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On the morning of Sept. 11, however, Greg had an early budget meeting. Michael, whose mother-in-law was late to watch his kids, was still getting dressed in his Queens apartment when he heard on the news about the crash. Minutes later, Greg sent a message through to Michael's Blackberry pager that he was trapped. For more than an hour, the two systems analysts tapped messages back and forth, Michael urging Greg to get out and Greg telling Michael that he loved Nicole and the boys. Greg's final words popped up at 10:03: "Fire here. Love yous."
Nicole says she has bypassed the anger stage of grief. Now she's stuck somewhere between denial and acceptance. The rational part of her knows that Greg--who scoffed at working out--could not possibly have managed 95 flights of stairs in the 27 minutes between his last page and the tower's collapse. But her heart is still playing tricks. "I'll get home and someone will have sent roses, and for the moment I'll think that was so nice of Greg. Or a friend will talk about having a party on a weekend, and I'll think, Oh, great, Greg will be able to make it." She pauses. "For a second, I just forget what happened, and then I remember again."
To get herself through the day, she's keeping a diary for the first time since high school. The story she spins recasts the past in a way that makes Greg's death inevitable because, of course, it was so absurd. She thinks she was preparing herself for a time without him: like the day in August when she asked him for the password to access the family budget on Microsoft Money, or when she inquired about how to change a tire and he sent her an AAA card embossed with her own name--not his. The narrative turns on the night of Sept. 10. Greg got home later than usual, so Nicole picked out a shirt and pants for him to put on the next day. He got dressed and left for the station before she awakened. "Since I knew what he had on, it was like I was meant to have that very last picture of him, of what he was wearing, of what he looked like at the end," she says.
Yet there comes a point when Greg's death begins making too much sense, when her grief loses its novelty and becomes scarily routine. This happened when her toddler Nicholas stopped reflexively asking for his father and started hugging people other than her. At first Nicole thought this was a sign he was adjusting, but then the worry set in. Would Nicholas' two-year-old mind begin to lose scant recollections of his father? "So now I just keep saying to him, 'Remember when Daddy used to do this or that,'" she says. And when they talk about Greg, Nicholas now blows kisses to the sky.
Nicole has begun jostling her own memory as well. She wants the pain for its intimacy. She has been eating a lot of chocolate and peanut butter, Greg's favorite combination, and shocked herself by craving Taco Bell, food he loved but she had long disdained. On Thanksgiving, after having turkey at her parents' house and dessert with Greg's family, she might just eat a late-night peanut-butter sandwich as he used to do. On Oct. 8, she watched a home video for the first time. Greg was offscreen, but that was precisely the point: all she wanted was to hear the familiar inflections of his voice.