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Sunday, September 4, 2011
9/11 WIDOW Try a Normal Life
It was a Monday morning 10 years later, and they had regained control.
The home-brewed coffee was flavored with a touch of cinnamon; the tomatoes in the garden were turning red on the vine. Shari Tolbert, 42, finished a training run for her upcoming marathon, straightened her blond hair and polished her acrylic nails. She fried bacon and eggs for breakfast, and the smell drew the kids from their rooms. The daughter sang Beyonce. The son wore two shades of yellow. “Go change, because you look like a confused bumblebee,” Shari told him, and they both laughed.
It was a Monday morning 10 years later, and they were still falling apart.
Shari stirred in bed and reached instinctively for her husband, a daily act that could sometimes send her spiraling into depression. “It feels like he still resides with us,” she said, and there he was in the family photos displayed in the hallway, the old football jerseys hanging on the wall and the autopsy report kept on a shelf in the living room. Place of Death: Pentagon. Estimated Time of Death: Sept. 11, 1000 hours. Manner of Death: Homicide.
Shari sat with the kids at the breakfast table and served the bacon she learned to cook for him on the plate she received for their wedding in the house paid for by his death in the city where they moved to be closer to his parents
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Ten years later, this is the dual reality the Tolberts refer to as their “new normal.” They are okay and they are a mess. They have moved on and they never will. Every day is ordinary; every day is that day.
They no longer expect to get better, or know if they want to, or understand what better even means. They are who they are: victims of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, survivors of Lt. Cmdr. Otis Vincent Tolbert, a wife missing her husband and children missing their father. That one event has defined everything since.
On this day, after they finished breakfast, the mother would go to work as a counselor and help other people grieve. The daughter, 19, would study vocabulary words in Arabic and plan for a career in national security.
The son, 11, would go to his first day of flight camp, where he hoped to learn how to fly a plane.
“I’m proud of you guys and I love you,” Shari said, because her husband had taught her to say it often and with conviction. She cleared the breakfast plates and grabbed her keys. “Have a good day,” she said. Then she walked out the door and into another day shaped by his death.
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