Good morning. It’s Friday, and it’s the 25th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks. We’ll meet a woman whose escape from Lower Manhattan that day was unusually complicated. We’ll also find out about a book co-edited by the lawyer who oversees the relief fund set up by Cantor Fitzgerald, the financial firm that lost 658 employees that day.
Aidan Kask’s fourth-grade teacher gave the class a writing assignment. The topic was “I am special because … ” “They could write about anything — ‘I play soccer,’ ‘I play football,’” his mother, Janet Kask, says. “A couple of his classmates said, ‘You were born on 9/11, talk about that.’” There were so many details about that day, and about how his parents got through it as unexpected bit players. One detail that Aidan Kask, 25, says he didn’t learn until he was in middle school was that he wasn’t supposed to have been born on Sept. 11, 2001. Aidan was not due until Oct. 5. That was supposed to have been the day on which his mother took his father home from New York University Medical Center. Peter Kask had undergone heart surgery on Sept. 10. “Giving birth was not part of the plan” for Sept. 11, says Janet Kask, who was a vice president of the New York Islanders at the time. She had enlisted a friend to drive to Manhattan from Long Island, where she and Peter lived. Inching along in the bumper-to-bumper line on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, admiring the World Trade Center in the distance, they saw a torrent of smoke and debris shoot out of one of the towers. The car radio told them that a small plane had lost control. “We thought nothing of it,” she says. They drove on, into the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel. They were closer to the Manhattan end when the traffic stopped. “I was scared,” she said. “Here I am pregnant. Are we going to perish in this tunnel?” She remembers worrying that the tunnel — the longest underwater tunnel in North America, almost a mile and three-quarters long — would flood. Instead, a cloud of dust and debris roared through. The south tower had just collapsed. The no-heartbeat scareLeaving her car behind, Kask ran for the Brooklyn end of the tunnel, sometimes bumping into car doors that had been left open as others bailed out. She took refuge in a tollbooth, but a law-enforcement officer told her, politely, that she could not hide out there. He led her to an ambulance, where the emergency medical technician could not find the baby’s heartbeat. “She actually said to me, ‘I think you might have lost your baby,’” Kask recalls. “My husband and I were about to celebrate our 14th anniversary. This was our first child. We waited so long. You know how when you’re young, you get busy with work and careers.” The ambulance took her to Lutheran Medical Center in Sunset Park, where doctors determined that the baby was alive and discharged her. Determined to keep an afternoon appointment with her obstetrician on Long Island, she found her way to the Long Island Rail Road’s Atlantic Terminal, in Downtown Brooklyn, and went home. The missing husbandThe obstetrician examined her and said, “You’re in active labor.” But Kask did not know where her husband was, and she wanted him to be at the hospital for the delivery. It turned out that he had been discharged from N.Y.U. Medical Center, on First Avenue in the East 30s, and after walking across town to Pennsylvania Station, had also ridden home on the L.I.R.R. The incisions from the heart surgery had opened, and he was bleeding. “The doctor was like, ‘You be quiet, I have to treat your husband now,’” she says. Then the baby’s heart rate plummeted, and the doctor did an emergency C-section. When Aidan was 5 or 6 weeks old, they went to Colorado, where she and her husband had vacationed for years. “It was the first time we could breathe, enjoy our baby and enjoy our future,” she says, and they decided to move there. But the good times were short-lived. “Peter hadn’t been feeling well for a while,” she says, and when Aidan was a few weeks older, Peter was diagnosed with cancer. He died after many rounds of treatment, in 2006, when Aidan was 5. Aidan, who grew up to be a systems test engineer with a defense contractor in California, remembers that fourth-grade essay. “I did write ‘I am special because I was born on Sept. 11,’” he says. It would be different if he wrote it now. He would say more about his parents. “I’d include what my mom and my dad had to end up going through, persevering to find their way out and make everything right,” he says. WEATHER Mostly cloudy with a high near 81. Tonight will be mostly clear with a low around 66. ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING In effect until Saturday (Rosh Hashana). QUOTE OF THE DAY “It was a singular moment in time.” — Kenneth Feinberg, who became the public face of the Sept. 11 victims’ compensation fund. The latest New York news
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When the job recruiter called, Caroline Koster, an associate in a law firm in Midtown Manhattan, said, “No way.” This was soon after the Sept. 11 attacks. She changed her mind before long and went to work at Cantor Fitzgerald, the investment bank whose offices had been on four floors near the top of the north tower of the World Trade Center, above where American Airlines Flight 11 hit. Of the firm’s 960 employees, 658 were killed. “New York was down, and we were down, and I was going to do everything I could to bring it back,” she said. “If that meant I was going to work at Cantor, then I was going to do that.” Koster’s responsibilities included overseeing the relief fund that was set up for the victims’ families. It has since grown to support disaster relief efforts and other charities. And, as the 25th anniversary of the attacks approached, her responsibilities grew to include co-editing a book, “The Families,” a collection of essays by relatives and survivors. She read the first batch on the way home one night. “I got on the 5 train, and 30 minutes later I was stuck in the middle of Brooklyn, I didn’t know where I was, I had missed my stop and I was crying,” she said. She texted Edie Lutnick, her co-editor and the president and executive director of the Cantor Fitzgerald Relief Fund. Lutnick’s brother Gary, who worked for the firm, was killed on Sept. 11. Their brother Howard, the chairman and chief executive, is now the secretary of commerce. Koster said the emotional power and determined resilience of the essays surprised her. “I don’t know what I expected, but it was not that,” she said. “The book has been a way of realizing that you can hold grief and hope and a little faith and even a little joy in the same sentence.” METROPOLITAN DIARY Snapshot
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Glad we could get together here. See you tomorrow. — J.B. Davaughnia Wilson and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at nytoday@nytimes.com. Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox. |
