Beverly Eckert (BE)

BE: Sean had warm brown eyes and dark curly hair and, uh, he was a good hugger. We met when we were only 16, at a high school dance…when he died we were 50. It was about 9:30 a.m. when he called and he told me he was on the 105th floor and he’d been trying to find a way out. He told me that he, you know, hadn’t had any success and now the stairwell was full of smoke. I asked if it hurt for him to breathe and he paused for a moment, and said, No. He loved me enough to lie.

We stopped talking about escape routes and then we just began talking about all of the happiness we shared during our lives together. I told him that I wanted to be there with him, die with him, but he said, no, no he wanted me to live a full life. As the smoke got thicker he just kept whispering I love you, over and over. I just wanted to crawl through the phone lines to him, to hold him, one last time. Then I heard a sharp crack, followed by the sound of an avalanche. It was the building beginning to collapse. I called his name into the phone over and over, then I just sat there, pressing the phone to my heart.

I think about that last half hour with Sean all the time. I remember how I didn’t want that day to end, terrible as it was, I didn’t want to go to sleep because as long as I was awake, it was still a day that I’d shared with Sean. You know, he kissed me goodbye just before going to work–I could still say that was just a little while ago, that was only this morning. And, uh, looking back on all that has happened since he died and the causes I fought for and the things I’ve done, I just think of myself as living life for both of us now. And I like to think that Sean would be proud of me.