HIS LIFE & LOVE
Easy for cemetery worker to spend time remembering tragic wife
On a sweltering summer morning, Isaac Feliciano stood alone near the simple headstone marking his wife’s grave as the 20th anniversary of her 9/11 death loomed.
Rosa Maria Feliciano, killed on the 96th floor of One World Trade Center, was buried where her husband works — inside Brooklyn’s sprawling GreenWood Cemetery. Isaac watched helplessly from the graveyard’s highest point on Sept. 11, 2001 as terrorists crashed a plane into her building at 8:46 a.m.
Paperwork from her office later wafted onto the cemetery grounds, picked up by his colleagues.
Feliciano, as he has for two decades, mourns her death here, his personal 9/11 memorial covering a cozy swath of green less than five miles from the lower Manhattan site where his bride perished 18 days short of their 11th anniversary.
“I come by all the time — sometimes without even realizing it,” said the veteran groundskeeper. “I’m in the cemetery, and then I’m here. It’s force of habit.”
Feliciano, 62, prefers a bit of solitude and solo reflection in this hallowed space to a spot among fellow mourners at the annual televised reading of the victims’ names. He sits on a bench near Rosa’s resting place, enjoys the shade from a beautiful Japanese Red Blood Maple that he had planted in her honor back in 2002.
He can see her frozen-in-time photograph, with her dimpled smile, on the front of her headstone and read the familiar inscription: “Feliciano, Rosa M. Beloved wife and mother. Dec. 20. 1970-Sept. 11, 2001.”
And that’s enough for him. Feliciano, set to retire at the end of this month, feels no connection with the site where Rosa died at age 30, leaving behind two young daughters now grown into adults. He once again skipped the Sept. 11 memorial service where the twin towers once rose 110 stories high.
“I just don’t see it in me,” said Feliciano, his hair and beard now flecked with gray. “I get to feeling down when the anniversary comes around, very depressed. The 20th anniversary, the TV keeps showing the twin towers getting hit over and over again ... I have to keep moving on and not think about it.”
Back in 2001, Feliciano — convinced his wife’s body was lost in the rubble — held a memorial service for Rosa. But the medical examiner identified some of her remains in January 2002, with Feliciano arranging a proper burial in Green-Wood. The painful process was repeated again in 2005, reopening old wounds.
And then it happened once more. Feliciano was recently contacted by the city medical examiner after the identification of additional remains and some jewelry.
“I made an appointment to go down there, but I skipped it,” he recounted. “I didn’t have the heart.”
Feliciano is proud of their girls: One pursuing a Master’s Degree in psychology, the other still in college. The older is now 26, and her sister now 22. The family returned to bury his mother-in-law alongside Rosa in 2015, and he recalls how their daughters eventually — as he did — found comfort at the grave.
“In the beginning, they wouldn’t talk about it, but they’ve opened up,” he said. “Now we can laugh, talk, think about the moments with her. They remember the silly things they used to do.”
His memory of that long-ago Tuesday morning remain crystal clear, unchanged by the passage of time.
Feliciano recalls the bright sunshine, the clear blue skies over Brooklyn, the good-bye with his young wife before she boarded the subway for lower Manhattan. She often waited outside the Green-Wood gates after work for Feliciano — until the day she never came home.
The hardest days are always the same, a sad trilogy of holidays when the family would gather: Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year’s Day. And of course, every Sept. 11.
“It’s hard to just feel like it’s another day,” he acknowledges. “It doesn’t seem like 20 years. Twenty years went fast.”
Feliciano’s retirement won’t stop his Green-Wood pilgrimages to visit Rosa. His family created memorial t-shirts for this year’s anniversary, featuring her forever-young face and a simple message: “20 years gone, forever in our hearts.”
He is comforted by the small statue of the Divine Child Jesus atop her gravestone, dressed in a pink gown and blue sash, with an ornate halo above his head.
“She can rest in peace with him,” he said.
The widowed Feliciano no longer struggles with the whys and what-ifs of that long-ago morning that never seems too far from his thoughts.
“It was meant to be,” he says. “Personally, it was the day that changed everything. But when things are supposed to happen, they happen.”