Life Amid the Anguish of Loss

Colleen Rastovich shuddered the other day when she heard a plane flying low over her toy-strewn east Ventura backyard. But the moment, like a million others since Sept. 11, passed.

Rastovich was a continent away from the devastation of that day. But for her and a number of other people who live and work in Ventura County, it was as close as an empty chair at the dining room table, a dear friend never seen again, a riotous laugh never heard.

For them, the shock and aftershocks of Sept. 11 dealt a terrible, intimate loss.

Not merely anguished witnesses to history, they were victims of it. Here are a few of their stories.

Look around her house and you will see why Colleen Rastovich never gave evil much credit. The place is bursting with life. Six-year-old twin sisters Tora and Lexi, miracle babies whose survival was in doubt, gleefully wrestle in the living room. Eighteen-month-old Max tags after brother Sam, soon to be 7. Their mom volunteers in the classroom and gives piano lessons. She paints, sculpts and writes songs. All in all, she seems like a woman who would breeze through adversity with a diaper in one hand and a coffee mug in the other.

But last Sept. 11 she was cast into a long, dark night of the soul. Her brother, Joe Heller--the family organizer, prodder and tell-it-like-he-sees-it kind of guy--was last heard from in a conference room on the 92nd floor of the World Trade Center’s north tower.

He had called his wife in Ridgefield, Conn., to tell her he was OK. Later, others who received calls from that room reported they were told that the blaze just beyond the threshold had melted the doorknobs.

“I never believed in evil,” Rastovich said as she pondered the year’s changes at her backyard picnic table last week. “I just thought of it as an absence of good.”

But since Sept. 11 she has opened her eyes to the extremes of human behavior, from the depravity of the hijackers to the nobility of the rescue workers.

At 41, she now believes in evil. Raised a Catholic but never devout, she has been gripped by urgent, spiritual questions that never before seemed to matter.

“All of a sudden, it’s very important for me to know: Is there an afterlife?” she said. “I want so badly to believe I’ll see Joe again.”

Three years older, she had been close to her brother since they were kids in Cleveland.

He poured himself into everything he did, Rastovich said. When he was in second grade, he was barred from the school bus after a tiff with the driver. Somehow, he managed to run several miles home every day after school, standing outside with a broad smile to greet the bus as it pulled onto his block.

“He was very, very stubborn,” Rastovich said.

A trader for a company called Carr Futures, Heller had worked in the World Trade Center for 15 years. Most of the time he worked on the second or third floor. But an unusual meeting Sept. 11 took him up to the 92nd--a level on which there were no known survivors.

Six weeks after the center’s destruction, Heller’s body was found. Three memorial services had been held without it, and Rastovich was surprised at how disturbed she was by the body’s absence. But its discovery also wound up tormenting her.

“Incredibly, he was nearly intact,” she said. “And how could that be? Our latest theory is that maybe he was almost out of there--and if he was that close, it’s even harder to accept. It would really help if I could get used to a scenario and just live with it.”

On Wednesday, Sept. 11, she will drop by an observance at Ventura’s City Hall and attend a talk in Thousand Oaks by New Age thinker Marianne Williamson. Otherwise, she will follow the routine of a stay-at-home mom who has glimpsed a bit of hell.

“I’ve become a terrible housekeeper,” she joked. “But I’m on the floor a lot more with the kids. I’m definitely paying a lot more attention to the here and now.”

Earl Dorsey and his 5-year-old son, Jaryd, have their weekends planned out this fall.

They will travel all over the West to see Jaryd’s 19-year-old sister, Imani, play soccer for the University of Portland.

That is just what they did two seasons ago--only then they were accompanied by an exuberant woman with a wonderful laugh, a woman whose loss they have been coping with since Flight 77 slammed into the Pentagon on Sept. 11.

When Dora Menchaca died, Dorsey, an attorney, lost his wife, the children lost their mother, and a cozy world of domestic routine suddenly was flung upside-down. But bit by bit over the past year, the rhythms of home have been restored.

“Even after Dora died, we went to see Imani’s games,” said Dorsey, who was married 18 years to the woman he met as a graduate student at UCLA. “That was our plan for the 2001 season and that’s our plan this year too.”

Stricken by chaos, Dorsey and his kids have hewed to routine.

A research scientist at Amgen in Thousand Oaks, Dora Menchaca walked the 26 miles of the Los Angeles Marathon in 2000 and 2001. In tribute to her, Dorsey and Jaryd walked about 1 1/2 miles of it in March, hand in hand.

“It was arranged by Jaryd’s bereavement group, so each of the kids could walk a mile and complete the marathon,” Dorsey said. “It was in honor of all the kids who had lost a parent.”

Jaryd will be 6 next month. When he learned his mother had died, he cried inconsolably and asked to plant purple roses. Menchaca loved to tend the garden at the family’s Santa Monica home. One of the last things she told her son was that they would get purple flowers.

At first, the concept of death--especially his mother’s death--was not something Jaryd fully grasped. But being around others trying to bounce back after the death of a loved one has helped both him and his dad.

“We’ve come to some sort of peace with the situation,” Dorsey said. “We’ve worked with various support groups that each of us is involved in to pull our lives together and proceed in a way that Dora would be proud of.”

Menchaca grew up poor in San Antonio. The first of her Mexican-American family to attend college, she went on to earn a doctorate in epidemiology. At Amgen, she was known for her passion, her willingness to work through the night on the complex clinical trials required before bringing a drug to market.

On Sept. 11, she caught an earlier plane than the one she was booked on.

She had spent the previous day briefing government officials on a prostate cancer drug she was helping to develop. The next day, she was eager to get back to her family.

Her flight was terrifyingly short.

Her husband has not flown to Washington since her death, but he has flown.

“I don’t have any more anxiety than I would normally,” he said. “But there isn’t a time I fly that my thoughts don’t turn to my wife and what her last moments would have been like.”

The turns the world has taken since then would sadden her, Dorsey said, his voice tightening.

“Dora wouldn’t want what happened to her to cause any bitterness or anger or resentment or further pain,” he said. “Violence is not the answer for the differences that separate all of us.”

At his rambling ranch house in the rugged Lockwood Valley, Brian Prosser wasn’t quite certain that the living-room memorial to his son would be a comforting addition.

“I thought maybe it would be gruesome or morbid, but as soon as I hung it up, I knew I did just the right thing--because he’s here.”

The display case he mounted holds his son’s Green Beret uniform, complete with decorations earned from serving in Kosovo, Somalia, Saudi Arabia and Haiti.

Staff Sgt. Brian Cody Prosser’s last assignment was in Afghanistan. With two other American soldiers, he was killed by friendly fire as the United States tried to root out Osama bin Laden after Sept. 11.

“My boy was just one of the select few,” said Prosser, a gravel-voiced retired Los Angeles firefighter. “You see a lot of them in Arlington.”

Twenty-eight years old, Cody died in a skirmish north of Kandahar on Dec. 5. Since then, his father, wheelchair-bound after an accident years ago, has made it a point to speak out.

“I want guys like my son not to pay the price they’ve paid for nothing,” he said. “I’m afraid his contribution to our freedom will be forgotten.”

Captain of his high school’s football team, Cody Prosser was known as a tough competitor--one who would barely grunt when he dislocated his shoulder during games and have his dad, the team’s assistant coach, pop it back in.

Even as a boy, people in his rural community knew he wanted nothing more than to be a Green Beret. As he became a young man, that flame burned even hotter. At a memorial service, his 10-year-old niece, Taylor Prosser, summed up his spirit in a poem:

“My uncle Cody, a killing machine,” it went. “My uncle Cody, a whisper in the sky.”

An Army veteran himself, Cody’s father moved his family to the sage-studded open spaces outside Frazier Park in 1965.

His oldest son had asthma, and a fellow firefighter told him that living in this mountain hideaway might ease the boy’s condition.

“A lot of things get settled around the kitchen table in a firehouse,” said Prosser, who ran a blacksmith shop after he left the Fire Department.

At 64, Prosser follows the news avidly. These days, he often bristles.

“I see people on TV upset over the way John Walker Lindh was being treated,” he said, referring to the young American who admitted fighting for the Taliban.

“I see barriers being removed around city halls. I see signs that people don’t really believe that these folks over there hate us and have taken an oath to make sure we don’t live too long. That makes me sad.”

On Sept. 11, Prosser plans to speak at a local school. Painful as the day will be, he said he welcomed it as a chance to remind people of freedom’s cost, of his son’s sacrifice.

“He was a warrior,” Prosser said. “One-hundred percent.”

If there is a story of good luck on Sept. 11, it has to be Dan White’s. But even the best of luck in horrible times can leave its scars.

White made it out of the 84th floor of the World Trade Center’s south tower unscathed.

Nearly one-quarter of his 280 colleagues did not.

“They were people you have over for dinner, people you trade stories about your kids with,” he said.

“On occasion, I’ve come across family members of people who were killed and I could completely envision them as my wife, my mother, my son. I go through an awful lot of what-if scenarios.”

White, 32, lives in Simi Valley with his wife, Corinna, and their two young sons.

But two weeks a month he works in the New York offices of a firm called Eurobrokers, which in 2000 acquired the software company he founded.

On Sept. 11, White and the other 150 employees on the firm’s trading floor were jolted by an enormous boom. Through the window they saw flames, smoke and debris pouring from the windows of the north tower nearby.

“I thought it was a bomb,” White said. “I thought I’d grab my laptop and cell phone, head to JFK, go home, and not come back.”

White joined a crowd hurrying down the stairs.

Some others reversed course when a voice on the loudspeaker sounded an all-clear, but White kept going. When another explosion rocked the building as he hit the 34th floor, he picked up the pace.

“I was in a get-the-hell-out-of-there mode,” he recalled. “I had to get away.”

When he finally emerged from a pedestrian walkway onto the street, he was desperate to call his wife. But first he looked up and saw both towers on fire.

“Everything around my floor was in flames,” he said. “I thought anyone who stayed was dead. I thought of the guys I knew who would have dillydallied around, or made sure everyone was evacuated before they were.”

Two days later he was back in Simi Valley, vowing never to fly again. After six weeks, he did. Over the past year, he figures he has been back in New York 18 or 19 times for Eurobrokers. Each time he boards a flight he has to remind himself of the statistic he pulled from the FAA Web site: About 30,000 planes daily lift off and land in the United States without mishap.

“My approach to fear--and everyone deals with it differently--is to learn everything I can to face it down,” he said. “But it’s not always so easy.”

Additional data do not help the software designer come to grips with the chilling randomness of the deaths around him.

“I made a set of choices and I didn’t know whether they’d turn out to be right or wrong,” he said. “But there was a guy just behind me on the stairs who went back up. And I saw these other people waiting for an elevator on the 78th floor. They must have been slaughtered.”

Thunder can rattle him, and sharp, loud noises such as a truck backfiring.

For a while, he couldn’t absorb the latest grim news at work about co-workers found dead in the debris or identified from body parts.

“At first I was just numb,” he said. “It took three or four weeks before I could really think about a couple of good friends.”

White wanted to attend a company memorial service in New York on Sept. 11 but declined. Instead, he will speak at an evening ceremony in Simi Valley’s City Hall.

“I wanted to be with my family, but to me and my wife, it was inconceivable for them to board a plane and come to New York. At home, I’ll feel really safe.”