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Resolve That Will Not WaverDennis Duggan
October 2, 2001
For Kathleen Ashton, whose 21-year-old son, Tommy, died in the World Trade Center massacre, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani's United Nations talk yesterday morning hit all the right notes.
Ashton and her family face a difficult, heartbreaking week - a two-day wake Thursday and Friday in Flushing for her son, whose body has not been recovered, and a funeral mass at St. Sebastian's Church in Woodside Saturday morning - but she has never wavered.
Yesterday, she sounded exactly like the resolute woman I met last summer in a restaurant near The Mount Sinai Hospital in Manhattan, where she worked as an insurance liability claims investigator.
She had worked hard in a losing cause for Sen. John McCain during the Republican presidential primary as an inexperienced but enthusiastic delegate for a "man of honor," as she describes him. The Vietnam War hero was also her son's hero. I wondered if the losing experience had soured her on politics.
Of course it hadn't. She had watched the Arizona senator lay down his sword at the Republican convention in July last year, urging Republicans to vote for George W. Bush and saying that "it is an inescapable and bittersweet irony of life that the older we are the more distant the horizon becomes. I will not see what's over America's horizon.
" She and Tommy, then in his third year at St. Francis College, and her daughters Colleen and Mary, both college students, had walked the streets of the 7th Congressional District, which includes neighborhoods like Maspeth, Sunnyside and Jackson Heights, hoping for an improbable victory in the Republican primary, and now it was over.
It would have been a time for moping, but Ashton picked herself off the floor and went on with her life, the way champions always do.
Yesterday, she was still picking herself off the floor and going on with her life. On Sunday, she and her husband and her daughters visited the horrific World Trade Center site.
"Words can't describe what I saw," she said from her Woodside home.
"I stood there for 10 minutes in total shock," she said, describing the terrorists who had killed her son as "cowards and barbarians who ought to be annihilated."
I wrote about the Ashtons last week after first talking to Msgr. Joseph Finnerty of St. Sebastian's. He had counseled the family on the probability that their son's body might never be recovered. They then decided to apply for a death certificate.
Finnerty was preparing for several funerals and memorials from his parish. Woodside is used to tragedy. A monument to the 28 Woodsiders lost in the fighting in Vietnam records the bitter fact that more men from the neighborhood lost their lives in that conflict than from any other ZIP code in the nation.
During my visit to the family, I spent some time in Tommy's bedroom, which, besides his books and two guitars, included a McCain poster. On a bookcase was a picture autographed by McCain.
Last week's story attracted the attention of McCain's people. On Friday the senator called and talked to Ashton, telling her how sorry he was to hear of Tommy's death.
"He was very emotional," said Ashton. "He told me that he was honored and proud that my son Tommy held him in such high esteem."
One of the Taliban leaders a few days ago said that Americans were "cowards." He hasn't met the Ashtons, nor has he met the people whose names were called out during a mass in Holy Trinity church on West 82nd Street in Manhattan Sunday afternoon sponsored by the Consulate General of Ireland.
"Would each one here tell us the names of the people they know who have been lost so that we can all pray for them," Msgr. Thomas Leonard asked.
It was one of the saddest moments yet in a city still cloaked in sadness, still grieving for those who lost their lives and for those who died trying to save them.
One by one the names were called out and they were like hammer blows to the heart. A woman behind me in a clear, strong voice said, "Terence McSweeney, firefighter."
"Police Officer Joseph John Vigiano," said First Deputy Police Commissioner Joseph Dunne, who was Vigiano's commanding officer at the 75th Precinct in Brooklyn years ago. Vigiano's firefighter brother John also went missing.
This tolling of the names went on for several anguishing minutes. Afterward, Rep. Joseph Crowley (D-Elmhurst) sang the national anthem.
Cowards?
We shall see.
Copyright © 2001, Newsday, Inc.