‘Why are you here?” Beth asked Tim Brown. Her husband, Terence Hatton — the captain of Rescue Company 1 of the Fire Department of the City of New York — was Tim’s colleague and close friend. “Go get him and bring him to me.” Tim, assigned to Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s Office of Emergency Management, had been leading a team of paramedics to the South Tower of the World Trade Center when he realized that it was coming down. Change of plan. He redirected the team to the Marriott next door and survived while the firmament collapsed. Terry, Beth’s husband, was trapped in the North Tower. He’d never find out that she was pregnant.
“Evil took my friends that morning,” writes Tim in The Greatest Love: Lessons for Living with Extraordinary Courage — Even After the Worst Day of Your Life (Convergent, 240 pp., $28). The word “terrorists” appears only once. This book isn’t an appendix to The 9/11 Commission Report or an exegesis of modern political savagery. It’s Tim’s story, and Terry’s; the story of Chris Blackwell of Rescue 3, Paddy Brown of Ladder Company 3, FDNY chaplain Mychal Judge (the first officially recorded fatality of the attack), of Peter Bielfeld of Ladder 42, who was at a medical appointment for a fire-related injury when he heard the news and rushed to join Engine 10 at Ground Zero, where he was seen for the last time. This is how faith and service give us meaning — and how grief transforms it.
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