The Greatest Love of All

65 years ago on October 13, 1951 a young man, not yet 30 years of age, sacrificed his life on a far away hill in South Korea.   First Lieutenant Joseph T. O’Donnell died defending the rights of the South Korean People.   This week, six and a half decades later, Joe’s youngest grandchild, Michael O’Rourke, celebrates his marriage to a beautiful young woman from Korea.   Her name is Yoonmi Lee and she seems to me to be a person worth defending and even, if need be, dying for.  I am now witnessing first hand a flesh and blood consequence of Joe’s ultimate sacrifice.   I am delighted to see this fruition of love between Michael and Yoonmi.   And, for the very first time in my life, I have finally gotten a sense of meaning, a sense of understanding and a sense of peace.   I realize now that Joe did not die in vain, he died in an act of the greatest love one man can show another.

“This is My commandment, that you love one another as I loved you. Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends.  “ John 15: 12,13 

The Gold Star that is given to a mother when her child is killed in action is a symbol of this ultimate act of love.  This Saturday I plan to give Michael and Yoonmi the Gold Star that belonged to Joe’s mother with the hopes that it will continue to be a visible symbol to them of the supreme love that it represents.  May  this extreme, supreme love remain with them,  and bring them peace and happiness, shelter and protection  all of the days of their lives.  

45 Years of Marital Bliss - More or Less

I laid awake half the night thinking of many things which is a sometimes annoying characteristic of my very active brain cells.  There is no question about it; I would have been diagnosed as having ADD or ADHD if I had been born 50 to 60 years later.

Probably one of the biggest videos that played through my mind all night was the review of the years that have transpired since the night before Thanksgiving in 1969 when I met a guy from Astoria by the name of Robert William Buchner at “The Desert Inn” in Queens, NY.    I went to this rather ordinary “pick up joint” along the Van Wyck Expressway in Queens, NY to meet friends and of course, to meet a guy or two.  I was going to be 25 years old on my upcoming birthday in March of 1970 and had just passed the date (November 8^th, 1969) that should have been my wedding!   This is another complicated story – not for this time - but needless to say the day came and went and I was still single, unattached and looking for Mr. Right. 

I met Mr. Wrong and Mr. Right that Thanksgiving Eve night, but luckily after a date with Mr. Wrong, and just one month later, I was lucky enough to accidently /coincidently run into Mr. Right at another famous “pick up joint” of this era, “Pep McGuire’s” .    Now I ask you, what were the chances of this happening in a city over 8 million people?   That night in December, 1969, Bob and I drank a couple of martini’s (each) and ended up making out passionately at the bar.  Tacky, right?  I thought so too, but after two martinis, I somehow didn’t care.

The video that I watched all night was rather lengthy; after all it was covering 45 plus years.  It was and is difficult to understand all that stuff and even more difficult to condense it all into a neat, concise package.    Nonetheless, I guess I felt it was worth reflecting on.   I tried to tell my mind,

“Let’s shut down for the night, get some sleep and think about it another time”, but my mind wasn’t buying it.  After all our relationship, our marriage and our life together is a monumental part of who I am, and who I have become, and it seemed important to me to look over the years and reflect on some things.   

There is so much to think about that my reflection “conclusions” could fill multiple pages. Also my blog entries would be complicated and not very easy to understand.   Possibly they might be helpful to others since they would be as honest as I could make them without too much negative exposure on anyone. 

Happily ever after stories make people who don’t always feel happily after sense that their marriage, their relationship, their story is a failure when in reality it is not.  Emotions are fleeting; they peak and wan, and peak and wan again, over and over.  There are great moments, there are ordinary moments, there are boring and angry moments.  There are times when love feels so strong and powerful.  And there are times when apathy and lack of interest overwhelm us.   As the years pass, we begin to get a grasp of what words like “for better or for worse, for richer or for poorer, in sickness and in health “really mean.   Who really knows what they are committing to when they speak those vows as young, healthy and robust individuals?

Forty-five years ago today, on September 18, 1971,I stood in the vestibule of St. Michael the Archangel’s Church on Jerome Street  in Brooklyn, NY waiting to walk up to the altar on the arm of my father, Charles A. Fries, Sr.   There at the front of the church stood a guy I met the year before in a bar in NYC.  In the sanctuary, before family and friends, we made a public promise to each other.  The more meaningful vow we had made in private both before and after the wedding when we promised that our love would be different, it would last “no matter what” and that when the going got tough, we wouldn’t get divorced but would stay together and work it out.   Sometimes, we have had to recall that promise.

I think we made a good choice in each other.  I think our love is different even though it is by no means “perfect” (many of our family and friends can attest to this!).   We still like to be together, but we are OK with having our own interests and pursuits and being apart.  We still like to share our love with the rest of the world.  

So, Happy Anniversary, Robert William Buchner.  Thanks for being my life partner.  Thanks for all you do for me and our family and friends.  I am proud of you and I love you. 

The Glenn I knew died on 9/11

The Glenn I knew died on 9/11.

Not everyone died as the World Trade Center towers collapsed and fell to the ground on September 11^th, 2001.  Many others crumbled slowly and painfully to their untimely deaths.   I believe this is what happened to my cousin, Glenn, a fireman from the theater district in midtown Manhattan.   Although he was considered “one of the lucky one” because he was off that day and physically survived the Terrorists’ attacks, the events of that horrific time period killed him as surely as if he had been hit in the head with one of the steel beams. 

I knew Glenn since he was born in November 1950.  I was a flower girl at his parents’ wedding.  I got to stay overnight at his parents’ apartment in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn when he was a newborn.  As a baby, Glenn stayed with my family at our house in East New York on days when his mother, my Aunt Margie, was unable to care for him. I was barely 6 years older but I always felt a certain type of motherly affection towards him.     On September 11^th, I was relieved and happy when I heard he was “safe”.

I had not yet realized that the toxic effects of this experience were going to drag him down, tear him apart and lead to his premature death.  He was exposed to the physical, environmental and emotional pollutions of ground zero.  The constant pounding of intense grief battered him brutally and left him weakened and exposed.   For an individual as gentle and sweet as my cousin, Glenn, it viscously took its toll.   

Approximately a year after 9/11, Glenn made the decision to retire from Engine 54, but later shared that he regretted this choice and wish he had stayed.   His long-standing marriage to the “Love of his Life” fell apart when he made other choices that were totally out of character.  He also left the next job he took as a school bus driver when the turmoil in his brain led to confusion in his assigned routes.   He shared with me that he felt he was going crazy and his anxiety and fretfulness were truly heartbreaking to witness.     He was eventually treated medically for a rather mysterious problem with his brain, and gradually but steadily deteriorated.  Little by little and then faster and faster, he reverted into a nonresponsive state.  It was never really clear to me what killed Glenn.   I don’t believe it was ever really satisfactorily explained to his family and those closest to him either.    Glenn died on December 10^th, 2013, and although it was a full twelve years after the World Trade Center attacks, I honestly believe 9/11 killed him.  His passing was perhaps, less dramatic, but in many ways more painful simply because it was a slow, torturous downward path of anguish and suffering.    In my mind he is as much a Hero as if he had fallen in the line of duty when the Towers collapsed.

After thought: I asked Glenn once before if I could share his story and he gave me his permission at that time.  I think he would want his story to be told.      The picture above appeared in the Albany Times Union newspaper on Sunday, Sept 12, 2010.  with an article I wrote entitled, One of the "lucky ones" - 9 years later.  Glenn sent me the photo and gave me permission to write the article.

In Memory of Glenn on the 15th Anniversary of 9/11

 

Marty, Glenn and Mary Beth circa 1950

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.