Sept. 11 and ‘What Truly Matters’ (Sept. 11, 2002)Any major event anywhere in the world is bound to have a local connection. That’s a basic truth for any news organization, especially one focused on local news.
The story of Steve Adams — who had worked for me briefly as a correspondent when I was The Recorder’s county editor and he was living in Charlemont — was more compelling than I could have imagined. It was told by his wife, living in Shelburne Falls, from whom he had been separated until just days before his death at his new job at Windows of the World.
The story of Steve and Jessica was so sad, so powerful, that I returned to it after the first anniversary telling in September 2002 to revisit it on the fifth anniversary because his widow’s commitment to stand against any reprisal for the attacks, against the war in Afghanistan, and for the organization Peaceful Tomorrows.
A man’s voice, persistent and tense, cut through Jessica Murrow’s heavy sleep that morning. Is anybody there? Jessica, wake up! Pick up the phone!” bellowed the voice of her husband’s cousin from the answering machine speaker.
When Murrow finally answered, the urgency of the man’s call was clear: “Did Steve go to work?”
She vaguely remembered her husband, Steve Adams, leaving their 110th Street Manhattan apartment early that morning, enthused about his promotion to a new job which finally left him feeling good about himself. He’d called out goodbye to his wife, with whom he’d only recently moved back to after years of separation.
He’d asked her to do his laundry. And then he left, to be at work by 8, to learn a new computer program at Windows on the World atop the World Trade Center.
“Oh my god!” the caller said, and told Murrow to turn on the television. He said something about a plane hitting the Trade Center, but it didn’t begin to register until she awoke to the horrific images beyond her wildest nightmare.
She hung up, and immediately tried calling Steve’s 107th floor office, but circuits were busy. In the crazed moments that followed, her brother rushed over and the couple’s best man phoned from California, as the TV relentlessly showed smoke bellowing from the tower.
“We watched the second plane hit,” said Murrow, who still believed that Stephen Adams’s only tragedy would be that fate had snatched his wonderful new job from him.
“Then we watched the building collapse. I don’t think I said anything for an hour.”
She told her heart that Steve might still return home, that he’d be back by 1 o’clock.
At half past noon, the doorbell rang “and I went crazy. It was a friend of my brother’s. That’s when I lost it.
“I couldn’t stop crying.”
Murrow sits in the Charlemont studio she’s rented for the summer as she recounts the crush of Sept. 11. An energetic woman who believes she’s shed most of the intense pain of the past year, she intently files an oboe reed as she begins talking, and pauses moments between sentences as her thoughts rush back to that day, and to the promise-filled evening before.
She points in the direction of where she still keeps the drum stick she borrowed from Adams when they first met at the Marlboro Morris Ale in Vermont. She’d been playing pipe and tabor for a dance team from New York and someone had pointed to Steve Adams as someone who could lend her a stick. They were married Sept. 10, 1994. By 1996, they’d decided to split up.
Murrow, a Juilliard-trained musician, had played oboe professionally for 20 years and had built a career as a freelance sound engineer for assorted venues around New York, including ABC’s “Good Morning America.” Adams’s life foundered in Charlemont, Worthington, and Shelburne Falls as he tried to find work that suited him.
“He loved me to death, and I didn’t get it,” said Murrow wistfully. “I was in the very fast lane, and I left Steve in the dust for the glamour of the industry.”
Living together since he’d moved to New York last April to become assistant wine cellar master at Windows, Murrow had actually thought about suggesting to him on that that Sept. 10 anniversary evening that they repeat their vows, thought about wearing her wedding ring again, thought about telling him that she loved him.
“We were always friends. Steve was absolutely my best friend. We were reconciled,” she said. “Almost. In my memory, like to think we were. I wanted to say it, but I didn’t do it.”
Murrow looks out the windows at Charlemont’s hills, comprehending for the first time what Steve had found so special about Franklin County. She’d asked him once — when he felt lost about jobs that had taken him from a Northfield Mount Hermon School kitchen to McCusker’s Market and Table and Vine in Northampton — what he would be if he could choose anything.
“I want to be a good man,” he’d replied simply.
“He thought it was more important to honor your friends and keep your values. He stayed absolutely loyal to me during that trial separation. He thought your best friends were absolutely your best friends. So what he did for a living to bring food to the table was meaningless for him.”
Promoted in less than six months to beverage manager at one of New York’s best restaurants, he felt appreciated for his knowledge about fine wines.
“It was the first time he could be who he was, and they paid him for what he loved to do,” Murrow recalled with a short laugh of irony. “So he was happy. He walked differently, he carried himself differently, he talked differently, he had a look in his eye that I hadn’t seen.”
At 51, the same age Steve had been that day, she is beginning to see an end to the year of grieving — a year she began by taking her husband’s dirty laundry into bed, sobbing; when she walked down a Manhattan street, teary, and was consoled and hugged by a woman on the street, a complete stranger.
“I had the most unbelievable pain in my heart,” said Murrow. Like so many zombies in New York then, she was numb, lost in a pit of sorrow. She began practicing yoga, she returned to playing oboe, she began seeking out places to be alone.
More than anything, she reflected on what truly matters.
“Now I know what I value, what’s valuable to me,” she says. “Life is very precious. I value the people I know more than I ever did before.”
The phone chirps in the Charlemont studio, and she tells a woman friend that she’s returning to New York to perform, but that she already can’t wait to return. And that she’s trying to buy a house in or around Charlemont, “the most healing place I’ve ever been ” She ends the brief conversation with the words, “I love you.”
Murrow has become a nicer person, she reflects. She doesn’t become as short-tempered with people as she used to be, she doesn’t take everything so seriously. After all, she adds, what really matters?
“I do feel I have to do what’s the most important thing to me now and not wait. I’ve been waiting all these years,” she says. “I’ve always wanted to live in country, to have my own house. I’ve always wanted a horse, a dog. I’ve wanted a child.”
If Sept. 11 has changed Murrow’s world dramatically, she laments and resents the negligible effect it’s had on the planet.
Murrow appeared in the days soon after the calamity on “Good Morning America” and “20/20,” telling Barbara Walters, “I’m here to say there should not be any war.”
It would devastate her late husband to know that his death had been followed by retaliation, Murrow said.
“In New York, people have shut down again and it’s gone back to the way it was,” she said, dismayed by the “rah-rah sentiment. It’s dangerous as hell. Everything we’ve done hasn’t contributed one iota to peace in the world.”
“I worry enormously about his soul and that he’s not at rest,”says Murrow, who hasn’t yet decided what to do with her late husband’s ashes.
“I feel he’s not at peace. I’m trying to find myself, to put myself at peace. If I’m at peace, he’ll be at peace.”
–RICHIE DAVIS