Grief is never easy. Sometimes, it's particularly difficult and unnecessarily cruel. The thousands of people who died 25 years ago on 9/11 all had loved ones. Friends. Families. Parents. Children. One of those children was David Ferrugio, now 37, whose dad, David Francis Ferrugio, worked in the World Trade Center. One morning he was there, then suddenly he was not. Ferrugio was 12 years old.
"We can make the best plans we can, but we don't know what's gonna happen next door," he tells USA TODAY.
His pain has informed his life and his work. He lives in Los Angeles and hosts the podcast DEAD Talks, where he interviews people, including celebrities, about their grief journeys. His book "You're Not Dead Yet," on lessons he's learned from grief, is out this
month. If you asked that 12-year-old kid from New Jersey where he thought he'd be 25 years later, he wouldn't have guessed this.
"At 12 years old, it's just a major checkpoint," he says, "and along that journey, I was someone who was very internalized, didn't express too much, expressed it in other ways, and learned the importance of speaking about it, which birthed the (six-year-old) podcast of wanting to share other people's stories."
He recognizes COVID-19, as many grief experts have before him, as a catalyst to more openly discussing grief in American culture. "I wonder if that shift, that paradigm acknowledgement, if you will, just caused people to be more interested in this discussion and through their own grief and through their own experiences," he says.
"I look at it like this," he adds: "death is just two sides of the same coin to life. There's life and death on both sides of the same exact coin, and I've realized just talking about death has opened up so much about life."
'A totally different dimension'
Ferrugio likens grief to a new world. "My whole life completely changed, as it does when you lose someone, you're like walking into a different dimension," he says. "Everything, everything gets shifted. Even when we know someone's gonna die, it's still a totally different dimension."
What's shocked him is how much good has come from the tragedy – even though he'd trade it all to get his dad back. "I'm amazed by how much beauty and presence and appreciation for the people in my life and wanting to stay a little longer and having this platform obviously would have never existed," he says.
You're Not Dead Yet," on lessons he's learned from grief, is out this month." id="91594372007">
What a grieving son hopes people remember about 9/11
He's planning to spend this anniversary with his family in New Jersey, and head into the city together and mourn with the company, Cantor Fitzgerald, that his dad worked for. Ferrugio is looking forward to sharing more stories about his father.
"Definitely gonna have a lot of laughs," he says. "I know that much, which is the beautiful part about it. I'm sure a couple tears will be dropping in there." His nieces and nephews "weren't even born when this happened," but he recognizes that's the beauty of storytelling. His dad lives on through these anecdotes. It keeps him alive.
While many attribute the axiom "never forget" to 9/11, Ferrugio would like to forget sometimes. He saw an advertisement recently on a billboard, of the the Twin Tower lights. It comes with the territory of a public tragedy: The constant reminder.
"Can we like maybe forget? One year would be all right for me," he says, half-kidding.
For those wondering how to mark the day themselves, he recommends people sit in the moment and take stock of their lives.
"I do hope the realization of what that day was, how quick it happened, how quick things can change, I hope it just helps people contemplate the notion of being present right now," he says. "And by looking at that day, it's such a representation of that, in my opinion. How quickly it happened, the way it happened."
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: A 12-year-old lost his father in 9/11. What he’s learned since
