Some are still burying the dead

Six years after 9/11, local families seek closure

When Foxborough police came to Cynthia McGinty's house in October 2001, she felt relief. The news they brought confirmed something that in her heart she already knew: Her husband was dead.

Michael McGinty had been on the 99th floor of the World Trade Center's North Tower on the morning that jets piloted by terrorist hijackers slammed into the buildings. Now, the officers told her, there was proof. Medical examiners in New York sifting through the rubble had found small pieces of his remains. A local funeral director soon went to New York and obtained the pieces of bone and tissue. She and her two sons held a service and buried the remains in a casket at Rock Hill Cemetery in Foxborough. She wept and tried to move on.

But then, about a year later, she received a call that more of her husband's remains had been found. Some time after that she received another call. And then another.

While trying to steer a 9-year-old son out of depression and coping with the loss of the husband she adored, McGinty found herself confronting his death over and over again.

"How many times are you going to bury somebody?" McGinty said. "It immediately takes you back to Sept. 11."

Today, as the nation remembers the sixth anniversary of the attacks that began when two airplanes took off from Logan International Airport, family members are still trying to cope with an open grave. Medical examiners continue to painstakingly sift through tons of debris from ground zero, searching for human remains that might be matched with DNA samples of possible victims. So far, the New York medical examiner's office has identified about 59 percent of the 2,750 people presumed killed, according to Ellen Borakove, spokeswoman for the office. But more than 22,000 human body parts have been recovered around the site, nearly nine times the number of victims.

For some families who receive news again and again that additional remains have been found, life has become a nightmare in which they struggle for closure but do not find it. Other families have received no evidence that their loved ones are dead, and they live their own bad dream.

"It's very difficult because there never is a closure on it," said Diane Hunt of Kingston, whose 32-year-old son, William Christopher Hunt, was a stock broker on the 84th floor of the South Tower. He is presumed dead, but no remains have been found. Without solid evidence that he is dead, Hunt said, her mind conjures a belief that he is not.

"Being a mom - and I know it sounds ridiculous - but I hope he has amnesia somewhere, and he's still alive," Hunt said. "I know it's an impossible thing, but there's a corner in my heart that gives me that little bit of hope."

With no remains to bury, she and her husband have instead memorialized their son in their backyard, where a stone bench sits near a flagpole flying the American flag and a banner with their son's initials.

Some families who still await confirmation of their loved ones' fates have clung to the operation at ground zero as their main hope for closure. Some have been able to move on, thinking of their loved ones as though they were lost at sea. But many family members say it is painfully difficult to move forward without the physical confirmation that their family member perished in the attacks. Some have erected headstones, even though they have nothing to bury.

Maria Koutny, 39, of Methuen couldn't remove from her mind the words of her mother, Marie Pappalardo, during one of the last times they saw one another. Pappalardo told her daughter that she wanted to be buried at the family plot in the Immaculate Conception Cemetery in Lawrence.

On the morning of Sept 11, Pappalardo boarded United Airlines Flight 175 to Los Angeles, which was crashed into the south tower. No remains have been found, and Koutny has not been able to fulfill her mother's wish.

"I guess in my mind, at least having the physical remains there would make it seem like she was finally where she wanted to be," Koutny said. She later added, "I feel a little guilty because I can't do something that I knew she wanted, to rest next to my grandmother."

For years she has thought of burying something symbolic - a lock of hair from her mom's hairbrush, a sprinkle of debris from the World Trade Center site, or photos of the cats her mother loved - but so far she has held out.

"I still hope, but I have to be realistic," Koutny said. "We're going on six years, and it's not looking real good. I don't even care if it's a little, just something."

Some families who have received additional remains over time have found ways to incorporate new findings into religious ceremonies. Several years after McGinty buried her husband, she had additional remains cremated and sprinkled at his grave during a graveside service.

But that option is not open to Jewish families whose faith forbids cremation and requires funerals to be held as soon as possible after death.

It means that Zachary Meltzer has had to bury his son three times, digging up the casket twice in order to rebury it at a small ceremony officiated by a rabbi.

"There was no other way to handle it," he said of burying his son, Stuart, who was working in the North Tower at the bond-trading firm Cantor Fitzgerald. "It's a very tough thing. For my wife and I, it's a disaster. Every time remains are found, it opens up wounds."

Then there's Stephanie Holland-Brodney of Wayland, whose mother, Cora Hidalgo Holland of Sudbury, was a passenger on American Airlines Flight 11. The medical examiner's office identified Holland from tiny remains that were exhumed during testing, giving the family confirmation but not providing anything to bury.

There's Teresa Mathai of Arlington, who still checks her watch every day at 11 minutes past 9 and feels lucky because her husband was among the first to be identified.

And there's Elizabeth Kovalcin, who had a funeral and later received two sets of her husband's remains. She had those cremated but hasn't found the right way to disperse the ashes or approach the emotional toll of another funeral.

Some families will come to Boston this morning to join in a ceremony at the State House. Others are drawn to New York and will spend their day at services there. Others will mark the day with subtle references to their loved ones, sending balloons into the air or placing flowers atop a cemetery plot.

"Right from the start, I never expected anything," said Dracut resident Peggy Ogonowski, whose husband, John, was the captain of American Airlines Flight 11. "It was an inferno. How do you pick out a tiny anything and say it belonged to this person?"

John Ogonowski's brother Jim is currently running for Congress in the Fifth Congressional District. The family held a ceremony the week after his death and put up a headstone in a nearby cemetery.

"If they came up with as much as a shard, I would have a full burial," Peggy Ogonowski said. "But so far that hasn't happened."

Matt Viser can be reached at maviser@globe.com.