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Gold9472
12-04-2005, 02:33 PM
Widow brings fresh insights into 9/11 attack

http://www.fortwayne.com/mld/journalgazette/news/editorial/13326302.htm

(Gold9472: This has nothing to do with 9/11 Truth, but in a way... it does.)

Reviewed by Helen Ubinas
12/4/2005

It was during Marian Fontana’s darkest moment – locked in her bathroom, screaming at the top of her lungs in despair over the death of her firefighter husband, out of control with grief – that the idea came to her.

“I want to advocate for the firefighters, to get them more money however I can,” she writes in her Sept. 11 memoir, “A Widow’s Walk.” “I will enlist other widows to help me. I will start an organization. I will call it the 9-11 Widows Association, and we will talk about our lives and use this rare spotlight to help them.”

And that she did. But even before that moment of deep pain and inspiration, Fontana had become a spokeswoman for a moment that will forever symbolize a national tragedy.

Early on, Fontana realized that there was no way for her grief to be private.

She led rallies when, less than two weeks after the World Trade Center attacks, the city announced plans to close Squad 1, her late husband Dave’s firehouse.

She looked into the cameras that intruded into her life and her grief, and she told anyone who would listen about the emotional and financial sacrifices firefighters endured for a job they loved. Dave Fontana was waiting for a 3?percent raise at the time of his death. They were living on $450 a week when he died.

“I think people are now aware that these guys are the bravest guys in the world. They would do anything for anybody, and it’s time for the country to support that financially. It’s always bothered me that someone on Wall Street can make a million dollars in 10 minutes, but I doubt any of those people would run into a burning building.”

Four years – and many books – after Sept. 11, it seems almost impossible for anyone to take us any further into the horror of it all, but Fontana rose to the occasion in a way that befitted her courageous husband’s memory.

Sept. 11 was the couple’s eighth wedding anniversary. She had just dropped off their son Aidan at his second day at kindergarten. She was looking forward to spending a night out on the town with her husband, whom she had asked to change shifts so they could celebrate.

“I’ll see you at Connecticut Muffin in 10 minutes.” Those were the last words Fontana spoke to her husband.

And then she noticed, she writes, “people pointing at a plume of smoke cutting across the sky like a black arrow,” and she knew something was wrong.

And from that moment on, Fontana takes us a step deeper, not only into her own loss, but also into the drama that unfolded around her.

There were the sometimes messy lives of the firefighters who died. At one point, Fontana had to serve as the go-between between Linda, a firefighter’s soon-to-be ex-wife, and Princess Linda (a nickname he gave her to differentiate them), his girlfriend.

And there were the tactless political maneuverings: politicians who gave the same speech, read the same eulogies at funerals and always left right away.

But Fontana, who is a playwright and comic, also offers moments of levity – humor that makes her grief bearable: the priest she loved immediately, who upon learning her husband had died on their anniversary, quipped: “God is incredibly tacky.” The widows who joked about the sudden market for grief makeup. Her own declaration that she needs a “wake-ation” after another of the endless wakes for the firefighters.

But more than anything, Fontana exhibits in her writing and through her dedication and work with the 9/11 Widows and Victims Family Association an indestructible spirit and a deep love for one of the many men who gave everything they had.

“I want to believe the pain lessens over time, the way everyone promised, but it has been nearly a year and it hurts with the same intensity,” she writes. “I wonder if the pain lasts in direct proportion to how much you loved someone and whether I will be crying like this like this for years to come.”