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THIS STORY HAS BEEN FORMATTED FOR EASY PRINTING
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EILEEN MCNAMARA Remember instead their lives
By Eileen McNamara, 9/16/2001
We know that James and Mary Trentini of Everett retired a few years ago from long careers in education, he as a teacher, she as a secretary; that Anna Williams Allison of Stoneham attended the Boston Symphony when she was not running her software consulting firm; that Robert Hayes of Amesbury was trained as an engineer but chose, instead, to work in sales and marketing.
We know so much, and yet so little, about those who died Tuesday morning aboard the two commercial jetliners that suicidal hijackers turned into cruise missiles and aimed with fatal precision into the twin towers of the World Trade Center. To the airline crew lists and passenger manifests that surrendered the names of the dead, we attach wedding anniversaries, children's ages, and college graduation dates as though such random facts could resurrect those who perished in the worst attack ever perpetrated on American soil.
The terror of their communal deaths had so little to do with the texture of their individual lives. It is not the facts about them that we know, but the essence that we can never fully capture that underscores the particular loss of the men and women who boarded American Airlines Flight 11 and United Airlines Flight 175 in Boston.
Is it more important, for instance, to know that Herb W. Homer of Milford was a Department of Defense official who had worked with Raytheon for 27 years or that he volunteered on Sundays in his church nursery school?
Is it possible to name all the friends who were family to Myra Aronson of Charlestown, a manager for Compuware Corp. in Cambridge, who at age 50 was in better shape than many of the young men who worked out alongside her at the Metropolitan Health Club?
Does it say more about Frederick Rimmele III of Marblehead that he was a doctor or that the 32-year-old Amherst College graduate chose to join a small family practice in Danvers rather than pursue a more lucrative medical specialty?
Do we come closer to the person Lynn Goodchild was by knowing that the Attleboro native was an administrator for Putnam Investments or that she was once president of the karate club at Bryant College?
Does it matter whether his colleagues at Alta Communications Partners remember David Retik more for his work at the venture capital company or for his tenacity as a member of the firm's basketball team?
Do we think it is more indicative of Peter Goodrich's personality that the 33-year-old software products manager from Sudbury was a six-time All-American at Bates College in indoor track or that he had mastered the traditional Japanese art of origami?
Those we now call victims, we called neighbors one week and one lifetime ago. John Cahill was the father of two boys attending Wellesley High School with our sons. Neilie Casey was the mother of the infant cooing at us from a grocery cart in the baby food aisle. Tara Creamer was the woman we envied for her ability to juggle her roles as household manager and retail buyer.
In the very ordinariness of these abruptly ended lives we see the reflection of our own. In the profound simplicity of so many of their final goodbyes - ''I love you''; ''Take care of the kids''; ''Try to live a happy life'' - we are reminded of all that we hold dear.
It is both a horror and a privilege to be a journalist in times of tragedy. Into our hands, grieving spouses place precious wedding photographs. Into our ears, parents in mourning entrust enduring memories of their lost children. No obituary of any length can ever truly encapsulate a life. But in a disaster of this magnitude, with so many victims, the need to edit competes with the desire to pay adequate tribute to all those neighbors we will no longer see at the supermarket checkout counter, at the town soccer field, or at the religious services where so many of us will remember them this Sunday morning.
This story ran on page 1 of the Boston Globe on 9/16/2001.
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