Westchester Woman Uses Volunteering To Cope With 9/11 Memories

TUCKAHOE, NY — For Tara Fappiano, a lawyer, educational advocate and mediator living in Westchester County, 9/11 is a day she'll never forget but has found in recent years that volunteering on each anniversary gives her a way to deal with the memories.

Sept. 11, 2001, started out as just another day for Fappiano.

By her own admission, she was living a dream.

"I was working at the World Trade Center," she told Patch. "I was in Manhattan, doing everything I wanted to do."

That Tuesday morning, she and her husband had commuted from Tuckahoe to Grand Central Terminal where they parted to go off to their separate jobs.

"It was a very normal day," she said, "and it turned into anything but."

Fappiano arrived at the World Trade Center by subway shortly after the north tower was struck at 8:46 a.m. by American Airlines Flight 11. It crashed into floors 93 to 99, according to the 9/11 Memorial timeline.

She said she just assumed there was a fire and wondered why she hadn't heard anything about it before she left her house.

"I didn't know what was going on," Fappiano said. "It seemed like a big fire."

She had a deposition to attend that morning and needed some documents from her office on the 85th floor of the south tower.

Her cell phone wasn't working and it didn't occur to her why it wasn't, so she went into the nearby Millennium Hotel to make a phone call at one of the payphones.

"It was packed in there," Fappiano said. "I couldn't get to a phone."

She went back out into the plaza, "and that's actually when the second plane came through and hit the other tower."

United Flight 175 crashed into the south tower between floors 77 to 85 at 9:03 a.m.

"It was chaotic, scary," Fappiano said. "Really, I just probably went into some sort of relative shock. I wasn't processing what was happening.

"You just don't have any perspective," she said. "A very, beautiful, sunny day that turned into chaos on my way to work."

After she saw the second plane and what happened after it crashed into the tower, Fappiano just started running.

She headed toward City Hall but decided that if something was happening that wouldn't be a place to go.

Fappiano ended up on Thomas Street, which was west and north of the towers, where there was a building with a small courthouse with which she was familiar.

Even though it was being evacuated, the security guards let her come in and use a payphone. She was able to reach her husband who worked on 18th Street.

They ended up taking one of the last trains to leave Grand Central that day and got home late in the afternoon.

Fappiano said she was fixated that day about where her coworkers were. She called the law firm's Long Island office but they didn't really have any information.

In spite of the fact that Flight 175 struck the second tower between the 77th and 85th floors, the people on the 85th floor were able to get out, Fappiano found out. Her office was on the other side of the building from where the plane hit.

Unfortunately, of the 12 people in her office who were actually in the building on Sept. 11, two were killed, she said.

Fappiano said the enormity of what happened on 9/11 gradually began sinking in as the day progressed. But it took more than a year for things to start feeling normal, she said.

The first anniversary of the attacks was difficult, Fappiano said, adding there were a lot of memorials, discussions — and images.

"Every anniversary is tough quite frankly," she said. "That's probably never going to go away."

For the next 10 or so years, Fappiano said she would just try to muscle her way through each anniversary of the attacks.

Then, while she was working for a law firm in White Plains, the Westchester County Bar Association organized a group to participate in the National Day of Service and Remembrance.

"I signed up for it on my own, and just felt that for the first time I was doing something on that day that made me feel better," Fappiano said.

"It was very selfish," she said, laughing. "It was completely something I was trying to do for myself. To distract myself from how I would typically get through the day.

"It was a turning point for me," Fappiano said.

This year, which is the 11th annual 9/11 Day of Service, Volunteer New York! organized two days of projects to "honor the memories of those lost by doing good and helping others."

Fappiano, a Volunteer New York! board member, is participating once again, this time as a site captain at Iona College in New Rochelle on Sunday where volunteers will be creating blankets for Project Linus, which provides handmade blankets to children in need.

Fappiano said the opportunity to volunteer — with some people who have a direct connection to 9/11 and some who don't — reminds her of the period of time just after the 9/11 attacks.

"It really is a sense of community that is reminiscent of those days," she said. "We were all in this together, and weren't going to let it take us down — that type of feeling."