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Ginny still dismissed most of the 9/11 events and invitations that crowded her mailbox. But she could not resist two free tickets to a Dec. 7 Bruce Springsteen concert at Convention Hall in Asbury Park, N.J. She and George had been fans from the very beginning, back when Springsteen was just a local bar act, and they relished any opportunity to see him live. It was only fitting that his should be Hilary's first rock concert. Hilary and Ginny were seated in the 9/11 section, and it was clear that the women with puffy eyes hadn't worn all black simply to be fashionable. The widows had come to a wake, and the minute the music started, they were bawling. But Ginny was determined to have a good time on their first night out in months. She sang all the words and pulled Hilary up out of her seat so they could dance. "Hilary kept turning around and looking at the women crying and asking me, 'Are you sure we're allowed to do this? Are you sure we're allowed to be dancing?'" recalls Ginny. "Nothing was going to spoil her first rock concert. I said, 'We're dancing because this is what people do at a Bruce show,' and we danced together for the whole night without looking back."
It was one of the last bright moments of 2001. December brought the memory of myriad traditions--the lighting of the tree in Rockefeller Center, the annual Avon hayride, the Aon party at the World Trade Center--that Hilary used to share with her father. As with everything else, she insisted things proceed as usual, even if a male cousin or a friend's father had to act as an understudy, and then regretted it the second the event started. One of Hilary's favorite parts about Christmas was her father's ineptitude with gifts. Ginny was in charge of the present buying, but George usually made a token purchase of his own. One Christmas he surprised Ginny with an electric pencil sharpener. "They were always so clearly the wrong thing, but it was just so funny that he'd taken the time and thought to buy them," says Hilary, who one year received a stuffed dolphin with tie-dyed fur. "When I came down for Christmas this year, something was very off. For the first time in my life, I had gotten every single thing I wanted, and then I really knew it."
It had taken a little more than three months, but her father was finally dead.
On Jan. 15, Ginny got a letter from the medical examiner's office. George's toothbrush and dirty T shirt that she had submitted the previous fall did not have enough genetic material to make a match. The examiner needed additional DNA from a child or sibling. Ginny could not face taking her daughter to the Manhattan morgue where the parts of so many husbands and fathers were being stored in refrigerated trailers, so she opted to have the DNA kit sent to their home. It arrived on Valentine's Day.
The procedure was simple enough. Hilary and Ginny both wiped the insides of their cheeks with cotton-tipped wooden swabs--Ginny, so that her DNA could be isolated from George's--and sealed them in cardboard boxes. When they were finished, Ginny asked:
"Do you want them to find a body?"
"I don't know," said Hilary. "What do you want?"
"I hope and pray he just vaporized, is one with the universe and never knew what hit him."
"Me too."
Then they moved on to another topic, ending their first discussion of George's remains.