The Children of 9/11: Living Through a Public Tragedy

AM New York 11/16/08

Grabbing a burger from the grill in her backyard, Caitlin Langone, 17, flops onto a chair. Her brother Brian, 15, carefully trims a piece of fat from a chicken kebab.

"That's exactly how your father did it," JoAnn Langone tells her son. "Cutting up food into little pieces. Just like a Langone."

Tommy Langone has been gone for five years, but at moments like this, he seems to be back. Or when Brian moves his hands while speaking. Or when Caitlin talks in great bursts, barely pausing for a breath.

"Slow down, Caitlin," her mom says. Or the way both kids perk up whenever they hear a siren. "Ambulance," they announce in unison. Sometimes it's so far away that their mom can't hear anything, and they have to tell her how it sounds.

At the Langone house, time is divided -- before Sept. 11 and after. Before the collapse of the Twin Towers that killed their father, a police officer, and their uncle, Peter Langone, a firefighter, Caitlin and Brian use to love dinnertime. Tommy, who specialized in rescue work, would come home to Williston Park and delight them with tales of saving people from car crashes and elevator accidents.

He would chatter away in rapid volleys even as he listened to a scanner, monitoring emergency calls. In his spare time, he was chief of the volunteer Roslyn Rescue Fire Co. Peter also volunteered in Roslyn.

After Sept. 11, the house became eerily still. No one listened to the scanner. Dispatchers stopped calling at odd hours. Dinners ended quickly.

Caitlin and Brian Langone are two of the 2,172 minor children who lost a parent in the World Trade Center. Like the others, they have had to grow up with a tragedy that every stranger knows about and that keeps replaying on TV and in movies.

Until now, the family has refused to discuss their lives publicly because, as Caitlin says, "Dad and Uncle Peter weren't showboats." Caitlin and Brian also skip Sept. 11 commemorations. Peter Langone's widow still doesn't talk to the media.

Caitlin decided to go public because she kept seeing the same people quoted in coverage about plans for a Sept. 11 memorial. She felt nobody can represent the views of 2,973 families, which includes those of victims at the Pentagon. Also, she worried that arguments about architecture were overshadowing what's truly important: reminding the world about Sept. 11.

He knew the risks

Despite their loss, Tommy Langone's family often points out that he knew the risks of his job. And unlike some who died in the World Trade Center, he had life insurance and a good pension. Besides, in the months that followed the attacks, his police colleagues and his buddies from the Roslyn fire station brought food to the family, drove them on errands and tried to keep Tommy's memory alive by sharing stories. "We're very lucky," JoAnn Langone said.

Of all the things she misses about her dad, Caitlin misses dinner the most.

"With my dad, it was, 'How was the work day?' " Caitlin recalled. " 'Oh, fine. We had some guy who wanted to jump off a bridge, but we stopped him. Then we saved a turtle that got stuck in an inlet. Then we helped a man trapped under a subway car and took a pig out of an apartment, And -' "

"Slow down, Caitlin," her mother said.

For Caitlin, the best dinners were the ones interrupted by the Roslyn dispatcher. When Tommy got summoned, he'd strap the kids in his Chevy Tahoe, switch on his flashing lights and roar to the station.

As Caitlin, Brian and their mom finished dinner in the backyard the other evening, a whine came from just beyond the table. It was their yellow lab, T.J., named for Tommy and JoAnn. The dog favored Tommy, and it's as if he's still waiting for his master to come home. His prized plaything is an orange cone meant to keep drivers away from construction sites.

"Your father taught him to fetch the cone," JoAnn told Brian, who had stayed at the table. "Your father knew how to throw it right."

Brian hears that several times a week: Your father used to . . . your father would have . . . The last time he saw his dad was his 10th birthday. Sept. 10, 2001.

Brian carried in the dishes, passing a frame holding his dad's blue NYPD uniform. Caitlin was gone. The house was quiet.

The towers are hit

Seventh grade was less than a week underway when a teacher told Caitlin's class that a plane had hit the World Trade Center.

Caitlin was 12. "I hadn't even heard of terrorism," she recalled. "My first thought was how does a plane hit something that's 110 stories tall?" Even after she learned that another plane had crashed into the towers, Caitlin worried about classmates whose fathers worked in the building. She didn't think of her dad, who worked in the Emergency Services Unit in Squad 10 in Queens.

From her dad's buddies, she knows Tommy was coming from another call when he turned around and headed to Manhattan. A few days later, one of Tommy's partners came to tell the family that he was dead. Tommy was 39; Peter, 41.

At first, Caitlin needed her mom around. But now that she's 17, she wants independence. She dyed the ends of her hair purple and took to wearing tight outfits with studded belts. But she also wears a necklace with replica of her dad's NYPD shield, etched with his number, 14356. She can't stand punk songs that criticize cops.

Caitlin doesn't bring up the tragedy in school, except when she hears kids using slurs to describe cops. Then she looks them in the eyes and says, "I don't approve of that. My father died in the line of duty."

The Langones honor Tommy by displaying memorabilia. Beside a TV sits a box containing the top of a service revolver and a pair of corroded handcuffs, recovered from the South Tower, that look like an 18th-century artifact. The serial numbers were traced to Tommy. That's all they recovered.

Therapy begins

Last year, JoAnn persuaded her daughter to join group therapy sessions organized by the North Shore Child and Family Guidance Center. Caitlin found support -- mostly for "the normal teen angst stuff." She doesn't like being lumped with others who lost parents on 9/11. The father of another girl in her grade died in the North Tower. Classmates seemed to expect the two to share a bond. But they weren't friends before Sept. 11 and they didn't become friends after. "You're not a 9/11 victim -- you're this person who happens to be a 9/11 victim," Caitlin likes to say. "It's just one thread that makes up your identity."

Her two cousins, who live a few miles away, just up Willis Avenue, recently renamed Langone Brothers Avenue. She used to spend more time with Peter's daughters when they were younger. Now that they're older, they have their own friends.

Caitlin hates math, but last year she found a math teacher she liked, Fran Jankowski. ("Mrs. Jankowski wore a shield on her necklace," she explains, "so I knew her husband was a detective.") Caitlin, preparing for the SAT, asked if her teacher would tutor her. And so on Saturday mornings, they hashed over everything from algebra to poetry. Almost everything, that is.

Jankowski remembers the day that a colleague told her Caitlin's dad had died on 9/11.

"I was like, Caitlin's father? I've been working with her for a year,' " Jankowski recalls. "Caitlin doesn't use that as her trump card. There are some kids who might go around looking for sympathy."

Brian, who turned 15 yesterday, likes to play paintball, go biking and hang out with his best friend across the street. And school. He likes school.

Tommy Langone never claimed to be a stellar student in the Roslyn schools, but he taught his children to be curious. Tommy didn't like trash TV, so they tended to watch the Discovery Channel or TLC. Brian doesn't turn on the TV that much anyway -- he has a full load of honors classes. "He wanted you to use your mind rather than work with your back," Brian said. He's thinking about studying engineering in college. Brian turned down his mom's invitations to go to therapy. "I'm not much of a ... "

"A talker?" Caitlin playfully interrupted.

"An open-up-and-share-things kind of guy," he corrected.

Brian remembers being about 7 when his dad declared, "We have to get you to see a car fire." And so they did.

These days, odd things remind him of Tommy. The road to Home Depot, for example. Every time they went there, it seems, the trip was interrupted by a fire. "It was like a curse. We'd see a plume of black smoke. Dad would drive on the shoulder of the road, his lights going, his sirens on ... "

"I'd be hanging on for dear life," his mother said.

"Well," Brian reminded her, "he was a good driver."

The Langones found a living reminder of their dad in Steve Stefanakos, a 38-year-old detective who worked with Tommy. Once or twice a year, "Stef" takes Caitlin or Brian to the 109th Precinct stationhouse in Queens, where they hang out with guys from Tommy's unit, Emergency Service Truck 10.

At the station, she laughed at the way the others called Stef "Knucklehead." The guys told her about the pranks they played on Tommy. Like the time they sneaked into his Tahoe and flicked a few switches so when he turned on the ignition to go home the sirens started screaming and the lights blazed.

The thrills of the 109th Precinct have made Caitlin think about becoming an emergency room nurse. After a visit, she wrote a poem, "Ode to Truck 10." One part:

The people whose lives you touch with your heroic ways

Learn what I have known always

You are the most remarkable people on earth.

And I swell with pride from simply knowing you.

Stef, with two young children of his own, has told Caitlin and Brian that he's available anytime night or day if they need to talk. Sometimes Caitlin is tempted. Six months after 9/11, she called when their father's buddy, Allen Frye, captain of the Roslyn volunteers, was struck by a car and killed. The next year, her aunt Joanne -- her father's little sister -- had a brain tumor (she is recovering from treatment).

When friends ask how Caitlin and Brian have kept their senses of humor, Brian responds, "You can't stop moving."

"We both threw ourselves into living again," says Caitlin, who's kept herself busy with writing while starting to think about where she'll go to college next year.

Caitlin speaks in complete paragraphs, one after another. It's not surprising. Tommy talked so fast that his colleagues called him "Captain Adrenalin."

Captain Adrenalin. He was, Caitlin says, the best father anyone could ask for. He lived life at 100 miles per hour, and died doing what he loved. Those 12 packed years with her dad felt like a lifetime. "If I could trade in my life for anybody else's," Caitlin says, "I wouldn't do it."