Life After Loss

The 9/11 attacks left thousands of families broken. In Hoboken, a city full of young professionals, many people in the prime of their lives lost their spouses. Two such survivors, Tracy Orr and Joe O’Keefe, met in an unconventional way under extraordinary circumstances, but they managed to rebuild their lives with the friendship and love they found in one another.

The day before the national tragedy that would change the course of her life, Tracy Orr had an uneasy feeling. She and her husband Alex Steinman were on their way back home from a trip they took to attend a friend’s wedding in Italy, and they had a stop at an airport in Brussels. As they waited to be called to the gate, security guards started pulling people out of the group and asking them questions: where had they been, where were they going.

Orr was asked what was in her purse, and her friend was hassled when she couldn’t produce receipts from the hotel she had just left hours ago. “The security was crazy,” said Orr. “Clearly, they knew that something was going on.” And it made Orr nervous. She told her husband that she wasn’t getting on the plane, but Steinman told her everything was going to be okay. “We got on the plane, and we got up in the air, and he goes, ‘See, everything’s fine.’ I go, ‘Well, the plane could blow up,’ and he said, ‘Well, if it blows up, at least we’ll die quick.’”

They had talked about death many times before that flight. Steinman lost his mother not long before he met Orr as a teenager at Suffield Academy, a boarding school in Connecticut. Orr said Steinman hesitated in starting a family because he was afraid his children might suffer the same loss. But then, in 2001, after six years of marriage, Orr and Steinman were looking for a house in the suburbs where they could raise their kids.

The couple finally got back to their home on Hudson Street Monday night. The next day, Sept. 11, 2001, would be their first day back at work. Orr, the vice president of global communications for Origins at the time, had to prepare for a three-week business trip to Asia and had scheduled an early meeting with her staff. As they sat in her office, her phone rang, but Orr didn’t pick up. Minutes later, someone knocked on her door and told her a plane had crashed into the Empire State Building. Orr turned on a small TV in her office and saw that it had not been the Empire State Building but the World Trade Center.

Steinman, a vice president at Cantor Fitzgerald, worked on the 104th floor. “Obviously, this has been Alex calling the whole time,” said Orr, “and I try to call his cell phone, and I don’t get through, and I listen to the messages, and he said, ‘My building’s been hit. I’m okay. Don’t worry. We’re evacuating, and I’m going straight home.’”

Orr worked in the GM Building and was also being evacuated, but she continued answering emails, printing out documents, and putting files together for her trip. “I didn’t realize,” said Orr. “I just didn’t know.” A security guard came by and told her that she had to leave. It wasn’t until she was at ground level that she understood that something was very wrong.

“The streets were a mess,” said Orr. “People were going crazy in midtown.” She managed to get a cab, but when she got to the West Side Highway, she saw it was closed. So, Orr got out and walked to the ferry. While waiting in line, she saw the first building collapse, and while on the ferry, she saw the second one fall. Some of her fellow passengers were inconsolable.

“People were flipping out,” said Orr, “and I was remaining calm. I don’t know why.”

She said a woman sitting next to her was hysterical and said her husband worked five blocks away from the World Trade Center. Orr tried to comfort her. “‘I’m like, ‘I know. My husband works in the trade center,’” she said. “Everybody just looked at me like, ‘Do you want to sit down?’ I said, ‘No, I’m okay. I can stand. I got a message. He’s on his way home.’”

But when Orr got home, her husband was not there. She started adding up the time it might have taken him to walk down 104 flights of stairs and trying to figure out when she should expect him. In the meantime, she packed a go-bag with a change of clothes for her and a change of clothes for him, a flashlight, and cash. She filled the bathtub with water and waited. Steinman did not come home.

Orr started calling hospital after hospital, giving her husband’s name and description and those of the people who worked near him, but her attempts were in vain. It wasn’t until Friday, when Steinman’s father, who’d been stuck in London, walked through her door that she realized her wait was over. “I think it’s just natural that you hold out hope,” said Orr. “You don’t have a body to look at, so how do you know for sure he’s dead? You don’t know.”

That same week, another Hoboken resident, Joe O’Keefe, 38, was searching for his wife Lesley Thomas, who worked on the floor above Steinman. She was Australian, and O’Keefe had met her when he moved for a job in the financial industry in Sydney. “She was a lot of fun,” said O’Keefe. They might go to a black-tie event one day, he said, and on a picnic the next.

A year after they got married, O’Keefe decided he wanted to return to the United States to be closer to his aging parents. Through a friend, he helped his wife get a job as a broker at TradeSpark, a subsidiary of Cantor Fitzgerald, and they moved into Marine View Plaza in Hoboken. She also did not come home from work the evening of Sept. 11, 2001.

O’Keefe spent the night on foot in New York City, walking from hospital to hospital, repeating who he was searching for and what she looked like. “I needed to be proactive,” he said. But he only found people like him searching for the missing.

“It was weird,” said O’Keefe. “There were just no injured people. Everyone was just dead or alive.” He said that after he realized there was no hope, he also realized the hospital personnel and detectives he’d spoken to listened to him maybe just to make him feel better. “I appreciated that, too,” said O’Keefe.

It was three or four weeks before Orr went back into the city. Facing life on her own at 34, she developed a mantra. “I kept saying, ‘I’m going to be okay. I’m going to be okay,'" she said, "and I would walk to work in the morning, up Hudson Street, the whole way, every step I took, ‘I’m going to be okay.’” Orr said she’d always been a positive person and that her memories of her husband gave her strength.

“He was a happy guy,” she said. “He was a passionate guy. He had such a zest for life.” He liked to travel, go skiing in Colorado, relax in Santo Domingo, spend time with friends and just have fun, said Orr. She remembers even telling him to slow down. “He lived life super-paced,” she said, “and he was lucky he did that in the end.”

But a huge part of her recovery, said Orr, was a support group she found in Hoboken. It met every Monday night and was led by Rev. Laurie Warum at the All Saints Episcopal Church on Washington Street, though only one of its members was actually part of the congregation. It was open to any resident who had lost someone in the 9/11 attacks.

Orr said its 25 members knew they had a unique situation. In most support groups, people have very different stories to share, she said, but that was not the case at All Saints. “We all had the same experience on the same day with the same timeline,” said Orr. She said their commonality worked for their benefit. They could identify with one another; they knew exactly what each other was going through; and they knew they could expect the same lows and highs as everyone else in the group.

Orr, who hadn’t wanted to move to New Jersey in the first place, was grateful for the friends she made there. “It was nice to find people,” she said. O’Keefe was one of those people. Orr said she would see him at the support group and around Hoboken and that after a while, he started calling her a lot to talk. “He’d always call,” said Orr. “I don’t know if he only called me. I think he called everybody. He was a real phone-talker.” O’Keefe, who worked on the floor of the Stock Exchange, said he was just used to being on the phone.

People at her job started telling Orr that she was talking about "this guy" an awful lot. “I just denied, denied, denied,” said Orr. She said that for a long time, she could not even entertain the thought that their friendship might be becoming something more. But, one night, at support group, a speaker who’d lost her husband in a tragic work accident told her story of recovery. She had even gotten remarried. “We couldn’t even believe that she could have a normal life again,” said Orr. But the woman could, and Orr and O’Keefe realized, so could they.

Five years after the day that so drastically changed both their lives, Orr and O’Keefe were married at All Saints, and they moved to Westfield just before their second child was born. To their son, five-year-old Finn, and daughter, two-year-old Riley, Steinman and Thomas are known as Uncle Alex and Aunt Lesley. There are photos of Steinman and Thomas at their home and the homes of their relatives, but the kids haven’t asked too many questions. “They are too little,” said Orr. And it’s not a conversation either parent is looking forward to. “Joe said to me one day, ‘I’ll talk to the kids about sex; you talk to them about 9/11.’”

Orr and O’Keefe said they know they have a special bond, an understanding that sometimes goes unsaid, but they will never forget what was taken from them. “I can never accept what happened, but the human spirit just helps you move on, keep going forward, no matter what,” said O’Keefe. He added that the recent death of Osama bin Laden, the mastermind behind the attacks, brought him little relief. “So much time has passed,” said O'Keefe. “I just wish it was something that had happened earlier.”

On most anniversaries of 9/11, the couple has attended the commemoration ceremony at All Saints, where in 2004 their support group donated the bronze bell that rings in memory of the loved ones they lost. But this year will be different. On the 10th anniversary, on national television, Orr and O’Keefe, side by side, will read the O’s and the P’s of the names of all those who died at the World Trade Center. Closure is not the right word for it, said O’Keefe, but “maybe that’s some kind of closing of the circle.”