This Man's Life
How can you begin to comprehend the enormity of September 11? By understanding just what was lost in one man's tragic death
Back at the Johnsons' that night, the guys congregated in the pool room. We could see the swimming pool outside where we'd have belly-flopping contests, Scott so skinny you half thought he might break his ribs. Trip Hosmer, a Trinity College friend, walked up to Scott's mother and introduced himself. "I'm the one who totaled your car freshman year," he said. She laughed. I flipped through a photo album of Tom's wedding and saw so many pictures of Scott with that vintage smile. Ann Johnson passed by. We could bear to look at each other only for a moment. "That's OK, Jeff," she said, tears in her eyes. "You're all going to grow old and gray, and Scott will be young and beautiful."
I returned to see her the following Thursday. She said she had struggled to decide whether to speak with a Keefe Bruyette survivor about what happened in those final minutes. "Do you really want to know?" her husband had asked her. "Well, I want to know that he didn't suffer," she said. She hoped Scott died instantly from the crash. "I couldn't protect him," she said and began crying. "You raise a child, you want to make sure they are OK. Tom and I said to each other, `Why didn't they take us?' "
The Johnsons are trying to accept that the beautiful days are not his beautiful days anymore. "So frequently I will catch myself enjoying something, and there is an instant pang of guilt," says Tom Johnson. He will think, "Oh my gosh, I lost Scott. I can't be enjoying this. You sort of feel you've compromised the grieving you're supposed to be doing. But then an instant later you realize, Oh no, that's not the case. Scott wouldn't want you to go through your life that way at all." He feels angry and cheated that his son has been taken away. "It's selfish, but it's about what they did to me," he says. "I'm angry looking forward to the times that this family will have together. It's been always so important to us, major holidays. Everything is going to get compromised by this, and I'm angry about that."
Kierstie wishes Scott would come into her mind more. "I've been waiting for him to sit next to me, a little hologram talking to me," she says. "I want something huge and I haven't gotten it. I've been ignoring the smaller things because of it." Her dreams are about death and fighting. "He used to come around in my dreams," she says. "I'm too preoccupied to notice him now." She keeps hoping for a "Road to Damascus" moment, where she will see the light and Scott in heaven. "I thought he'd be sitting on the edge of my bed," she says. "I didn't know in my heart that wouldn't happen. I knew in my head that's not the way life works. That's starting to set in that his presence is subtle."
A couple of weeks ago, Josh and Zach and I decided we had to see ground zero. A friend's father had described it as "looking at the gates of hell," so we thought we were prepared for the worst. Below Chambers Street, we followed the silent crowds down Broadway and stopped at a metal barricade. Two blocks away, the burned out hulks were smoldering. A banner on one of them said, "We will never forget." An Air Force reservist alternately yelled for people to move forward and handed out tissues from a box of Kleenex. "It's worse than I thought, and I thought the worst," Zach said. "There's just so much metal. You think of concrete, but it's so much metal and steel. It's so hard to think that Scott-O is buried under all that rubble." Scott's friend Mike Morris lives the ground zero nightmare all week. "You don't understand what it's like," says Mike, who works in a wine store nearby. "I walk by that thing every day going to work. I cross Chambers, I look down, I see big, burned-out buildings. I blow a kiss, say, `Love you, baby,' I keep walking. I say something to him every day."
advertisement
