Le quotidien qui Mark

 Ten-year-old Michele Marie Abbot never met her grandfather, Michael San Philip, but he died knowing she'd be named after him. Mikki, as she's known to her family, was born the same day that her grandfather's wallet was recovered from the wreckage of the World Trade Center.
Jill Abbot, Mikki's mother, says that when Mikki was a few years old she insisted that she'd met her grandfather "and I said, 'Well no sweetie, you were a couple of months shy.' I said, 'He loved you before he knew you, but he never actually saw you.' And she said to me, 'No no, he gave me a hug.' She would say things and I'd kind of stop and say, 'Hmm… wow…'"
Three months before Mikki was born, Jill was at her desk at Delaware's Winterthur Museum, where she still works as an events planner, when a colleague appeared in her doorway to say a plane had hit the World Trade Center. "I thought to myself, that can't be possible, I don't know what she's talking about." As soon as she realised it was true, her colleagues drove her home, knowing that she had family in New York. What they didn't then know was that Jill's father worked in one of the towers and her younger sister worked in a building right next to it.
At home, Jill called her mother, "and I remember [her] saying, 'Please, please – I've located your sister, I haven't located your dad yet – but please stay put because I know where you are.' And I guess all I can say is I didn't listen to my mum when I was growing up and I didn't listen to her that day. My first instinct was to go find my dad, that it really can't be as bad as it seems and I need to find my dad. I said to my husband, 'Let's just pack something for tonight, we'll drive up and we'll find Daddy and then we'll be back here tomorrow."
The drive to her mother's house in New Jersey is around 150 miles, but they barely passed another car on the roads. "It was like Armageddon," she says. "There were no cars and they were just waving people through at the toll plazas. For me that was earth-shattering – we're not paying tolls today? Why are they doing this?"
She finally reached her sister on the phone as they were driving across the Commodore Barry Bridge that crosses the Delaware River. "I remember to this day her voice – how scared she was. I didn't understand what she was trying to say to me on the phone. And every time I go over that bridge it's always very unsettling to me. I always want to zip over it as fast as I can because I go back to that day. Strange as it sounds, that bridge is really when I heard my sister's voice and I heard the terror. She was actually the last person my dad spoke to. She called him and he said, 'No, Carol, we're fine, we were told to sit tight. It's not our building, it's the one next door.'"
When Jill reached her mother's house it was filled with family and friends: "It was surreal, like This Is Your Life – everybody came in. It didn't seem like people were optimistic and I was a little impatient – I started handing out lists for everybody to start calling the hospitals. If they were there I was gonna put them to work." Jill sat on her parents' terrace with a phone and pages of hospital numbers "and I just kept dialling and dialling and dialling". It didn't cross her mind that Michael might be dead.
"Oh, I had every expectation that we were going to find him. I knew it might take some time because he didn't have a cell phone and, knowing him, he'd have said to the younger guys – you know, he called them 'kids' – he would have said, 'You call your wife, I'm fine!' He would defer to people, that was his nature, so I figured he'd be at the back of the line for the payphone, letting everyone else go before him. So that's kind of the vision that I had, as crazy as that sounds. I was absolutely convinced that I was going to find him."
It was when she and her sister went to give DNA samples a few days later that she began to accept he might be gone. She met a guy who had escaped from the same building as her father when the plane hit the first tower. He'd taken escalators down 100 floors to get out.
"I remember getting the chills when he was saying that, thinking this is not possible, this guy must be making it up. When we left that day, we got in the car and we didn't say much. And then I think it was my mom who said: 'Did everybody get the sense that they don't hope to find them? They're talking about them in the past tense.' And we all agreed."
A little under a month later the family held a memorial service for him. "I don't remember that as a day that I thought Daddy was gone," says Jill. "As horrific as the day was, it was really such a good day for people to tell me things about my father and laugh. And I did a lot of laughing and hugging people. I don't know if I even cried once that day, but I might have been teary-eyed from laughing."
Jill and her husband had told her parents about the pregnancy on Memorial Day on a date they chose for it being halfway between Mother's Day and Father's Day. She remembers her father reacting with "excited disbelief" and then getting up to leave the dinner table. "I thought he just went to the bathroom," she says. "My sister told me later he left to cry, he was so happy. She told me that after he died."
Jill stumbles a little on those last two words as though, a decade on, she still can't quite believe them. When I ask her when she started grieving she draws a long breath. "That's… a really good question. Some of my friends would say I haven't. My situation was… different: I didn't find my dad and he perished so from then on everything was, 'OK, nothing can happen to this child, everything is going to be focused on the health and wellbeing of the next generation.' Because there is so much sadness in our family and there is such a wonderful person that's going to enter our lives, and my dad was so looking forward to being a grandfather. This really was such a good thing in such a bad time."
Jill recently came upon the online guestbook she signed after her father's memorial. She found that she'd written to him "that I was sitting there with his granddaughter Michele, and she had already started to give me a look, one of his looks. Everybody thinks I'm the female version of him, but I don't think I look anything like him until I look at Mikki's eyes. He was my role model. He was my go-to guy. Really my rock."
Mikki, she says, asks for stories about him all the time. "When she was younger she was hesitant to mention it because she would see my crying as sadness, and I'd tell her it's not sad, I love to talk about Papa Mikey. But she loves to ask me questions, and I'll say, 'Oh, you know who loved this movie or this dessert?' He's a very big part of our life."
Today, Jill will make the trip to Manhattan with Mikki. "I've always wanted to be in New York because I feel closest to him at Ground Zero. I've taken Mikki there and she understood that it was a special place for us and for Papa Mikey." Every time that I went down to Ground Zero I would just pick up a couple of rocks and put them in my purse. I don't know why I started doing that, but I would just hold them. I would rub them in my hands."
Now the rocks sit on her keyboard at work, a connection to her father and a reminder, "of what those people went through". Thinking about that, Jill says, "totally redirects me. I haven't had to pick them up recently, but when I do I just get a little extra strength."

Max Giaccone, 20

This year Max Giaccone is facing the heavy truth of having lived as long without his father as he did with him. At 20 years old, Max is now two years into a music degree at the University of New Haven, but a decade hasn't dimmed his memory of that Tuesday morning. He was just a 10-year-old boy, but "I honestly remember it like it was yesterday", he says.
His teacher took a phone call in the classroom and when he was told to go down to the school office Max thought his mother had come to take him to a doctor's appointment. Then he saw her crying. She grabbed him and told him that the building which Max's father worked in had been hit by a plane. By the time he and his mother reached home the second tower had fallen.
Joseph Giaccone was the director of global infrastructure at Cantor Fitzgerald and worked on the 103rd floor of the first tower, five floors above the impact zone of the hijacked plane. The night before he went to work for the last time he and his family had gone out for dinner "and we'd had a really, really great night", recalls Max. He remembers his dad "chasing me around the house… We were just having a lot of fun. He went to pick up my sister from dance and then he put me to bed. And that was the last I saw of him."
It took Max weeks to apprehend that finality though. "You never want to think your dad's not coming home," he says. "I kept saying he was walking home, that he was going to find his way home. I didn't believe it, I was the last one to fully accept it. When my mom told me that we were going to start the memorial preparations I said no, he's coming home. She said that hearing me say that was one of the hardest things ever.
"Even months after it happened we had people at the house every day, bringing us food. It just seemed… it wasn't real. It seemed like it would eventually end, but it didn't. When people started to go away, but me and my mum and my sister continued to live our lives, that's when the reality set in, that's when it got hard. I tried to stay as positive as I could because, you know, you don't want to let those bastards win twice. They took my dad away from me, I don't want to let them take my life away from me."
Asked what sort of a guy his father was, Max takes a huge breath, as though words aren't up to the task. "He… you know, he was amazing. I can't think of a better word to describe him. He worked a full day and he still found a way to come home and see my baseball games or my sister's dance recitals. He was caring and genuine and I…" he falters. "I… can't say enough about him."
Their great shared love was baseball and Max continued to play until his father's absence on the sidelines meant the game became "too emotionally draining for me". As unfailingly supportive as his mother was, it just wasn't the same: "My friends would have their fathers to go talk to and I had no one."
Max credits his mother, though, with "helping me get through all of this. She was my backbone. She could have crawled up in a ball and thrown the sheets over her head every morning when she woke up, but she got up for me and my sister. She is absolutely amazing." He overhears her talking to his dad sometimes. "I don't know if she knows that, but she does it a lot."
How did he feel to hear that Osama bin Laden had been killed? "I always find it weird to say I'm celebrating someone's death. I still don't fully know what closure is and I don't think I'm supposed to, but it definitely felt like a weight had been lifted."
The hardest days remain the milestones: "High-school graduation, birthdays, Christmas. It's always very clear who isn't at the dinner table that night." This month marks one of the hardest milestones yet and he says "September has come early this year" for him and his family.
"It's 10 years with him, 10 years without him. It's tough to swallow. I don't even know how to explain it, but I try not to dwell on it because then you're letting them win."
And he repeats a phrase he uses often: "I could have had an asshole for a dad my whole life and instead I had an awesome guy for 10 years."