A.R. Torres

The flags were intended to honor ground zero and the remains of the dead, but here they are merely props, used to add a powerful patriotic punch to your message. The tower and the corpse are two hideously broken and disfigured things behind and under the flag, and your image — with your red tie, white shirt, and blue suit, standing in front of thick strong white columns — serves as another, symbolic, flag.

That image of ground zero, and the body shrouded with the flag, reminded me of the sulfur from the few pathetic remnants of my husband’s last day: his Cantor ID, Debitchek Meal Card and subway Metrocard.

I thought I’d finished dealing with the gruesome aspects of his dead body, but it came back to me during your commercial. I had a thought I’d never had before: Was every corpse draped in an American flag as it emerged from ground zero, or was it just an honor bestowed upon the uniformed workers? What if that was my husband’s body, now serving as a “spokesman” for your campaign?

I canceled my toddler’s afternoon activities so I could do research. I could hear my voice quake as I called the medical examiner and the mayor’s office. Initially, uniformed personnel were the only ones wrapped in the flag, I learned — but it became standard practice to cover all the dead in that way.

In effect, then, Mr. Bush, you’ve paraded all our 9/11 dead out as the official mascots of your reelection campaign. You use them to show our nation that you can protect us against what we should all fear the most — being an anonymous corpse in another attack.

But these sleights of image and crafty juxtapositions are the only true demonstrations of your leadership abilities. After all, on that tragic day you didn’t actually lead the nation: according to the work of the “Jersey girls” — the four 9/11 widows who fought to have an independent commission investigate the tragedy — your first reaction to the plane hitting the North Tower was to blame the pilot. And you continued your activities — reading stories to a group of young schoolchildren. And as you try to impress our nation with your role during and after 9/11 in these ads, you refuse to talk meaningfully to the independent commission about the specifics of your role prior to 9/11 and how much you knew about a potential large-scale al-Qaida plot.

I didn’t think that co-opting 9/11 with such disregard for those of us who have been affected by this tragedy would anger me so much. I hope that John Kerry doesn’t use 9/11 to strengthen his own candidacy . But so many 9/11 families are sick at your use of our sadness … I can’t imagine it being any worse than where you have already led us.

I’ve reacted to all the news about Eddie, his body and his belongings in the same way: I am seized by an immediate and intense spasm of grief, which spreads throughout my body, until totally absorbed. After that, to my surprise, I feel peace.

I have tried to feel like a winner. After all, I was among the few who received so much from the recovery efforts at ground zero. According to the news, roughly two-thirds of the 2,823 dead vanished without a trace. Their loved ones still wait and hope that the medical examiner will call with the news that their loved one was “found” among the approximate 19,550 body parts still waiting to be identified. Meanwhile, of the 1,092 bodies identified, there were only about 300 whole bodies. Eddie, was one of them, less his feet.

As a winner, I was able to take control of Eddie’s body, and in doing so, I could begin to retake control of my own chaos. Life left Eddie’s body suddenly and violently. And, according to the grief literature, when someone you love dies in this way, you feel powerless and vulnerable. I did, and the rituals that came with possession of Eddie’s body suddenly gave structure to my messy world. I compiled “to do” lists and relinquished very few tasks to others. By confronting the realities of retrieving Eddie’s body, ceremonializing his death, and burying him, I anticipated some relief as payoff for my efforts.

But relief, and the widely advertised sense of closure, evaded me as I stumbled on my last duty. Since April, I’ve awkwardly tried to get a headstone for Eddie’s grave, often losing the paperwork and forgetting to make the necessary phone calls. It’s not that I haven’t felt a certain urgency about getting this done. Whenever I visit the cemetery, I’m bewildered by the bleak dirt trail under which Eddie lays. The sight evokes the awful days when Eddie was equally ill-defined at death, identifiable only through dental records. My need to delineate his grave is so strong that I always end up ripping the heads off the roses I bring and throwing their petals all over his rectangular form. But the wind removes them and I am left where I began, with a dirt trail and a loss for words.

In May, I tried to take care of all the headstone business in one day. I came to the cemetery to look at other graves and their markers. The stone of one of Eddie’s next-door neighbors, Ellen Jackson, 1874-1924, was the one I liked best. It was charcoal black, the kind of stone Eddie and I wanted to use for our kitchen counter but found too expensive. The marker was slanted and rough edged along the top, sides and back.

I wanted Eddie’s stone to be different in just two ways — I wanted to include the complete dates of his birth and death, even if this meant that passersby might wonder if he was “one of them.” I also decided to leave space for another person on the stone, but not in a way that indicated he’s expecting anyone else, just in case I don’t get there.

But when the headstone salesman arrived to meet me, he drove up fast in a sleek new sports car with a vanity license plate that read PLAYTIME. As I gave him a haggard widow’s smile to cover up my disgust, I knew that I wouldn’t be doing business with him. His marker repelled me; I wouldn’t give him the details of mine. I would wait. But, as strong as I felt about the legitimacy of my delay, I did wonder whether I’d been sabotaging this task that marks the official end — for me, at least — of this sad era.

Still, for all my stress and equivocating, I believed I understood how lucky I was to have this choice. I thought I understood what distinguished me — with Eddie’s body uptown — from those families with little or nothing of their loved ones around whom they might perform these rituals. It was up to me what Eddie’s monument would be and who would make it; the other families couldn’t determine exactly how their grave site — ground zero — might be transformed. By that time, members of the general public had submitted 19,000 plans for ground zero to the Lower Manhattan Development Corp.

But last week, I was suddenly kicked out of the winner’s circle. Just like that. The medical examiner provided me with information that was different, and more accurate, than what I had earlier. It turned out that I never had control of Eddie’s body — just his head, upper torso and left arm. His right arm and hand were at Memorial Park, in one of the refrigerated trailers that contain all the remains of 9/11 victims that have yet to be released to the families. In total, I had accounted for only about 40 percent of Eddie’s body.

As I sat in the medical examiner’s office, I tried to understand it all, all over again. Although the worker sitting in front of me was prepared to tell me anything I wanted to know about Eddie, it all depended upon how prepared I was to receive these many awful truths. She sat with a file turned away from me, to shield me from seeing anything I didn’t want to see. This included a manila envelope with postmortem pictures of Eddie.

As we talked about the cold science of Eddie’s body, actual percentages and other grim details, I saw tears in her eyes for just a moment. It’s strange to see a professional lose the composure. It is the grieving widow who’s expected to break down, not the person in the crisp white coat. But these tears, from the least likely people, clarify the tragedy for me more than anything else. Even if I am too numb to feel my own pain, I see its reflection — and its enormity — in these encounters.

Now I have joined the other families in their efforts to have a say about the future of ground zero. This is the new task that helps reorder my new chaos. I know that, in the competing voices, there will be some that belong to people who own shiny cars with cheesy vanity plates. But I am equally certain that some will belong to other people who just can’t get through the days without crying, just like me.

“Do you have kids?” the worker asks sternly. She is trying to break me, make me cry, I think. This payback for my being so rude to her. My eyes water when I answer the question. “Yes, my son and my two stepsons.” I hear my voice — little, sad, barely in control — and am reminded that this person has done me no wrong. She doesn’t deserve this. It isn’t her fault and it isn’t mine that we are still poisoned with grief. Neither of us had anything to do with the powers that be, the powers that forced us together on this day for an exchange of symbolic goods. I apologize.

I used to know whose fault it was. At least I thought I did. The loss of my beloved Eddie hurt badly enough when 9/11 was a story about a secret plot that was so fantastic, so sophisticated and hidden, that it escaped our mighty intelligence network. Eddie, just a human among many other humans, was a victim merely because he was there, in the wrong place at the wrong time. His story, and the story of all the other victims, was a story of good vs. evil. Their fate inspired an important national project to root out that evil, and the nation rallied around us, the victims’ families, and around that project. Osama bin Laden, the mastermind of the plot, needed to be bagged. Our president assured the nation, bin Laden was wanted, dead or alive.

But now the story has become one of incompetence vs. evil. There had been knowledge, hints, warnings — shared at the highest levels — and yet no action, not a peep. How was that possible? Suddenly the diabolic geniuses behind this plot weren’t that smart. Instead they were just a few fundamentalist lunatics with box cutters and a dream, who could have — should have — been stopped at so many points before 8:46 a.m., Sept. 11.

This epic tragedy deserved epic villains. Now what do we do? My healing has been tied in with the story of this disaster and now I am feeling undone, unhinged and ultimately betrayed. I have questioned myself many times since the tragedy: How could Eddie and I fail to realize that the World Trade Center might not be the safest place to work? But I have taken solace in the fact that the people whose job it is to make this country a safe place couldn’t anticipate what would happen. Now I’m not so sure.

Now I’m afraid of what will come next. I’m afraid of the questions my son — who will always be 50 days older than his father’s death — will ask. How will I explain the murky taint in what was once a story of good vs. evil? If nothing else, the story now will be a parable, a lesson of Grimm proportions. You must always tell the truth, I’ll say at the end of the story. If you know something that might save someone else, tell everyone who will listen. And if something happens that you knew something about, tell what you knew, immediately. Be honest, before and after. Always.

From the moment that Eddie died, I have played the game of “What if?” There are endless ifs in the game, and the object is for me to find the right one. If I find the right if, I win, and I get to have Eddie back. I used to play this game with the only ifs I had, personal ifs about the things that were in our control: What if Eddie had started working at Cantor a few days later because instead we’d taken a last-minute vacation? What if he’d never been offered the job? What if he’d taken a different job? Never left his previous job? What if I’d kept him home that day, because I’d been so angry with him that I needed to talk to him?

I always lose the game. I try to accept the loss gracefully and resist the temptation to play one more time. Now I have a new set of ifs, provided by the govenment. I still lose the game, of course, but I am a sore loser. The new ifs are not so easy to dismiss as beyond my control. They carry a crushing sense of regret. And I wonder: If I had heard about these ifs soon after Eddie died, would I have endured the same guilt, would I have engaged in a daily probing of the wound if I’d known that I may not have been the only one to feel as if I somehow failed to keep my husband alive?

It helps to read the e-mail a Japanese friend sent to me shortly after Eddie was killed. She wrote:

“You are the one of lukiest [sic] persons on the earth because your husband chose the best way to die. People have to die alone anyway with some pain and they cannot usually choose the way to die and the time to die. If there is the God, he chose carefully those victims, including Eddie. Eddie was chosen because he was such a great person with full of love. His death was an honor.

“What you should have in your mind is not wounds,” she wrote, “but an honor as the wife of such great person and as a mother of his son. You have been chosen as the wife of the victim because the God knows you will survive this tragedy with strengths and you will be the one who can encourage other people by going through those incredible hardships.”

It helps too if I force myself to remember what Eddie always said about “if.” With a wide grin on his face, he’d put a halt to sad conjecture by saying, “If my uncle had titties, he’d be my aunt.” As angry as I am, as betrayed as I feel, I am ready to refresh this memory, to remember Eddie, rather than surrender, in a rage, to regret.

The date of our wedding, the only important element of our prenuptial planning, coincided with the moon waxing, not waning; the former is good luck, the latter, bad. Mother and mother-in-law-to-be fussed about me in preparation. I was the conduit between them since neither spoke the other’s language. I translated their English and Spanish anxiety to each other. The absurdity of the day needed no explanation; it was clear to everyone.

After our City Hall ceremony, we traversed the downtown streets that led to the World Trade Center. Everyone smiled at us, the newlyweds, on this spring day. A perfect bride, I wore the white glossy dress that Eddie bought me from a Queens black market. He plucked it off the rack, sized me just right from his hands-on knowledge of my shape.

Up we went to Windows on the World to toast our newly contracted state and to celebrate the end to Eddie’s precarious illegal status. I remember the purple drink made of champagne, vodka and Chambord, but I’ve forgotten its name. Eddie would have remembered it.

We strove to fulfill the government’s definition of marriage. We exchanged rings. I compounded my name with his, and became someone new: A.R.-T. We shared our various bank accounts. We took sweet pictures of our coupledom on all the days of supposed significance.

Marriage did not corrupt our wildness. Instead it legitimized it. Despite the myriad domestic trappings, the familiar bred its own excitement. And I was always startled to find how sweet the words “my husband” tasted in my mouth.

On Nov. 15, 2000, a year and a half after our marriage, we had our green card interview. The fat and unhappy immigration officer, Mr. D., investigated the authenticity of our union. Mostly he focused on me, presuming, it seemed, that I was a crafty woman who sold her U.S. status to this hapless human. Mr. D. demonstrated his knowledge of sham marriages by inappropriately describing his own: how he lived with a manipulative woman for many years solely for pretense in front of their children. With his children grown, he now considered divorce.

We left his office with too much knowledge about Mr. D. and without the official stamp in Eddie’s documents that would enable him to visit Colombia, his home. Even though Mr. D. had pronounced us man and wife, he had also found that the Immigration and Naturalization Service had lost Eddie’s file. Without a file, he had nothing to stamp. And without that stamp, Eddie could not travel. He was stuck in limbo, allowed as my husband to stay and work, but denied the privilege to leave.

He never did go back home.

On Sept. 11., when Eddie died, the favor I did for him became the favor he did for me. As Eddie’s lawful wife, I became the recipient of his earthly possessions, as well as the debts and benefits that would surface in the wake of his death.

Among other things, I was responsible for all of Eddie’s personal effects — his clothes and all the other little things that were his. These items, more than anything, are still a mountain of memories that I am sorting through and dividing into piles: items to keep, items to put aside for the children and items to give away to the appropriate family member, friend or charity.

Even after seven months, it is still a pile of Himalayan proportions. I have kept too many of his clothes because they fit me. Eddie and I were approximately the same size. On certain days I indulge in dressing in drag as the dead man. I wear his khaki pants and office shirts, his T-shirts and shorts, his underwear.

In January, I learned that there were more of Eddie’s things to be had. Unnamed items from ground zero. It took three weeks to find out what the items were and almost three months to receive them. As I waited, I suddenly wanted them to be his scapular, a Colombian religious necklace, his junky new scuba diver watch and his soft leather wallet. These items in my hand would be the open casket that never was, the proof that he had really been there. After almost a month, city officials told me they had three of Eddie’s cards: the one that got him downtown (his MetroCard), the one that took him up onto the 105th floor of the North Tower (his Cantor Fitzgerald I.D.) and the one that fed him his last meal (a Cantor Fitzgerald “Debitek” cafeteria card).

When I finally received these three plastic pieces, they smelled evil. I did not even have to open the clear plastic bag marked “Biohazard” to discover the odor. Included were crumbs of ground zero dirt — a little smudge of it appeared on the I.D. card, on Eddie’s cheek.

I had already buried Eddie’s body in late September, after agonizing decisions about how to do so, and where. I thought that he should go back to Colombia. His family thought it best to have him buried here. I chose a quiet old cemetery in the Bronx.

I thought I had all of Eddie. But a week ago, I found out that I had buried about 95 percent of him. Another widow had called to say that some families were learning that additional parts of their loved ones had been identified. I called Sean, the funeral director, who told me that the Eddie I buried was incomplete by 5 percent. I asked the next obvious question:

“What was missing?”

He said, “A foot or two.”

When I got off the phone I suddenly became confused about what kind of foot Sean was talking about: Was it the one with the toes, or the measurement? It could have been funny, if it hadn’t been so sad.

Sean clarified my confusion about a half-hour later when he called unexpectedly. The medical examiner had coincidentally just contacted him. They had identified a piece of Eddie’s muscle mass.

I had been thinking about muscle mass the previous night — except it belonged to someone else, someone living. That day I smiled at a man as we spoke and noted the bulk of his arms. I thought about how nice it would be to have him wrap them around me.

But now I was held once more by Eddie’s body and dazed by it too. And I remembered his feet with precision, especially how I licked them and how they tasted like ocean salt on Sunday, Sept. 9, 2001.

Here was the Eddie that, like the rest of his body, I would meet again unviewable and boxed. But this time the box would be much smaller. And I suddenly felt a twisted jealousy toward Sean and the medical examiner who were the last ones intimate with Eddie’s body.

As Sean explained, I now have three options concerning any additional body parts:

I can be spared the information of any additional findings and give permission to have any additional parts buried in a mass grave with other unidentified parts; or I can be informed of each part as it is identified; or I can learn of all parts at the conclusion of the investigation and then decide what to do with them.

Sean reminded me of a document I had signed before the funeral. I had forgotten it completely. Originally, I chose not to be informed in the event that there were more body parts.

But now I’ve changed my mind. I want his parts at the end of the investigation. By then, I think, I will somehow be able to tell his family about them. Again I have agonizing decisions to make about what to do with him.

But I know what I will do with him. Like most immigrants, Eddie was a man split between here and homeland. Although he chose to stay here for me, for his children and for all the opportunities available, he also always dreamed of going home. In death, he can be in both places.

By the power of marriage, I will send at least a piece of my husband back to Colombia. Lightly, he will tread back to the soil from which he came.

The missive, and an avalanche of ones just like it, did not inspire an apology from Mr. Rall. Instead, he told the press, “I’ve done a few lousy cartoons in my time that I’d love to take back, but this isn’t one of them.” And then, in another blast of cruel stupidity, Rall did it again, skewering firefighters in a Gear magazine cartoon.

The Universal Press Syndicate issued a statement in support of Rall, insisting that the cartoonist “is looking at recent news events with the cynical eye of a satirist.” And they’re right. Rall captured in his cartoon the new view of victims’ families as shallow and greedy. Gone is the exaggerated view of the families as noble and tragic, as wounded individuals worthy of unlimited sympathy and support. In its place is the growing impression that we are money-grubbing widows, glad to dump our husbands for a cool million.

I thought the first take on us was problematic, but it was certainly better to be pitied than to be despised to the point that my loved one’s death can be painfully and unapologetically satirized. Is there a chance that sometime soon we will be seen for what we are: a diverse and reluctant band of grieving and frightened victims who might be expected to show emotions on occasion? Are there observers of our very public mourning who might concede that our experiences in the last six months cannot be characterized by those who have not had them too?

For instance, I am angry. It is an emotion that could easily be interpreted as unseemly, whiney, or insane, but I am nearly consumed with rage these days — at Rall, the Red Cross, my therapist, all therapists, the Victim Compensation Fund, my husband Eddie, callous strangers, certain media (you know who you are) and myself.

Of course, anger is the third phase of the grieving process. It comes after denial (no, Eddie’s not dead, I just haven’t found him yet) and bargaining (if I can find Eddie alive, I promise I’ll be a better wife), and before the final phase, which is acceptance (OK, Eddie’s dead, my life continues, so what’s next?). But this natural flow of grief is aided and abetted in ways that can be hidden or misunderstood.

There is, for example, the case of the federal Victim Compensation Fund. Here is a resource meant to ease the hardship of victims’ families and to avoid litigation. This was supposed to be a win-win situation for which we, the victims’ families, were supposed to feel grateful. Instead, we are frustrated and hurt, our emotions blithely interpreted by Rall and others as greedy and ungrateful.

The problem? As Kenneth Feinberg, special master of the fund, blundered along, organizing the federal relief effort while fielding ethical questions from the media, he failed to work around the shortcomings of the Air Transportation Safety and System Stabilization Act (H.B. 2926), the statute that created the fund. Didn’t anyone think of using a calculator? The math is simple. When you subtract the statute’s enumerated setoffs — Social Security, workers’ compensation, 401Ks, life insurance, etc. — from Feinberg’s average $1.6 million award, it’s easy to come up with nothing.

And so with the media cameras rolling, victims’ families foamed at the mouth and the American public watched in disgust. With all the millions in donations that America made on their behalf, along with this federal handout of $1.6 million per customer, how could these newly rich whiners complain? Rall’s cartoon widow exemplified this view: Knowing that her dead husband will never come home (and not caring much about that), she cuddles up with the $3.2 million that she’s received from the Red Cross.

Ah, the Red Cross. At this point, I can’t imagine cuddling up with anything associated with the Red Cross. Perhaps, like Mr. Feinberg, this well-meaning charity was overwhelmed with the fallout of this disaster. But I am still recovering from the incompetence and insensitivity doled out by the organization during the most vulnerable months of my life. In my darkest fury, I wonder if the generous financial help I finally received — nowhere near Rall’s $3.2 million — was worth the enormous emotional strain it took to get it. Somewhere in this (attention Mr. Rall!) there is a cartoon:

On five different occasions, I met with many different Red Cross caseworkers, each of whom made me tell my story, from the beginning, and answer the same intake questions: How are you doing? Do you have a support system? Are you working? Are you seeing a therapist? How’s the baby? And after each lengthy encounter, with teary eyes, the caseworker du jour would console me with a patriotically beribboned stuffed animal.

One caseworker wanted to perform another full intake when I delivered my husband’s death certificate. When I said I had just attended my husband’s funeral and didn’t feel like talking, she perked up: “So how was the funeral?” Three other caseworkers wrongly assumed my Hispanic husband worked as a sweeper for the Port Authority.

In late October, I finally received a check, not the check. It was $21 for transportation expenses sent in a Federal Express envelope. In early November, a visiting caseworker declared: “What a beautiful Jewish looking baby you have!” In mid-November, I received another Red Cross check (again, not the check) in an envelope mistakenly addressed to my dead husband.

In the beginning of December, when a new caseworker called me, I asked her about the status of my family gift. She adamantly denied the existence of the entire Family Gift program. Weeks later, I finally received the family gift that had been promised in September, when my case was prioritized because I was widowed, seven months pregnant, unemployed and in immediate need of alternate housing.

Then, last week, the arrival of the six-month anniversary and the debut of the first 9/11 movie brought yet another wave of rage. Somehow, I am supposed to accept that my husband’s death doesn’t belong to his loved ones, that his death is a public spectacle that will be viewed by millions again and again. CBS said of its “9/11″ documentary that, while it’s not visually graphic, the movie allows viewers an opportunity to hear the “thud” of bodies as they plummeted to the ground. No doubt, Eddie’s body made one of those thuds.

Why, oh why, do we unearth the graphic sights and sounds of the day, hold ceremonies before hundreds of cameras with ground zero the background in every shot? To make sure “the rawness” doesn’t fade, according one CBS executive producer. This is a worthy goal?

On March 11, I woke up at 8:44 a.m. and rolled over so that I could be unconscious for the infamous 8:46 a.m. moment and the horrific memories — real (mine) and imagined (Eddie’s) — of the minutes that followed. I canceled my therapy appointment and had a manicure instead. And whenever 9/11 entered my head, I banished it with a song I learned in my baby’s music class: “A RamSamsam, a RamSamsam, googly googly googly googly RamSamsam.”

A successful day, carefully plotted. But the night was ruthless. On a specially arranged Circle Line boat tour, called “Tribute in Light,” victims’ families were escorted around New York Harbor. The cruise was meant to be a kindness, but they allowed news teams on board. One reporter sat a row ahead of me, her microphone casually dangling nearby to catch my every gasp or sigh. I asked if she could move it; I wanted to toss it overboard.

The tour guide was incongruously happy-go-lucky, reminding us that the snacks are free: “It doesn’t get better than that!” he says. Then, as we pulled away from the dock, he piped up: “Are you excited about this? You should be!” I wanted to toss him overboard. Do these impulses, ignited by grief, make me a monster?

After the tour I found myself downtown, close to the Wall Street corner where Eddie and I had often met for spur of the moment kisses and end of the day encounters. I went to the corner and waited for several minutes. I looked down the long street and remembered how Eddie would walk toward me. I stood there until I felt like a jerk, having been stood up for a date.

I am angry with Eddie for dying on that day, a common reaction that fills me with guilt nonetheless. “To die at 31, without saying goodbye, without ever seeing our baby!” I think. “How dare you!” During one hypochondriacal moment long ago, when I claimed, half in jest, that I was dying, Eddie replied, also half in jest, that I should go to hell if I died now and that he’d certainly hate me forever for it. Will I hate him forever for disappearing from our lives? As I now consider adultery as revenge for his betrayal, I pity the man who will be trapped in this awful love triangle.

Really, I am angry with both of us, that we had no paranormal contingency plan, a place and time to meet after death, a celestial Wall Street corner similar to that one where we frequently met in life. We should have made arrangements for this, along with a promise that every night, at midnight, the dead person would say hello to the living one by flickering the lights. I hate that we wrongly assumed that we would be healthy and happy and together for many years to come, and wasted so much time because of this false sense of abundance.

Sometimes I am angriest at myself for being angry. I berate myself for my rage and then laugh like a madwoman, amused that I’ve wasted so much time choking on the venom of such an unproductive emotion. And in my laughter I release my anger and take great pleasure in the beauty of each day, as a tribute to Eddie, and to everyone who isn’t here to experience it. And I laugh extra hard at people like Rall, so angry with me for not living up to their expectations of what a proper 9/11 widow is supposed to be.

Like Rall’s terror widows, I am “eerily calm, [I] smile and crack jokes and laugh out loud.” But not because I am an evil person. I laugh because sometimes I have to stop crying. I am calm to sustain my family. And I smile because, angry as I am, I am deeply grateful. Working for the Cantor Relief Fund, sorting through the letters that accompanied donations, I read about sacrifices that donors made in order to send their money: There were children who gave up birthday presents, families that gave up a month’s income, people who gave up unemployment checks, a small dairy farm that gave up one of its 24 cows.

Go ahead: Read the hype, but don’t believe it. Those of us who were wounded to the core by this tragedy are sad and angry and frequently lost. But we are not ungrateful opportunists who have welcomed the death of loved ones as an opportunity to get rich. That person is Ted Rall, and I pity him, more than anything else.

How do you have a relationship with a dead man? How do you love somebody who is no longer near your body? How do you love a body you did not see before it was buried because it suffered so much trauma that it was only identifiable through dental records? According to Helen, my therapist, you continue to have a relationship with a person whom you have lost — somehow, some way. You internalize the relationship, she says. I look over at her with a smirk, and tell her this new relationship with Eddie is sorely lacking.

Supposedly, with a body to bury, I had an edge in the grieving process over the WTC victims’ families who didn’t have a body. Supposedly it gave me closure. But having the body is not the same as seeing the body.

So I re-create Eddie from the physical traces he left behind. I pretend that by assembling all these little pieces, I will re-create the whole man. I say goodnight to a picture of his sleeping face, and hug his shirt — last worn on Sept. 10 — through the nights. Sometimes I can still catch his smell on it. His shirt from Sept. 9 stays under the pillow. Scents of hot sun and ocean cling to it, the remains of our day at a nude beach. There are still other shirts that I keep in a plastic bag in the closet. I take them out only on special occasions. They smell strongly of Eddie’s labor from renovating our house. I won’t wash any of these shirts.

I often play the final two messages that Eddie left on our answering machine on Sept. 10, amused that these messages aren’t the sweet things I wish them to be. Instead they are the residue of a disagreement we had that was never fully resolved. He says, “Hey, I just want to know how you’re doing. Call me.” He is annoyed that I am unreachable, which is how I now feel about him, each and every time I hear his words.

Certain items are obvious stand-ins for Eddie, as evidenced by my exaggerated emotions in their presence. Whenever I misplace Eddie’s beat-up old hat, I become so anxious that I cannot breathe. Similarly, I was infuriated with my mother when she insisted that we could transport Eddie’s bike on top of all the junk in the back of her SUV. The symbolism is easy: the bike, his body; the SUV, the hearse.

At home, Eddie stays in the bedroom, on the mantelpiece. He is captured in several pictures that I casually glance at throughout the day. Alongside the photos, I’ve added various items commemorative of our life together and our lives apart: old, dried Mothers Day roses, from him, for me, the mother-to-be; two scented candles, one called “Blessing,” the other “Love,” that I gave to him recently on what would have been his 32nd birthday; a stone brought by his mom and sister from Colombia, his beloved homeland, the only one of several that did not go into his grave; a necklace from Hawaii, the belated birthday gift that he promised me, that I received after he died; and a small black bowl made of special Colombian clay, a wedding present that now has a sticky residue of cognac at its bottom.

When I travel, Eddie stays in a large white envelope full of big color photos of our final day at the beach. In this way he accompanied me to the hospital when I gave birth to our son. Up until then, I had been discreet with these naked pictures of us — Adam and Eve before the fall. But in the hospital I lovingly presented them to all my doctors.

When it snows and the city streets are quiet under ghostly blanketing, I write love notes to Eddie on car windows and hoods. I am still waiting for a response.

Prior to Sept. 12, I used to try to memorize Eddie’s body as I caressed him each morning. I wanted to hold on to my sensations of him so that I could savor him throughout the day. But I never succeeded. He always left my hands warm but empty. And then the day came that my hands stayed empty and all of me went cold. As I try to put Eddie back together again, he is out of my reach, and I am numb.

I naively believed I could function like a racehorse, blindly jumping over hurdles in the trifecta of festivities — Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year’s — to get to the finish line of my grief. But when I went to the pharmacy on Christmas Day, I almost cried when I saw the employees replacing Santa with Cupid. In my focus on holidays at hand, I had forgotten about Valentine’s Day, the worst holiday of all for the unloved and brokenhearted.

In moments of endearment, Eddie would tell me of his wish to turn 90 beside me. I’d smile and wish for the same. This year, I’ll wish for someone new to be a father to my son. He will be someone who does not mind a lingering ghost, or being pushed aside in favor of that spirit. He will know the trauma, but won’t be traumatized by it. He will love me but have little or no sympathy for me. Above all, he will be someone who won’t disappear on a bright blue day.

Meanwhile, Eddie and I will celebrate Valentine’s Day in the same way that we celebrated his 32nd birthday, another milestone of his absence. At midnight I lit the candles on the mantelpiece, danced salsa with the baby, smelled the shirts, listened to his messages and drank some of his cognac. I also poured some cognac for him into the black Colombian bowl.

In the morning the bowl was empty except for some sticky residue at the bottom. I pretend that Eddie drank it, even if it was only the heat of the room that sucked it down.