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Mourning a life takes a lifetime

September 6, 2003

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The father of one S-11 victim says his grief is still very much alive, writes Caroline Overington.

The second anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks is approaching and, without meaning to be cruel, some people are bored by that.

It is not that they do not care that people died, but they wonder how much longer they will have to hear about those deaths. When are people going to move on?

John Titus is asking himself the same question. His daughter, Alicia, 28, was a flight attendant on Flight 175, which crashed into the South Tower of the World Trade Centre.

Two years later, Titus's world has been dismantled. His daughter died horribly, before an audience of millions. Then her death was used to justify one war against the Taliban in Afghanistan and another in Iraq, which is something Titus, who is a mild-mannered, peace-loving college careers counsellor, finds impossible to fathom.

Also, Alicia's remains have not been found, so the Titus family, like hundreds of others, is still waiting to hear whether any of her DNA will match any of the bits of people stored in refrigerated trucks outside New York.

Meanwhile, a debate is raging over what should be built at the site where Alicia died. Are tall towers now targets? Should the site be a cemetery?

Titus has spent a lot of time trying to find out what happened to Alicia that day, "scanning, reading, researching, thousands and thousands of pages, to try to find out what happened on the plane, like where she was, and how she died.

"I asked her room-mate, Hayley, who was a flight attendant, and she seemed to think that Alicia might not have been in first class. But in the first year, I couldn't stop thinking about what might have happened to Alicia if she had been in the front of the plane.

"I thought, if she was in first class, then maybe she was stabbed or killed straight away because that is what happened on the first plane (which hit the north tower). They stabbed two flight attendants and the co-pilot and the pilot to show they had control of the plane."

But then, a few weeks after the attacks, both Titus and his wife - Alicia's mother, Bev - had visions of their daughter sitting calmly at the back of the plane. In Titus's vision, she had a small child on her lap, and she did not appear distressed.

"It was a very clear image," he said. "And later I found out that there was a two-year-old child on the plane, so maybe that was the child she had with her. So I have found some peace with that. I can't keep thinking about the worst-case scenario."

It has also taken the whole two years for Titus to accept that he will never really recover from the pain of losing his daughter. He thinks the second year after the attacks has been worse than the first.

"In the first year, I guess I was protected a little by the shock. And it felt so surreal, so unbelievable. I spent a lot of time just trying to believe it," Titus says quietly. "But in the second year, you lose some of that and some of the supportiveness of other people."

In the absence of a body - only Alicia's Boston Library card and her driver's licence were recovered from the rubble - the Titus family could not bury Alicia, so they established a foundation in her name and held memorial services.

Many other families did the same for their loved ones; only one-third of families were given any remains. At the first memorial for Alicia, in her home town of Ohio, thousands of people waited in line for up to eight hours to see the Titus family. But, after a while, many people stopped calling and fewer were willing to bring up Alicia's name.

But Titus was still struggling, so he started reading about grief. Intellectually, he was surprised to learn that it was a painstaking, active process. He found that it was not something that washed over him, but something to which he had to contribute, with his heart and his head.

"I started to realise it was not just Alicia, but the future we miss, too," he says. "The doting over the grandkids that we expected to do. Watching her grow up and get married and live her life. We were so very close, and it has left a big, gaping hole in our family. And I miss the relationship that was developing between us. After Alicia left home, we didn't need to be parents so much. We could be friends. And we were really enjoying being friends, more than parents."

He watched from a distance - the Titus family lives in Dexter, Michigan, and Alicia lived in a share house with four other flight attendants in Boston - as the first anniversary of the attacks passed, and a debate started over what should happen to the site of the World Trade Centre.

Some plans were drawn up and New Yorkers hated them, so architects from around the world submitted new ones. But even the winning design, which calls for the world's tallest tower to be built at the site, is unlikely to go up as planned since the developers and others are already arguing about it. Then came the debate over whether the attacks could be linked to Iraq and, if so, should the US invade Iraq?

"That was when I really became upset," says Titus. "I just feel the US has been totally wrong in how we've handled this. We've killed a lot of innocent people in Afghanistan and Iraq. Our own soldiers are at risk. And what we have done is not working. We might have slightly disrupted al-Qaeda but they are still out there, orchestrating new attacks, and we must have given them thousands of new recruits for generations to come because of all the people we have killed. And I feel so awful for the Iraqi families, who are going through the same thing because of the war we started there, because I know how painful it is. There must be another way."

Of course, not all the families of victims agree with him. Some think the wars were justified. Others are consumed by plans for the Ground Zero site, either because they do not want anything built there, or because they do. Titus has noticed that all have become defined by what happened to their loved ones, and by what happened after.

"I feel when I walk along that everybody must know, because I am always in the process of dealing with it," he says.

"And maybe that's because not a moment goes by that I am not thinking about my daughter and the way she died. And the thing that is so frustrating is (that) Alicia was a peacemaker. I promise you, if she had known what troubled these people (the hijackers), she would have been the one that was sitting next to them, trying to get to know them better, trying to make their lives more comfortable."

As the second anniversary approaches, Titus has written an essay for the "SweetAlicia" website that Alicia's friends established in her honour. He hopes it will help people understand that his grief is alive and that his family would do anything not to be part of this year's second anniversary.

On the first anniversary, Titus, his wife, Bev, Alicia's fiance, Greg, and her siblings and best friends went mountain-climbing together. This year, the family will take another physical challenge, somewhere close to nature, away from the television.

And Titus will cry a river.

"I know that our society gives men a traditional role, where they are supposed to be the strong one, the one who comforts others," he says.

"But I have carved myself a space to grieve. I tell my male friends, even the ones who are uncomfortable with these kinds of emotions, that this is how I feel. She was my daughter. I changed her diapers. I cared for her when she was sick. And now she's gone. And I receive hugs. I am fine with crying."

Caroline Overington is The Age New York correspondent.



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