Varia: Jeannette's Story

I was not much better, as I recall, telling her over and over what an amazing job she had done as a wife and mother, putting Peter through school and devoting nearly full time to fighting with school bureaucrats to get Morgan, who had autism, every bit of the help he needed. When she answered that she knew she had done all she could for them, it was just the truth.

After about a year, Jeannette said that she no longer felt that the earth might swallow her up at any moment. She didn't ever want to move away from the home she had shared with Peter and Morgan, but she did redecorate the place and went back to school, eventually earning a master's degree in social work.

I knew even before she told me that on 9/11 and for days after, she would be at St. Vincent's Hospital downtown, where they had brought the bodies of Morgan and Peter. She volunteered there after the Twin Towers came down, trying to get the families of those still missing to eat something. She said she recognized the frozen look that so many New Yorkers wore for a long while after that as one she'd seen in her mirror; they were all living in her country, suddenly, at least for a time.

She did grief counseling for a couple of years, and worked in a hospice where she witnessed a lot of healing and grace at life's end. Now she has a job counseling rape victims--not because she is comfortable in the dark but because it's her gift to know how to help people out of places they don't want to be.

When we met for dinner the other evening I saw that she, too, was much changed--softened and stilled in a way I would never have thought possible. This was not the old Jeannette, of course, because that woman is never coming back. Yet this summer, on the anniversary of the accident, she was even able to watch some old videos, of Morgan in a school play and Peter with some of his students--and laugh, really laugh. In fact, she said she was happier than she'd ever believed she could be again, thanks in part to her new partner, Genny.

(I should probably make clear here, only because I don't want to leave the misimpression that this is a case of late-onset posttraumatic-stress homosexuality, that Jeannette had had girlfriends before Peter, too.)