On a bright morning in August, Haleema Salie was sorting through boxes of old family photos and papers at her apartment in Framingham when the sight of a 25-year-old ultrasound — and the unmistakable outline of an infant boy — brought her to a sudden stop.
The black-and-white scan showed her unborn grandson at nearly 7 months, his round cheeks and delicate features remarkably clear. For several minutes, Salie sat in silence, eyes welling, imagining the life stolen from him — his first steps, his birthdays, and the young man he would have grown to be.
Salie was swept back to the morning of Sept. 11, 2001. A teacher at a Montessori school in Wellesley, she was escorting children from their parents’ cars into the building, when she overheard colleagues mentioning hijacked planes and a terrorist attack in New York. Then her husband, Ysuff, walked through the school doors.
When their eyes met, neither of them uttered a word — she could see everything on his face. Their 28-year-old pregnant daughter, Rahma, and her husband, Michael “Micky” Theodoridis, 32, were aboard American Airlines Flight 11 when hijackers flew it into the North Tower of the World Trade Center.
“The grief never goes away,” said Salie, who is now 74. “I didn’t just lose my daughter. I lost a whole family.”
At least 206 people with Massachusetts ties were killed in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. In the 25 years since, survivors, victims’ families, and first responders have had to move forward, haltingly, honoring those lost, but also raising families, rebuilding lives, enduring. From a crucible of grief has emerged unexpected light: new connections, healing, and even lasting love.
For Salie and her husband, work became a refuge in the days and years that followed Sept. 11.
She continued teaching while Ysuff threw himself into running a cafe on Boston’s Newbury Street. Working all day, seven days a week, he filled the space with smells and tastes of their native Sri Lanka.
In quiet moments, or those when she was weighing a decision, Salie found herself asking: What would Rahma do?
Bright, outgoing and full of energy, Rahma had become her parents’ anchor, offering everyday wisdom and inspiration. She moved through the world with an easy confidence forged across continents, spending her elementary and high school years in Tokyo before focusing on international relations and Japanese studies at Wellesley College.
Rahma’s drive was visible at an early age. In first grade, when a teacher in Tokyo gave her an A-minus instead of an A-plus, Rahma protested so stubbornly that the teacher called Salie into her office to complain.
“You can imagine that teacher was not happy, but that was Rahma,” Salie recalled with a laugh.
As traditional Muslims, Haleema and Ysuff were determined to raise their daughter with the same values that had shaped their own upbringings in Sri Lanka. Growing up, Haleema was forbidden from socializing with classmates outside of school, and her marriage to Ysuff was arranged.
So it came as a surprise when Rahma, working at a Cambridge technology company, broke with family tradition to announce she was in love with Micky, a non-Muslim man of Greek descent. “Why do you always have to take the difficult path?” her father asked her.
Yet after several family meetings, and Micky explaining he was converting to Islam, Ysuff gave his blessing. On Aug. 15, 1998, the two were married in a lavish Cambridge ceremony, joined by hundreds of friends and relatives who had traveled from several continents.
Rahma and Micky were inseparable. Once, when Rahma extended a trip to Japan by a few days, a lovesick Micky implored her father to help persuade her to come home. “It was so touching,” Salie recalled, “how they would drop everything for each other.”
While packing up her apartment for an upcoming move, Salie recently made another painful discovery: the final email her daughter sent to Ysuff the night before boarding American Airlines Flight 11. It was classic Rahma — brimming with precise details on where they would stay, and who they planned to see in California.
“Dad… Both Micky and I will have our cell phones in case of an emergency,” Rahma wrote. “Please leave a brief message if I don’t pick up.”
In the immediate aftermath of the attacks, as mistrust and suspicion of Muslims spread, the Salies were sometimes treated not as grieving parents, but as suspects.
When Ysuff rushed to Logan, desperate for information, federal agents stopped and interrogated him. Salie later learned it was because her flight history resembled those of the hijackers. Salie’s relatives who tried to fly in from overseas to support the family were barred from entering the US for weeks.
“You know, it was all chaos and the authorities had to do what they had to do,” Salie said. “But it didn’t help. We were not normal for a very long time. We were in too much shock.”
Now, a quarter-century later, Salie is struggling over what to keep and what to let go. It’s just her now. Ysuff died five years ago, his health worn down by a broken heart, Salie said. Should she hold on to the ultrasound photo of her unborn grandson? And what about her daughter’s letters and emails?
Like many relatives of the 2,977 victims, Salie longs for any physical remnant of her daughter — a strand of hair, a fragment of bone— to lay to rest in her gravesite. Advances in forensic science have enabled investigators to identify more than 1,600 victims, including Micky. Yet so far, her daughter is among the 40 percent who have not been linked to any remains.
Salie sifted through old papers. “The more I look at these things, you know, the more it brings back all the pain,” she said. Yet the keepsakes remain impossible to part with.
Alongside the ultrasound — the last trace of the grandson she never got to hold — is Rahma’s favorite shawl, turquoise-colored and light. Salie wrapped herself in it this summer, at her niece’s wedding in London. Each time someone mentioned Rahma, she found herself touching it.
“With that shawl, I could really feel Rahma’s presence,” her mother said. “There are some things you can’t let go.”
For a quarter-century, a 52-year-old home improvement salesman from East Boston has tried to correct the narrative about his experience on Sept. 11 — and the photograph that briefly thrust him into the national spotlight.
Earnest and soft-spoken, Craig McFarland avoids drawing attention to himself and a close call that morning, insisting the focus should be on the victims of the attacks and their families. He has turned down multiple interview requests over the years, leaving only his closest friends to know the full story.
It started at McFarland’s mother’s home in Derry, N.H., after a wedding. Restless to return to his life in Los Angeles — working at the legendary Troubadour rock club; performing with his band — he had called the airline to switch to an earlier flight out of Logan. He scored a seat aboard American Airlines Flight 11.
The early-morning trip down Interstate 93 on the airport shuttle was right on schedule — until the driver needed to make a detour to pick up passengers at a Woburn hotel. The elderly couple took nearly 30 minutes to emerge, while McFarland fumed and checked his watch. Then, as the shuttle finally started pulling away, the husband realized he’d left his jacket in his room. McFarland dashed inside to grab it, hoping to save time.
That unexpected detour, and that forgotten jacket, saved his life.
At Logan, McFarland sprinted through Terminal B to reach the gate for his flight, scheduled to depart at 7:45 a.m. He arrived about 10 minutes late.
Feeling defeated, McFarland walked into an airport restaurant to get breakfast. Less than an hour later, he and another diner watched in stunned silence as the television showed footage of an airplane striking the North Tower of the World Trade Center. The airplane he was supposed to be on.
“I got chills then,” McFarland recalled, “and I still get chills every time I talk about it.”
An Associated Press photographer captured an image of McFarland, then 27, slumped over a ticket counter, head buried in his hand. Exhausted, he was really trying to avoid the crush of TV news cameras. But his image beamed around the globe turned him into a symbol of national heartbreak.
Ever since, people have hounded him with the same question: “How did escaping death on 9/11 change you?”
“I’ve heard that question a million times,” McFarland said.
His answer often surprises or even unsettles them: For the most part, he says, it didn’t change him. “I mean, if it takes something as catastrophic as 9/11 to motivate me to change my life, then there must be something wrong with me,” he said.
In his mind, the lesson of his harrowing close call was not that he had been living the wrong life or needed to change, but that he should stay the course and value even more deeply the one he already had.
Warren Beaumont, vocalist for their band Ruins of Mars, had just woken up when he saw television coverage of American Airlines Flight 11. Knowing McFarland was scheduled to be on that flight, he was devastated by the crushing certainty that his friend had perished.
The tragedy would reignite the band’s drive, prompting them to rework a song they had been writing before 9/11, transforming it into a reflection on friendship and weathering life’s adversities. “It’s still intensely emotional,” said Beaumont, who lives in Wilmington. “I can’t sing those lyrics without remembering how close I came to losing my friend and remembering everyone who passed.”
Today, McFarland still lives for music, playing guitar with his bandmates at crowded venues across New England. He also earns a living crisscrossing Massachusetts selling windows, doors, and other supplies — a demanding schedule of home visits that keeps him grounded and busy.
Every now and then, McFarland experiences flashes of gratitude for his second chance at life, and for everything he would have missed had he stepped onto that plane.
He felt it when his twin nephews, now 18, were born, and on his first of many trips to South America, where he fell in love with the music and culture. He moved back to Boston in 2008 to be closer to his family.
“Anytime something big happens, that’s a great thing in my life, I look back and think, `Wow, that’s something else I wouldn’t have been able to experience,’” he said. “But I don’t linger on it. I treasured life then and I treasure life now.”
Miles Schlichte Jr. reached toward an old baseball cap hanging near a second-floor window at his home in Gloucester. He removed it from its peg and nodded at its New York Fire Department markings.
“It’s never been washed,” he said.
The discolored cap remains coated with the dust that enveloped Ground Zero and beyond, a reminder of Schlichte’s grim search for victims amid the smoldering wreckage of the Twin Towers.
Schlichte, 68, has been a lobsterman and a commercial fisherman, and climbed the ranks of the Gloucester Fire Department, retiring as deputy fire chief.
“I’d been to a lot of things where bad things were happening,” he said. “There is nothing that I’ve ever done that was 1/1,000th as overwhelming as 9/11 was.”
That morning, Schlichte and more than 80 other members of an urban-rescue team were dispatched to Manhattan. They were known as Massachusetts Task Force One — highly skilled volunteers from throughout New England — and became the first rescue team from outside New York to reach and search that fiery hellscape, Schlichte said.
Their mission: To comb the smoking rubble for survivors.
Schlichte led part of the team to a dark, underground parking garage, where the rescuers could hear enormous piles of rubble groaning above them, threatening to collapse. Everything was covered in a shroud of chalky dust.
“Some of the steel there was so hot, your boots would stick to it,” Schlichte recalled. “You knew no one was alive underneath.”
The mission shifted from rescuing victims to recovering their remains.
Schlichte worked in Manhattan for eight days, 12 and more hours a day. He remembers the horrors, of course, but also holds onto something else: The sense of common purpose that united the first responders.
At home in Gloucester, he scrolled through photos he keeps on his computer, talking about the people he worked alongside. He ticks off their names, what they did, where they were from. He points to a piece of airplane fuselage amid the mountains of debris.
Thirteen of the team’s 85 members have died since then, he said. They all served well.
“Once you get past the horrific terrorist incident, the public should remember how the city of New York and others responded, and how the country all worked together,” Schlichte said.
“Around the first week of September, I’ll call certain guys,” he added. “These were people who just wanted to be the best of the best.”
Ever since terrorists took her mother’s life aboard American Airlines Flight 11, Stephanie Holland has spent countless hours trying to untangle a complex web of grief, guilt, and unresolved feelings of abandonment by her biological father.
“I vowed 25 years ago that I would never let that day change me,” Holland said. “Now I know that’s not possible.”
Her mother, Cora Hidalgo Holland, raised three children with energetic devotion. The trunk of her lilac Ford was usually packed with gifts for people she loved — often the exact same shirt bought in three different colors and sizes. In her rare free time, she ran the Little League snack bar and showed up to soccer practice with a dozen flavors of Gatorade just to ensure no one went unhappy.
“She was the master conductor at Grand Central Station,” Holland said, laughing. “She wanted to make sure everyone was taken care of.”
She did it as a single mother. Holland’s parents parted ways before she was born, and her mother drew a hard line — no visits, no phone calls, no contact whatsoever. Her mother once recalled running into her former partner years after their separation, casually adding, “He didn’t even ask about you.” Holland says she internalized the rejection as her own failing.
That sense of abandonment deepened at age 11, when her mother and stepfather moved to adopt her. As part of the legal process, a public notice was posted to give her biological father an opportunity to object. Holland waited in desperate hope that he would see it and claim her. He didn’t. Holland was heartbroken.
“Even though I was led to believe he wasn’t interested in forming a relationship with me,” she said, “I still wanted that connection.”
By 2001, Holland’s mother was working toward a bachelor’s degree in early childhood education at Cambridge College when the attacks of Sept. 11 cut her life short. She was 52 years old, three years younger than her daughter is now.
For weeks, Holland went through the motions of raising two young children in a fog, numb with grief. She doesn’t recall crying until two weeks after Cora’s death while giving her children a bath at their home in Wayland.
“The tears just kept flowing and they wouldn’t stop,” she said. “I remember thinking, ‘Will I ever smile again?’”
It would take another 18 years for Holland to muster the courage to reopen the childhood wound involving her father — a move she still considers the greatest risk she ever took.
In early 2019, Holland learned that a cousin in California was throwing a big birthday party. It meant flying the same cross-country route her mother had intended to take on 9/11. She forced herself onto the plane anyway.
While in California, she arranged to meet her mother’s best friend for lunch. There, she found herself asking a question she had buried for decades: “Can you tell me about my father?”
What followed was a three-hour conversation that unraveled much of what she had thought to be true about her father, Dennis Garcia.
She learned that he was struggling with a chronic illness and had wanted to be a presence in her life all along. After 9/11, she later heard, he had asked relatives if it was finally time to reconnect with his daughter. They argued against it, reminding him of Cora’s lasting wish that he stay away.
“At times I felt betrayed, but mostly I just wanted to understand,” Holland said. “I mean, my Mom and I were really close, so why didn’t she tell me the truth?”
A couple months after that lunch, Holland finally met Garcia at his ranch home in San Bernardino, Calif. He was in a wheelchair, a blanket spread over his legs, he struggled to talk or move because of advanced Parkinson’s disease. In the short time they spent together, she learned they shared a love for music, that he was a decorated Marine who served in Vietnam and advocated for veterans, and that his eyes were as arrestingly bright as her own.
He tried to explain to Holland that he always longed to know her, but when she was born he “just wasn’t ready to be a dad.”
When Holland walked out his door, she felt exhilarated, as though a giant weight had been lifted.
After their reunion, she was invited to a Garcia family reunion, where she met aunts, uncles, and cousins she never knew. She remains connected to many of them today.
“It was like a movie, but in the movies, there aren’t always happy endings,” she said. “This one was.”
For many years, early September brought Blake Allison a dreaded visitor: an insidious mix of physical discomfort and emotional malaise that robbed him of energy and blurred his focus.
His wife, Anna, died on Flight 11 at age 48. The founder of a software company, she’d intended to fly to California for work on Sept. 10, but postponed her trip by a single day.
Afterward, the shock of that tragedy would revisit Allison, unannounced but always expected, as each anniversary approached.
He thought of her vitality, her convulsive laughter, her early morning ritual on the porch with The New York Times crossword and a cigarette, even in the winter. She loved their trips each summer from their home in Stoneham to their place on Penobscot Bay in Maine, where she had spent an idyllic August before her final trip.
“To this day, I have never seen my wife’s plane hit the North Tower,” Allison said. “Nor do I ever want to.”
Twenty-five years later, Allison’s pain has subsided, if not vanished. The healing continues, and a deep understanding born of shared grief with his second wife, Nancy, is a major reason why.
Their bond dates to a memorial gathering for Anna in Arlington, shortly after the terror attacks. Nancy and her husband, an associate of Allison’s in the wine-sales industry, had driven there to comfort him.
Only a little more than a year later, Nancy’s husband, Lewis, died of a heart attack. Then, it was Allison’s turn to show up for support.
“I offered myself as someone to talk to,” said Allison, who is now 76. “I would never say I know exactly what you’re going through because I don’t.”
Later, Nancy invited him to a Christmas event with friends in Lyme, N.H. Allison drove up for the party, and a deep relationship began to grow. He eventually moved to Lyme and married Nancy in 2005. Their 21st anniversary was Aug. 27.
From the beginning, he and Nancy always took care to respect each other’s grieving. “It’s continued to be that way, too,” Allison said. “If you had to arrange the things that would have had to happen for Nancy and I to be here, you’d say, ‘No, it’s impossible.’ ”
As Allison spoke, Nancy bid farewell to a contractor who had just finished laying a new driveway. She walked to the front door, smiled broadly, and greeted a guest with a friendly wave. Allison smiled back.
“We’ve been extraordinarily lucky. The odds of us even getting together, through grief, is ... ” he said, his voice trailing away. “Sometimes, all we can do for people is just be there.”
Chris Serres can be reached at chris.serres@globe.com. Follow him @ChrisSerres. Brian MacQuarrie can be reached at brian.macquarrie@globe.com.