Posted on Fri, Sep. 2, 2011
Nearly a decade after 9/11, Tara Bane DellaCorte thought she was getting over the death of her husband, Michael, in New York's World Trade Center.
Which is why she was so surprised at her emotional reaction when she learned that U.S. commandos on the night of May 1 had shot and killed Osama bin Laden.
Her response wasn't elation or relief; it was fury. In an instant, all the old rage over Michael's loss and her abandonment flared again.
"I am so tired of being angry," she said. "I don't want to be angry anymore."
Of the 2,973 people killed in the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, 18 were from Bucks County, including seven from Tara's community of Lower Makefield, near Yardley. Many took the same train from Trenton and knew one another by sight if not by name.
Tara was young and resilient, just 29 on 9/11. As the 10th anniversary approaches, she knows that in many ways she has done quite well since: She has fallen in love again, she has remarried, and she has a beautiful boy who just turned 2. She lives in an affluent suburb and does counseling as an art therapist.
But Michael remains something of a ghost in her family's life. She kept her former married name, Bane, until her son, Cole, was born in 2009. Her new house isn't far from her old one, and a closet still holds Michael's things.
"My husband was, like, 'So Michael's going to get a room in this house, too?' "
She laughed at the recollection. But the answer was yes. Remembering Michael may still bring her pain. But forgetting him would mean erasing his very existence.
And that she won't do, not 10 years later, not ever.
Last kiss goodbye
On 9/11, Tara and Michael Bane had been married for four years. Both were from the New York City area and had met at the State University of New York at Stony Brook.
Michael worked at Marsh & McLennan, an insurance brokerage that occupied eight floors in the North Tower. He was 33, a claims-processing executive.
As Tara describes him, he was the sort of ambitious, street-savvy young man often found in Lower Manhattan's concrete canyons. He was smart, but had dropped out of high school. He had to get a GED and attend community college before he could enroll at Stony Brook.
The Banes shared a certain fatalism. His mother had died giving birth to him. Tara's mother had died, unexpectedly, when Tara was 18.
The couple at first lived across the Hudson River in Jersey City. But the spring azaleas and 1920s housing along the Delaware drew them to Pennsylvania, and in 1999 they moved to the Yardley area.
Tara, a psychology major, worked at a family-services center near the Oxford Valley Mall. She could sleep later than Michael, who had to catch the NJ Transit train at 7:04.
He woke her on their last morning together because he couldn't find his laptop bag.
"I said, 'Oh, it's over here,' and he kissed me goodbye. I can still see him walking out of the room. And I said, 'Be careful,' as I always did."
Tara had a client at 9. She was making a quick bank stop on the way when "I heard - I guess it was on NPR - 'A small plane has hit the World Trade Center.' That's what they said at first, a small plane. I thought, 'Oh, wow, I've got to call Michael.'
"I called his office, and it rang, but then it went to nothing right away. I called his cell, and I think it went right to voice mail."
She realized later that Michael may already have been dead. The Marsh & McLennan offices were right in the path of American Airlines Flight 11, hijacked en route from Boston to Los Angeles, as it nose-dived into the North Tower at 8:46 a.m.
By the time she got to the parking lot at work, the radio news had grown much worse. A second plane had hit the South Tower; there was talk of a terrorist attack.
"I panicked. I drove around that parking lot like a lunatic. I'm so lucky I didn't hit anyone. I ran into the building. I got on the elevator. I just kept pressing the button and crying."
She tried again to call, but couldn't get through to Michael or her family - or to anyone in New York. She went home and watched on TV as the rest of the day played out: the towers collapsing, the attack on the Pentagon, a plane crash in Western Pennsylvania. America, suddenly at war.
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