Lori Guadagno dug through one of the boxes on the floor of her father’s home in Cypress Village, searching for a couple of things from her younger brother Richard’s childhood.
“Where’s his head and his hand?” she said. “There’s this little plaster handprint. And there’s a paper cutout of his head, with his own handwriting, saying what he wanted to be when he grew up.”
She kept sifting through objects from another time and other places. DVDs and CDs, awards going back to high school in New Jersey in the 1970s, a resume clearly typed on a typewriter, business cards collected before everyone put their contacts in their phones. And next to all of this, a display case containing a neatly folded flag that flew over the U.S. Capitol in 2002.
A few days
later, she would pack the boxes in the back of her car and, along with her longtime partner Ross Bratlee, make another drive from Jacksonville Beach to the Flight 93 National Memorial in Pennsylvania. The contents of the boxes will be added to a massive trove of archival materials kept by the National Park Service, telling the stories of the 40 passengers aboard United 93 on Sept. 11, 2001.
Richard Guadagno was one of them.
This 9/11 anniversary has been particularly challenging for Richard’s only sibling, partly because it’s the 25th, with all the weight that carries, partly because their father, Jerry Guadagno, died on July 21 at age 101, 12 years after they lost her mother, Bea.
So now, at age 66, Lori Guadagno has a task that, in many ways, is similar to what many of us have had to do after losing parents. Go through a house full of memories and figure out what to do with them.
But what makes it different is that she isn’t doing this with her younger brother — and that many of the items in her parents' house, and the boxes in the garage, were full of his memories, brought to Jacksonville when Jerry and Bea Guadagno moved here from New Jersey in 2004.
And now here was Lori sorting through all of this, opening up all kinds of memories and emotions.
“I come in here around noon, open a box and look at my watch and it’s like 5 o’clock, and I only went through one box,” she said. “What happened? It’s like a time warp.”
In several ways.
Richard would’ve turned 64 this month. But, as Lori notes, it’s as if time stopped on Sept. 11, a couple of weeks shy of his 39th birthday.
“We've all changed,” she said. “We’ve had all of these life experiences in those 25 years, and he did not. It just ended in this over-the-top, crazy, senseless world event that just did not make sense, that still does not make sense.”
Creating a memorial
On the first anniversary of 9/11, something that Jerry Guadagno said became the headline of a USA TODAY story.
“Closure? Forget that word. There’s no such thing.”
From the beginning, Jerry and Bea channeled some of their grief into being involved with the planning for a Flight 93 National Memorial. On the second anniversary, then-Secretary of the Interior Gale A. Norton administered the oath of office to 15 members of a new federal advisory commission.
Jerry Guadagno was among those 15, along with four other passengers' family members: Lawrence R. Catuzzi, father of passenger Lauren Catuzzi-Grandcolas; John T. Felt, uncle of passenger Edward Felt; Kenneth Nacke, brother of passenger Louis Joseph Nacke II; and Calvin Edward Wilson, family member of First Officer Leroy Homer.
They played a big role in creating the memorial that is in a Pennsylvania field today.
So while Lori says she really didn’t want to go there for this anniversary, she knew she needed to — not just for her brother, but for her mother and father.
“I have to do it for my family,” she said. “And I know the people there will be so kind and loving. But it’s the kindness that wrecks me. That’s where I get emotional. I feel like just saying, ‘Don’t say anything nice to me, because that’s when I’m going to lose it.’”
'When I grow up ...'
She didn't know what she was going to find when she opened up a box. It could be Richard’s high school yearbooks or the coroner’s report from Pennsylvania. She’d never seen the latter before. But she took a deep breath and started reading it.
She came upon some of Richard’s checkbooks. Such a mundane thing. And yet the stubs, in his handwriting, told her where he’d spent his money, ate, traveled, lived.
“What do I do with that?” she said.
She doesn’t have room for much more in her own Jacksonville Beach house. So in the end, the checkbooks didn’t make the cut. Some things you just have to let go of. But some she’ll keep — like a ghostly painting of Richard and his dog, Raven — and some will go to Shanksville. Like the hand and the head.
“Here it is!” she says.
She pulls out the small plaster handprint and a paper cutout, the silhouette of a young boy’s head.
It isn’t just one head-shaped piece of paper. It’s multiple pages, each one with the careful handwriting of a young boy.
She flips to the first page and starts reading aloud, smiling about what her brother wrote.
When I grow up, I would like to own a farm or tree nursery in North Carolina, alone in the wilderness. I grow crops or trees for a living with many animals and maybe a friend.
I would play the piano or flute till the sun sets.
Rutgers University will be my agricultural school. In my spare time, I make paintings of animals.
I would like to invite Charles Kuralt of “On the Road” on Channel 10 News because he would tell me about the millions of people he meets and how they live. …
"Oh my God, I've never read this," Lori says, then continues.
Fishing is the most fun I ever had. I love to go out in the wilderness and fish. … I also love to go on toad and frog hunts. I enjoy trying to catch the fast hoppers and make homes for them at my house.
The kindest, nicest thing I have ever done is letting the toads go. I love toads and their living habitat, so I catch up to 15 of them from Florida, California, Maine, New York, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey. When I let them go, they watch me til I'm too far away.
He goes on to write that math is the worst part of school because “we do the same thing over and over again.” And that he likes to play football with his friends. And that he’d love to visit Italy, Romania and the South American rainforest. And that the most embarrassing thing that ever happened to him is when he went golfing, saw a lake, started looking for frogs and fell in.
“Is that not hysterical?” Lori says after the last page.
Hysterical and heartbreaking, all at the same time. But what makes her smile is that this childhood vision of “when I grow up” basically describes what Richard did when he grew up.
He went to Rutgers. He became a U.S. Fish and Wildlife ranger. He lived in the woods. He fished. He worked with plants and animals. He traveled. He met people. He played the guitar. He made art. And while some will say he did even more memorable things than letting the toads go, that’s still a good story — one worthy of ending up, along with a plaster handprint, as part of the material archived at the Flight 93 National Memorial.
On the 25th anniversary, bells will begin tolling there at 10:03 a.m.
But ever since the plants and animals returned to what had been an abandoned strip mine before 9/11, there are all kinds of other sounds in that field. And when the sun sets, and the September air turns cool and calm, sometimes you can hear something that, if you’ve listened to Richard’s big sister read from his paper head, will forever sound like another tribute.
Frogs croaking.
Florida Times-Union columnist Mark Woods: mwoods@jacksonville.com and (904) 359-4212.
This article originally appeared on Florida Times-Union: 25 years after 9/11, fresh grieving and healing for Flight 93 sister
