One of the Lucky Ones - Article that appeared in the Times Union

My cousin Glenn drove Engine 54  for a firehouse in the theater district in midtown Manhattan.

At age 50, Glenn was a senior member of his company. Not too long before 9/11, my husband and were in Manhattan to see a show on Broadway and we decided to walk over to Glenn’s firehouse to say hello.

Glenn wasn’t there that day, but the younger guys on duty were more than happy to laugh and socialize with the family of one of their brothers. It was obvious they were a close-knit bunch of guys who loved to taunt and mess with each other.

We left the firehouse with a smile on our faces and a bounce in our step. These young, handsome, cheerful and robust bunch of guys had that kind of effect on you.

As fate would have it, Glenn’s firehouse was one of the first to respond when disaster hit the World Trade Center on that beautiful morning in September 2001.

He was on his last day of vacation. Shortly after the planes hit, all the off-duty firemen were called in to work. As they stood somberly awaiting their assignments, one of the men asked the question on everyone’s mind, “Were any of our guys lost?”

The answer they heard — “everyone” — was too horrifying to fully comprehend.

Everyone from Engine Company 54 who happened to be on duty the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, was gone — 15 men in all.

In a state of disbelief, the survivors started to ask about the men in surrounding firehouses.

The word — everyone — was repeated over and over again. The shocking truth was that almost all the firehouses in the nearby communities had lost all the men who were at work that morning.

At 1 a.m. that night, the guys from Engine Company 54 were down at the World Trade Center site, digging through the rubble, desperately hoping to find their brothers alive. As dawn approached, the full impact of the devastation came into focus — 50,000 desks, chairs, file cabinets and computers, as well as the steel and concrete of the world’s most majestic pair of skyscrapers, were reduced to white ash and unrecognizable rubble.

The surrounding buildings contained massive gaping holes and furiously burning fires.

The area was promptly labeled ground zero, a term previously used to describe the devastating destruction found at the epicenter of a nuclear attack.

Because Engine 54’s firehouse is in the center of one of Manhattan’s biggest tourist areas, typically the doors are left wide open. After Sept. 11, people from all over the world came to the firehouse to show their support and pay their respects.

My cousin told me, “I feel like I’m at an unending wake; I’ve never been hugged so much in all my life. Even the hugs are pulling me down; I just can’t stand it anymore.”

He described a pervading sense of numbness, as if the firemen had been anesthetized. He knew more than 60 firemen who died and he asked, “How can you lose so many friends in one swift swoop?” I had no answer for him.

There was no relief from the sorrow. Funerals and memorial services occurred in a constant stream. After many weeks, the wife of one of his comrades spoke as if her husband might still be found alive. My cousin told me how painfully heartbreaking it was to hear her clinging to this hope once he’d been to ground zero and had seen firsthand the minuscule particles that remained.

Because the word “off” was penciled into my cousin’s schedule for Tuesday, 9/11, most people defined him as one of the lucky ones. Yet, I know firsthand that he never recovered from this devastating loss. It appears that his life blew up along with those majestic towers. The overwhelming anguish he suffered led to severe post traumatic stress syndrome and his mind still contains an indelible picture of a hell known as ground zero.

Mary Beth Buchner lives in Latham.