After Losing Her Firefighter Husband on 9/11, Marian Fontana Reflects on Raising Their Son
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My son, Aidan, was born a month early. At 25 years old, he is still compulsively on time, probably making up for my notoriously tardy parents who have often left me in lobbies and movie theaters cursing them. I used to joke that I got married in my parents’ backyard so they wouldn’t be late for my wedding, but in fact, we got married in my parents’ backyard because we couldn’t afford other venues.
Dave and I were married on September 11, 1993. It was a crystal blue sky day, slightly chilly in the shade, which kept most of the guests on the dance floor two-stepping to the Cajun band. Dave chose the date because he liked telling his firefighter friends that he got married on 911. We'd met in the arts dorm at college where he was a sculpture major; Dave became a firefighter so he would have time to sculpt. But his love of firefighting surpassed his love of art—and his love for his new son Aidan eclipsed it all.
I had imagined the moment Aidan was born. I had seen it in the movies a hundred times, and aside from Rosemary’s Baby, there was never a birth scene where I didn’t cry. The mother always stared down smiling at her new baby with pure, unfiltered joy. After 16 hours of back labor without an epidural and a final push that broke my tailbone, smiling was the last thing I wanted to do. When Aidan was handed to me, yellow and wrinkled as an overripe mango, the tears of joy came from Dave who was smitten from the moment he laid eyes on our tiny yellow boy.
It turned out Aidan’s color was due to jaundice and he had to stay in the NICU where they placed his tiny body in a clear box under a heat lamp. He wore a black mask and a diaper the size of a credit card and Dave joked that he was the world’s tiniest sunbather. Every day for a week we drove back and forth from Brooklyn to Beth Israel Hospital, my breasts bursting with milk I didn’t know how to drain. An overworked lactation specialist tried to help, jamming my nipple into Aidan’s mouth as if it was the last hot dog in a contest.
On an unseasonably warm day in February, we finally took Aidan home, where Dave and I stared at each other wondering why our baby didn’t come with instructions. Dave went back to work, often taking 24 hour shifts. Back at home, Aidan had colic and wailed every hour to eat. It was in those silent moments, feeding Aidan, his tiny hands opening and closing on my finger like a sea creature, that I felt that feeling everyone talked about. It was both primal and pure, the stuff of poetry and Gerber Commercials and countless clichés. I was in love.
But unlike the Gerber commercials, it was also hard. There were sleepless nights, postpartum depression, and fights with Dave over who was more tired. We were broke, exhausted, overwhelmed, but we always landed on the soft cushion of our new family. We created rituals with Aidan; we gave him a bath, read him a book, sang "Hush A Bye" from our Music Together class. Finally, we kissed his warm head and said “We love you more than the stars” slowly closing the door behind us.
Then everything changed. On September 11th, 2001, our eighth wedding anniversary, Dave was getting off a 24-hour shift. Aidan was five. It was his second day of kindergarten and the sky was the same color as our wedding day.
Everyone knows the story, how the world changed. Our tiny family shattered like glass. Dave was gone. Neighbors and family poured in and out like grieving ants, the postman delivered packages from around the world filled with homemade quilts, letters, flags, and Build-A-Bears singing God Bless America.
I wanted to cover 5-year-old Aidan in bubble wrap in order to protect him, not only from the world’s grief, but from my own. I kept our rituals in place: I gave him a bath, I read him a book, I sang "Hush A Bye," my voice cracked with tears. “I love you more than the stars,” I said quickly shutting the door so he wouldn’t see my sorrow.
I formed my own nighttime rituals: I drank wine, I smoked cigarettes, I listened to Joni Mitchell, “I wish I had a river I could skate away on.” I attended endless funerals, memorials and events, always rushing home for my son's bedtime, but I often missed it. He began waking up at night again, crying from a bad dream he couldn’t remember. I let him climb into my bed then and kissed his wet face saying “I love you more than stars,” until one night he said:
“Do you love me more than daddy?”
“No. I love you differently.”
“Because he’s not here?”
“Because he’s your daddy, and you’re my boy,” I said. When he seemed satisfied, I rolled onto my side so he couldn’t see me cry, and drifted off into the dreamless, restless sleep I had then.
After a year, I reluctantly left Brooklyn for Staten Island to be closer to my parents and make a fresh start. Aidan seemed happy to have a yard to play in and attend a school where no one knew who he was. I bathed him in our new tub and read him a story in a bigger bed; I sang "Hush A Bye" and whispered, “I love you more than the stars,” from the doorway of his room. I sat on my porch, the crickets replacing the traffic. I drank wine and smoked cigarettes and listened to Joni Mitchell. “I am on a lonely road and I am traveling, traveling, traveling.”
Years passed as fast as breaths. I made new friends. I traveled. I wrote a book. I dated a lot. I went to trauma therapy. I composed lists. My world still spun fast, but I kept the bedtime ritual Dave and I had started. (Aidan bathed on his own now, though.) He lined up his plastic army men on the edge of the tub where he held epic, bloody battle scenes.
"We sang the Beatles together, or the theme songs to cartoons he watched, but 'I love you more than the stars,' always stayed the same."
Since his books no longer had pictures, I sat in a chair next to his bed reading the Narnia Chronicles, Wind in the Willows and Harry Potter. We sang the Beatles together, or the theme songs to cartoons he watched, but “I love you more than the stars,” always stayed the same.
Even when I quit smoking, my buried sorrow remained, a cold lump in the back of my throat that I tried to breathe away in yoga, meditation, and in relationships with men. Aidan struggled too. I spoke to teachers in letters: ADHD, PTSD, IEPs, but every night we kept our sacred routine—two survivors alone on a raft of grief that only we understood.
When Aidan was 14, I was diagnosed with breast cancer, and my therapist predicted a wild rebellion would ensue. His acting out began small at first; wet towels on the floor and a trail of socks like Hansel and Gretel breadcrumbs. More often than not, the socks turned out to be mine, stretched and useless from the occupation of Aidan’s now size fifteen feet. Lights were left on in every room, empty cartons of orange juice were put back in the refrigerator, and I had to hide my headphones so he wouldn’t steal them. He took long hot showers instead of baths and didn’t need me to read or sing. “I love you more than the stars,” I called from downstairs.
“You too,” he mumbled back.
Aidan started staying up late listening to music, his walls now covered in Nirvana and Jimi Hendrix posters. His hair began to curl and a slight mustache lined his upper lip. After radiation treatments, I dragged him to auditions for LaGuardia and Talent Unlimited, where he played Nirvana's “Heart-Shaped Box” on my old Martin guitar: I wish I could eat your cancer when you turn black.
Halfway through his freshman year of high school, Aidan cut his hair, took down his posters, and started listening to rap. An unfamiliar tension lodged itself between us. He wore headphones in the car and spent hours making beats and murdering people in video games.
By sophomore year, Aidan was listening to what he called underground hip-hop. He greeted me with a “What up,” his pants slung so low, he walked the way he did as a toddler with a full diaper. He reeked of pot, his giant eyes now permanently set to half-mast. The lump in my throat became worry that never left, worry that kept me up at night. When I dreamt, I was the only one left, sad and alone.
I sent Aidan to therapists, tutors, and yoga classes, but he was a stormy sea, his moods as mutable as the weather. We fought often, his door slamming behind him after he stomped up the stairs. He ran away to friends’ houses and continued to flounder in school. At the therapist’s suggestion, I started each sentence with, "I love you, but…"
Aidan’s struggles became my secret sorrow as my friends talked about college tours and acceptance letters, while Aidan wanted a gap year. I offered up possible adventures from living with pandas in China to working on an elephant farm in Thailand, but he preferred to be a busboy at a coffee shop in Union Square.
Aidan came home long after I was asleep. His room always reeked of weed and sweat. I tried saying “I love you, but…” which launched what I called Aidan’s “marijuanalogues,” citing articles about the myriad benefits of cannabis. I felt like I was living with a half- lawyer/half auctioneer, my son always bargaining and pontificating. I became too tired to fight.
I was busy driving my sister to NYU's Cancer Center. She had recently been diagnosed with breast cancer worse than mine. On other nights, I simply fell into bed and never slept, making a mental gratitude list for the things that I appreciated: A is for Aidan, B is for beauty, C is for creativity.
When Aidan finally went off to college, I was relieved. After 15 years of single parenting, I could finally attend to my to-do list, one that was much longer than the novel I was writing.
Aidan seemed happy at school, texting me, “I love you” with heart emojis. The days drifted like leaves on a lake, and in less than three months, he was home, moved back for good. I found out later that he had fallen down a flight of stairs and had a Traumatic Brain Injury, though he'd never told me.
Aidan mostly sat in his room with no lights on, his head throbbing, averting the light like a mole. He usually slept until late afternoon, his eyes red and swollen. There were no more emojis, and he'd grown quiet. He'd never been quiet. He ignored my texts and didn’t respond when I whispered “I love you,” into the seam of his closed door.
My sister’s cancer worsened, determined to find other places to go: her bones, her liver, her lungs. Sometimes I wondered if I had been Hitler in a past life. Aidan acted out as I took him to concussion experts. Thankfully—finally—he zeroed in on audio engineering school, waking each morning without complaint and always arriving on time.
At his graduation, a man in his early 60s with a wide toothy smile recounted how Aidan had stayed late, teaching him a music program he was struggling to understand. “You raised a beautiful human being,” he said, smiling in a way that immediately made me cry.
That winter, as Aidan turned 22, my sister was dying; I was sure life had finally, permanently knocked me down. My therapist suggested “radical self-care” and a timeline for Aidan to move out. He and I agreed to less than three months, and in two he'd packed his things and moved in with my parents. While I had mixed feelings about his decision, it would turn out to be kismet in the months ahead. He texted and called often “just to say hi,” regaling me with funny anecdotes about his new housemates. The heart emojis returned.
A few months later, I arrived at my sister’s house on what would be her last night. She was weak and reminded me of a baby bird. She was trying to sit up, crying into what was left of her hair; I told her I loved her. Aidan came over and when she vomited a bucketful of blood, he quietly cleaned it up, telling her he loved her, too, and that it was okay to go. He had read The Tibetan Book of the Dead and, at 24, was now philosophical about death.
My sister died the following morning on December 14, 2019, my father’s 83rd birthday. Her husband was cradling her head, and her youngest daughter was stretched out next to her. I was holding her hand watching her labored breathing until I felt the pulse in her hand suddenly stop. When I texted Aidan that she was gone, he sent eight heart emojis. Half of them were broken.
It seemed almost fitting that the pandemic began sending everyone into their apartments and homes. Watching the news and the impossibly high numbers of sick and dying felt eerily familiar. I was now grateful Aidan was living with my parents. He made sure they wore masks and kept them safe.
I moved upstate, receding into the mountains where the days and nights were sewn together in a surreal quilt of fear and quiet. Aidan called often, regaling me with more stories about my parents. He made me laugh when I didn’t feel like it.
When my son turned 25, I helped him move out of my parents' house and into an apartment. He had survived Covid, isolating in what used to be the maid’s quarters in the back of his grandparents’ Queen Anne. I found him a place on the top floor of a friend’s old Victorian near the Staten Island ferry. It had three cozy rooms painted in bright colors with peaked roofs and closets that reminded me of the Harry Potter books we'd read together years ago. He decorated bookshelves with shrines to Dave, my sister, and his close friend, Jimmy, who had also died of cancer.
We hiked when he visited upstate, and I began to sleep over at his place when I came down to the city. He made me cappuccinos, showed me the African movie posters he'd framed, and played me the most recent beats he'd put together. He was funny, smart, and taller than Dave, 6'3" with stooped shoulders from carrying heavy backpacks to high school. He was strikingly handsome with his father’s straight nose and square chin. His thick eyebrows were like mine.
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“What do you want to do for the 20th anniversary?” I asked him on a recent visit. It was hard to believe it had been 20 years. It felt both like another lifetime and as though it had just happened. I still thought about Dave every day.
“I just want to be alone with you at a beach,” Aidan answered. We talked about Dave and his years as a lifeguard at Jones Beach, how Aidan had inherited his Dad's love of the sand, ocean and nature.
“He’d be proud of you,” I told Aidan, the familiar lump in my throat returning.
“I sort of remember you guys tucking me in,” Aidan recalled. His memories had begun to fade, like photographs kept in boxes too long.
“Yup,” I said smiling, remembering. “That’s when he told you he loved you more than the stars.”
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