A Widow Finds Life in Family

After 21 days of bagpipes, tears and eulogies, Sally Siller was reeling from grief. She had mourned at the funerals of firefighters killed in the World Trade Center attacks, and now it was time to face her own loss.

Her husband, Stephen, had not been heard from since he raced to join his Brooklyn fire engine company at the crash site on Sept. 11. And as days turned into weeks, her five young children still had not been told what happened to their father. Finally, at the end of yet another wake, Sally turned to her brother-in-law, Frank, and said quietly: “It’s time.”

If Stephen Siller, 34, was cheated in life, he wasn’t going to be cheated in death. His large Staten Island family gave him a dignified service in their local church, and Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani came, telling Stephen’s daughter, Katie, that her father was a hero who saved many lives.

The line to get into the wake stretched down the block, and friends who grew up with Stephen--now men and women weeping in Sally’s arms--said over and over what a crime it was. They remembered a brash, fun-loving man who was crazy about his kids. A devoted husband who would be sorely missed.

And then, numbingly, it was over. Time to start the long road back.

“Nights are the toughest time for me,” Sally said on a recent afternoon, rocking her 11-month-old son to sleep in the kitchen. “It’s when Stephen and I would put the kids to bed. It was our private time, to talk about the day. When I’m alone, I’m filled with despair, and I’ve been worrying a lot about my kids. This has been very hard for them to take.”

Katie, 10, thanks her dad in a sad, nightly prayer for all that he did. Putting on her pajamas, Olivia, 5, burst into tears one evening and said: “Mom, it’s just so hard without him.” Genevieve, 3, seems more restless and irritable than usual. Jake, 2, clutches a photograph of his father and kisses it, waiting at the door for him to come home.

Three months after the terrorism attacks, the families of World Trade Center victims are struggling with a world that changed abruptly and forever. For most, it’s too soon to talk of recovery or the future. They’re simply trying to get past the initial shock that has yet to lift. Some have no relatives to help them; others have been thrown together by trauma, even though they haven’t been close for years.

And then there are the Sillers, a big-hearted, boisterous clan with 57 people in the immediate family. Since Stephen’s death, they have descended on Sally’s home, spending hours with her and the children. They talk about Stephen and how he brightened their lives when she wants to remember. They maintain a respectful silence when the memory gets too painful.

It’s a caring, attentive family with deep community roots. The West Brighton neighborhood of Staten Island where they grew up--and where Sally still lives--looks much as it did years ago. On a blustery December morning, Christmas decorations twinkled from the front porches of wood-frame homes and blizzards of crackling leaves swirled through quiet, tree-lined streets.

But there is one telling change: Large American flags flutter from rooftops and windows bear photos of firefighters, police and others who went to work Sept. 11 and never came home. Staten Island lost 283 people in the terrorist attacks, and the sense of loss here is palpable.

When Sally walks through the neighborhood, she runs into friends who are also in mourning. And while she’s outwardly strong, the 33-year-old widow is just beginning to wrestle with the anxiety of her new life. At times, when relatives fill her living room with conversation, she becomes distant and somber. The family can give her only so much.

“It’s hard for Sally, especially with Christmas approaching,” said her sister, Sheila. “She has to be a rock for her children. When firemen came over after Sept. 11, they cried, and she took them into another room so the kids wouldn’t see. It’s part of our tradition. We have to be strong.”

Stephen learned early. The youngest of seven, he lost his parents by the time he was 10, and his brothers and sisters helped raise him. Now they are going to help his widow raise the couple’s children.

“We didn’t need a tragedy to make us closer or to give us a wake-up call as a family,” Frank said, as he poured a cup of coffee at Sally’s kitchen table. “But this is something else. The hurt rips us apart.”

As grief gives way to anger, the Sillers ponder troubling what ifs: What if Stephen hadn’t heard about the terrorist attacks on his scanner as he finished a work shift and had joined his brothers as planned for a golf game in New Jersey? “What if he came home?” Sally asked with a bittersweet smile. “When I get up to heaven, I’m going to kill him.”

Frank thought of using that line in the eulogy for his brother. It captured the family’s good-natured joshing, the zingers they aim at one another. But he left it out because he thought outsiders might not understand.

“We rip each other to the bone,” Frank said. “It’s how we survive. Anyone who’s ever lived in a large family knows what I’m talking about.”

Siblings Stepped In

Stephen Siller was a surprise baby in a family in which the firstborn was 25 years old. He was headstrong and filled with mischief, and was doted on by his parents and siblings. In grade school, he caught the eye of Sally Wilson, a shy, intelligent girl who was the youngest of five in a family that lived just one block away in West Brighton.

“Oh, I remember Stephen all right,” Sally says. “I can still see him running down Allan Court, the street where we lived, and he was the boy of all boys, with a big blue parka, a rip in his pants and a chipped tooth.”

It was a tranquil, insular world, 10 minutes from the Staten Island ferry and 30 minutes from the ruckus of Manhattan. But it began unraveling in 1975, when George Siller, Stephen’s father, died of diabetes. Two years later, his mother, Mae, died of cancer. Six of the seven Siller kids were grown; Stephen was a 10-year-old orphan.

“We had to take care of him because we had always treated him like a son,” said Russ, the oldest brother. “So my wife and I decided to take him into our home. We raised him as if he were our boy.”

It wasn’t the easiest fit. Stephen would go through life missing his mom and dad, Russ said, and his siblings couldn’t always fill the void.

After high school, he held a series of odd jobs on Long Island, then began working in the furrier store the family runs on Staten Island. Stephen was physically strong, had great self-confidence and wanted to help people, Frank says. Eventually, he decided to join the Fire Department of New York.

“Look at the sense of family they provide you with in the fire department, the guys working and living together, and the wives being so close-knit,” Russ said. “It made sense for Stephen to join this world.”

He became a member of the FDNY in 1995 and worked the last three years with Squad One, an elite rescue unit. His mates described him as a workhorse who mastered the intricacies of firefighting. “Stephen kept the scanner on at home, even when he was off. He’d call us about fires that were breaking out on Staten Island and in Brooklyn,” said Tony Edwards, a fellow firefighter. “Nobody else we knew did that.

“When Stephen was born,” Edwards added, “God looked down and said: ‘This is a New York City firefighter.’ ”

By now he had married Sally Wilson. A mutual friend put them together on their first date in 1988, and it lives on in family lore: Sally’s car got stuck in reverse and he drove her home, backward, for nearly 20 minutes. They were married two years later and, in keeping with their families’ ebullient spirits, Stephen and Sally didn’t simply put on a big celebration. They threw a wild party.

As the band played, the Sillers and Wilsons wrapped themselves in tablecloths, put napkins on their heads and danced a conga line. They cheered when Stephen stood on a table and sang a raucous Doors song to Sally, shouting: “The future’s uncertain, the end is always near.”

The newlyweds gave each other something precious.

“Stephen brought me out of my shell, because I was an introvert,” Sally said. “From my end, I gave him a sense of peace and his own family.”

She and Stephen had five kids in 10 years. Although Sally was a nurse, she ultimately decided to be a stay-at-home mom and never regretted it. Her husband and their large extended family became the focus of her life.

When Sally’s father was dying of cancer, Stephen insisted on taking him to play golf to keep his spirits up and even played a practical joke on him with an exploding golf ball. When he was no longer able to walk, Stephen carried him from room to room.

Stephen Siller was a tireless dad, coaching his girls in softball with a young son strapped on his back, never too busy to take his children on weekend trips.

“I was the one who got the kids dressed, and he was the one who got them dirty,” said Sally, her blue eyes brimming with tears. “It’s like we had finally arrived, you know? As a family, we were finally at our peak.”

Family Was in Denial

At 8:30 a.m. on Sept. 11, Stephen Siller finished an uneventful night shift at his Brooklyn firehouse. He began driving to a golf date with his three brothers when he heard the first bulletins about the World Trade Center.

Stephen wheeled his car around in traffic and raced to the site. But the routes into Manhattan were blocked, so he strapped on 80 pounds of fire gear and began running through the 1.7-mile Brooklyn Battery Tunnel until a fire engine company picked him up. They headed to the south tower, and that was the last anyone saw of him.

Initially, no one dared believe the worst. Family members gathered in Sally’s living room for a vigil in front of the TV and insisted Stephen was invincible. Surely he’d come walking out of the smoldering wreckage.

In those first hours, Sally’s mind raced back to the conversation she’d had with her husband the night before. He’d called from the firehouse to tell her a firefighter’s sister had died, and suddenly the two were talking about death. Several months earlier, three New York firefighters had perished fighting blazes on Father’s Day, and the memory haunted them both.

“I asked Stephen if he was afraid of dying, and he said no,” Sally recalls. “But then I told him, with a catch in my voice, I said, ‘Do you know how we feel every time you walk out the door, how frightened we are that we’ll lose you?’ Stephen would usually hear that and say, ‘Don’t worry about me, I’ll be OK,’ but this time he just said, ‘I can’t talk about it.’ ”

Trying to be strong, Sally kept the household routines intact: Dress the kids. Send them to school. Act as if nothing’s wrong. But then she began the ritual trips to funerals for other firefighters, and soon it came time to bury her own husband, even though his body had not yet been found. At first she had told her children their dad was missing. Now, three weeks later, she sat them down and said he would never be coming back. The family laid him to rest on Oct. 3, the same date as his father’s death.

These days, Sally’s relatives visit constantly and help her take care of the children. There’s Uncle George, making faces and playing with Genevieve in the dining room. Aunt Catherine offers to baby-sit for the night and takes Jake upstairs when he begins fussing and needs a midafternoon nap.

In the weeks since her husband died, Sally has had some fleeting upbeat moments. She enjoyed the October benefit concert at Madison Square Garden for families of police, fire and other rescue workers; through her tears she proudly held up a photograph of Stephen that was shown on national TV.

At Thanksgiving, family members offered toasts to Stephen. They told jokes about him, recalling a baby brother whose energy amazed them. They remembered home videos of him splashing with his kids in a pool, beaming at his son’s baptism and holding Katie on his shoulders at a local parade.

Stephen’s second family--his colleagues from Squad One, who lost 12 of 27 members at the World Trade Center--are also reaching out to Sally.

They’ve taken her on errands and escorted her to funerals. They’ve delivered cartons of food donated by people across America. Most important, they’ve shared with Sally the firefighters’ special bond.

“Stephen was a warrior,” said fellow Squad One member Paul Stallone, delivering a box of Christmas toys to the Siller children. “He was a real brother to me. And we will always be there to help his family.”

Like others who lost loved ones Sept. 11, Sally will be receiving financial assistance from several charities. As a firefighter’s widow with five children, she received a check from the Twin Towers Fund, set up for uniformed rescue workers’ families. She’s eligible for help from the Victim’s Compensation Fund created by Congress, plus aid from other relief groups--all designed to protect her long-term financial future.

But for Sally, the future isn’t two or three years from now. It isn’t even this coming weekend or the new year. She thinks one night at a time.

Someday, perhaps in a few months, she may speak with someone about her private feelings. A priest, maybe, or a counselor. She worries about the health of her youngest boy, Stephen, because he was born with a heart defect and will need a delicate, potentially risky operation next year. She doesn’t know how she will afford college educations for her kids.

Meanwhile, there’s the ache of each new day. Increasingly, Sally feels anger about what happened, a fury over the senselessness of it all. She has no patience for people in the supermarket who complain about trivial things. Don’t they know how fragile life is? Don’t they realize how fleeting our time is here on Earth?

“I’ve tried to be honest and tell the kids exactly what happened to their dad. I tell them that we all have to move on the way he’d have wanted us to,” she said, as the late afternoon sun faded in her kitchen.

“But nobody’s moving on. The best I can say is--we’re together.”

Last month, a friend told Sally that if she got up at 4 a.m. she might see a colorful meteor shower in the sky. It was the kind of crazy, spontaneous thing Stephen would do, and she got ready for the big moment.

“I went out on the porch, looked up and there it was--one meteor after another streaking across the sky,” she said. “I thought to myself, that’s Stephen. It’s a sign for us. It’s him, blazing out and disappearing.

“Then I rushed back into the house to wake up the kids and make sure that they saw it too. It was something I wanted us all to remember.”