‘We can pull wisdom from the rubble’
Two decades later, a sister grapples with the pain of two losses linked to 9/11
For Margaret Eckert, her sister and brother-in-law are intertwined in death as much as they were in life. Margaret’s sister, Beverly, and Sean P. Rooney met when they were both 16 years old, at a dance at Canisius High School in Buffalo, N.Y. They eventually married and, in the 1980s, bought an old Victorian in Stamford that they filled with friends, family and good food. On the last summer weekend of 2001, they threw a neighborhood block party.
Rooney took the train each morning to his office at Two World Trade Center in New York, where he worked as a vice president for Aon, the insurance services company. On Sept. 11, 2001, he died trapped in a top floor of the south tower, one of 161 victims of the terrorist attacks with ties to Connecticut.
Then the second tragedy struck. Seven and a half years later,
Beverly, who had become a vocal advocate for 9/11 victims’ families, boarded a flight from Newark to Buffalo. She planned to award a scholarship in her husband’s name that she had established at his high school and to celebrate what would have been his 58th birthday. Colgan Air Flight 3407 crashed just outside of Buffalo. There were no survivors.
Margaret Eckert of Springfield
traveled to Connecticut on Thursday to mark the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. She placed flowers and flags at memorial sites in Stamford, the city that had embraced her family in the wake of Rooney’s death, and then her sister’s. And she spoke at the state’s annual 9/11 memorial ceremony in Westport.
Eckert, 66, was very close to her sister and saw Rooney as a brother. Two decades after the Twin Towers fell, and more than a decade since she lost her sister, their tragedies remain painfully, inextricably linked.
“If it hadn’t been for 9/11, Sean would not have been killed,” she said. “And if he hadn’t been killed, Beverly wouldn’t have been killed.”
‘I love you’
On 9/11 20 years ago, Rooney was 50 years old, one of Aon’s 32 employees who worked on the 98th floor of the south tower. At 8:46 a.m., he left his wife a voicemail telling her that it looked like a plane had struck the north tower.
“It’s on fire at about the 90th floor. And it’s, it’s — it’s horrible. Bye,” he said, according to the New York Times. He then left another voicemail saying that he was all right.
By 9:30 a.m., the south tower had also been hit and he and others were trapped on its upper floors. They tried to escape to the roof but found the doors locked. He finally reached Eckert by phone, telling her that he was on the 105th floor and hadn’t been able to find a way out. The stairwell was engulfed in smoke.
Eventually, they stopped discussing escape routes and began talking about how happy they had been together, Eckert recalled in a Storycorps 2006 oral history.
“As the smoke got thicker he just kept whispering ‘I love you,’ over and over. I just wanted to crawl through the phone lines to him, to hold him, one last time,” she said. “Then I heard a sharp crack, followed by the sound of an avalanche. It was the building beginning to collapse. I called his name into the phone over and over, then I just sat there, pressing the phone to my heart.”
Rooney’s remains were never found.
But the carpentry tools he used to restore their Stamford home — including a woodworking square, screwdriver, pry bar and toolbelt — are part of the collection of the 9/11 Memorial & Museum. He had built the hardwood floors of their kitchen by hand, as well as their cabinets, island and maple diningroom table, according to a Times remembrance.
Beverly Eckert told The Times that when she sat in their kitchen, she was “completely surrounded by him.”
In the wake of 9/11, Eckert retired from her job at the Stamford-based General Reinsurance Corporation and devoted herself to accountability efforts. She advocated for the creation of the 9/11 Commission, served as a member of the 9/11 Family Steering Committee, and co-founded VOICES for September 11th, an advocacy group for survivors and victims’ families. She also lobbied for improvements to skyscraper building safety codes.
Eckert’s pursuit of justice in her husband’s death did not come at the cost of her kindness, her sister said. To counteract the destruction of that day, she often volunteered with Habitat for Humanity and at Julia A. Stark Elementary School in Stamford.
In early February 2009, Eckert joined other relatives of 9/11 victims in a meeting with President Barack Obama to discuss how the new administration would handle terrorism suspects. Less than a week later, she boarded the flight bound for Buffalo.
In Stamford, her name was added to a memorial garden at the Glenbrook train station alongside that of her husband.
‘Wisdom from the rubble’
On Thursday, Margaret Eckert walked with a line of mourners from the pavilion on Sherwood Island State Park to the 9/11 Memorial, which juts into the Long Island Sound, facing the Manhattan skyline in the far distance.
The afternoon rain had eased by then, and low clouds seemed to rise off the shoreline, making their ascent. A thin streak of pink light gradually gave way to a radiant orange sunset, which enveloped the place where, 20 years earlier, billows of smoke could be seen from the burning towers.
In the wake of such devastation, talking about the power of kindness can seem “sappy,” Eckert said. But she holds close the acts of bravery and generosity of that day, and of those that followed. The first responders who ran into the flames. Her neighbors in Massachusetts and friends in Stamford who came with casseroles and compassion.
And yet — kindness is still just a “muscle,” she said. One that “needs more exercise.”
“Wisdom usually comes at a price, and 9/11 was too high a price,” she had told the crowd during her remarks. “But we can pull wisdom from the rubble, to not perpetuate the hate that commandeered the four planes on 9/11. Fate gives us opportunities to see if we’ve learned anything, to see if we are any wiser now. How are we treating each other today? How are we treating our troops and first responders today? How will we treat the refugees who will soon arrive in our communities from Afghanistan? They helped our troops; will we help them?”
At the memorial, Eckert knelt down to place a photo of Rooney and her sister above his name and arranged white roses around it. In the photo, the couple stands in front of a Christmas tree, Eckert flashing a wide smile as she embraces her husband, who is grinning from ear to ear.
There is some solace in the knowledge that, because they met so young, the couple shared many years of love before that final phone call.
Around her neck, Margaret Eckert wore a lanyard with a photo of her brother-in-law on one side and his Aon business card on the other. And she wore a necklace with the same design as her sister’s wedding band, which was found in the wreckage of Flight 3407.
“I wear the emblem of their love just about every day,” she said.