fell silent. In Terminal C, where United Airlines operates, passengers came to a stop where they stood. In front of an American flag, about 15 United employees gathered, some dabbing tears from their eyes.

Razia Jan, a native of Kabul, Afghanistan, stood in the United ticket line. Jan, a tailor who lives in Marshfield, was flying to Washington, D.C., to participate in memorial services at the Pentagon. She had made two quilts, one for the Pentagon employees killed that day and one for the passengers on the plane that hit the building.

"This is something I wanted to do, just in a small way, to help," said Jan, who has lived in the United States for 31 years.

The airport around her was filled with signs of how the city and country have changed in the past two years. State Police once patrolled Logan with pistols secured in shiny black holsters, and now troopers routinely walk through terminals armed with submachine guns. Also stationed at airport gates are employees of the Transportation Security Administration, an agency created after the 9/11 attacks.

The terrorist attacks aren't part of daily conversation among airport workers, said John A. Spano, an American Airlines employee. But "you still keep them in your heart," he said of the colleagues he lost. Members of the Cambridge Fire Department also sought to remember lost colleagues yesterday. On the banks of the Charles River, they raised a truck ladder 70 feet in the air, hoping that commuters would see the American flag attached, flanked by signs that read FDNY and 343, the number of firefighters killed in New York.

At Boston College, hundreds gathered to dedicate a stone labyrinth etched with the names of 22 alumni who perished in the terrorist attacks. About 1,100 people watched as the Rev. William P. Leahy, BC's president, sprinkled holy water on the 28-loop labyrinth, calling it a "perpetual place of remembrance."

Jefferson Crowther was there to remember his son, Welles R. Crowther, a 1999 BC graduate who worked in the World Trade Center and helped evacuate workers from the 78th floor.

"We knew that in the last hours of his life, he was doing what he truly wanted to be doing, and that was serving his fellow man," said the father, a volunteer firefighter like his son.

While many took part in formal ceremonies yesterday, others gathered at public service activities intended to honor lost lives. On the Esplanade, about 30 workers from Marsh Inc., a New York-based insurance company that lost nearly 300 people at its World Trade Center officies, replaced grass near the Hatch Shell with gardeners from the Charles River Conservancy. More than 200 employees from the firm's Boston office set out around the city yesterday, serving food to the homeless at shelters, baby-sitting for teenage mothers in school, and sprucing up parks from Dorchester to the Back Bay.

"Our focus today is on making the world a better place," said Christine Conway, a company spokeswoman.

And at the Mary Baker Eddy Library, some of the more than 50 fourth- and fifth-graders from the Samuel Mason Elementary School said they hoped that change would come. "I just want the president to do what he always says he's going to do, like stop all the violence," said Taneyri Sanchez, 10.

She and her classmates recorded their thoughts for the library's Words for the World project. "I want to live in a world where there is enough peace and harmony," said Raynisha Slade, 10, "where there's no fighting or bullying."

David Abel, Megan Tench, and Anand Vaishnav of the Globe staff and Globe correspondents C. Kalimah Redd, Brendan McCarthy, Sasha Talcott, Mary Hurley, and Paul E. Kandarian contributed to this report.