In her memoir "Evolution of a Heart" about losing her husband, Michael, on 9/11, Tara Bane begins: "I couldn't tell you the day I decided to live instead of die."
She learned grief never vanishes, even as you create a new life.
"It becomes part of you," she writes.
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Twenty-five years after the first news bulletins, the desperate phone calls that went unanswered, the searching and finally the acceptance that Michael was gone, she sits at her dining room table at home in Upper Makefield, attempting to explain how she deals with that loss even today.
"About mid-August, the dread begins," she said, as the calendar pulls closer to Sept. 11, the date on which 2,996 people perished in Islamic terror attacks on the World Trade Center in New York, the Pentagon and United Flight 93. Among them were 18 people who lived in Bucks County or had strong ties here.
Even now she cannot bear to see the images of that day.
"I don't watch the news. I don't want to see it again," she said.
The irony for Bane is that she's an art therapist and has spent her career helping to heal people who've been traumatized, usually by some crime.
But for her, 9/11 became an event in which she was a healer without a cure.
"People will tell you, maybe a few years later to 'move on' or to 'get over it,'" she said.
Well-meaning intentions aside, grief doesn't work that way,
"That's the most important part that people should know about (working through) grief. There is no timeline," she said.
Even today, it seems hard to believe it happened at all, or that a quarter century has passed.
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In Sept. 2001, the Banes had been married just four years. He was a musician and athlete. He loved horses and dogs.
They met in college. They were Bucks Countians by way of New York, and, at the suggestion of a family member, they bought a house "with a peony-lined driveway" in Lower Makefield in 1999. With its roominess and lush yards, it seemed like it would be their forever home for their dogs and the kids they planned to have.
"We loved that house," she said.
Her voice turns wistful saying it.
Mike Bane took Amtrak's 7:03 a.m. "Clocker" every weekday morning, bound for the World Trade Center where he worked for Marsh and McLennan, an insurance company. His office was on the 100th floor of the North Tower.
She was still in bed when, on his way out the door, Michael asked if she knew where his laptop charger was. He kissed her as she lay in bed.
"I love you," she said to him.
In a vivid image that haunts her, she saw him briefly silhouetted in the bedroom doorway. He said, "Love you, too." And he was gone.
Hours later came the early, stunning news bulletins about planes crashing into the buildings, her disbelief, her mounting worry after calling Michael over and over, but only getting a fast busy signal.
The images from that time remain disjointed. Co-workers trying to comfort her. Family in and out of the house, bringing food and crying, and staying over to keep her company.
"I wasn't alone in that house for a year," she said.
She went to Lower Manhattan to search for him. Along with thousands of others, she publicly posted his photo listing him as "MISSING." To the authorities in charge of search recovery, she provided Michael's DNA from his toothbrush and hair brush. In a request that still chills her, she was asked to provide his dental records, too.
"That week was a blur," she said.
She saw the smoking ruins of the towers at Ground Zero, continued her searching, but by Thursday Sept. 20, accepted that he was gone forever.
"He was not coming home to me or the dogs," she said.
Mike Bane is among the 1,100 people whose remains were never recovered from the wreckage.
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Life grew dark. She had never been in an emotional funk this deep, not even when her parents divorced when she was a kid, or when her mother died. It was compounded by intense news coverage.
"My grief was in the public eye," she said.
She wrestled with black depression and overwhelming despair while, at the same time, going through the motions of life.
"There were days riddled with the desire to be dead," she writes.
She presented well in public appearances, in interviews, and through fundraisers to build the Garden of Reflection in Lower Makefield, the 9/11 memorial for the 18 Bucks Countians killed that day.
On the inside, it was another story. She wrote in her journal as if she was speaking to her late husband, telling him how much she missed him, confiding in him how lonely it was without him, how she felt lost and broken.
"Nothing is the same anymore. And nothing seems to make me happy," she wrote in November 2001.
Then a few days later: "I am living and functioning, but I feel like I am dying inside … I would give anything and everything to be together again … I wish it was all a bad dream. Michael, I feel cut in half, not whole anymore."
She lost interest in art therapy and her job. She was floating through her life. Sometimes she'd make some progress, tamping down the bad feelings, but then something would trigger the worst of them, and they arrived without warning. In one case, it was meeting another 9/11 widow.
The woman's husband had worked on the same floor as Michael at Marsh and McLennan. The woman said she had received a phone call from her husband after the plane hit the building.
"She only heard chaos on the other end," Bane said.
It was chilling and left her unsettled for a long time.
Things began to change maybe a year later.
Bane said she was at dinner in California. The comedian Chris Kattan was there.
"I laughed so hard for the first time," she said. "Like, all night I was laughing and at some point, I realized that I could make it."
Laughter was part of her healing, but not all of it. It was finding a community of people seeking peace in their lives, too. It was discovering yoga at the Khalsa Healing Arts in Yardley. It was her nights out at the Yardley Inn with the other Bucks County women whose spouses or children had perished on Sept. 11.
"We got to be on a first-name basis with the bartenders," she said.
But it was also getting outside of herself, throwing off the heavy blanket of grief that threatened to smother her life.
She comforted a neighbor whose husband had died from cancer, leaving behind two little kids. She'd pick up the coffee tab for a stranger. She'd have her young nieces over the house. Her family rallied around her, even as they dealt with similar sadness.
"I think of these as 'little lights'" she said. "Each of those activities would give me a little light, and the more light I got, the more I was able to fully enjoy the good moments that life offers you."
In the years since that dark day, she remarried, divorced, and had a son, Cole, from that marriage. He is 17, a tall, upbeat kid with a quick smile, proud of his mother.
"Grief doesn't ever go away," she said, as she brought out photos of Michael and set them on the dining room table.
"What I've learned," she said, "is that in all of this, in those small acts of kindness, your heart grows bigger than it was."
It has to grow big enough to carry the pain of 9/11 and the joy of family and friends and having a son starting on his own life's journey.
JD Mullane can be reached at [email protected].
This article originally appeared on Bucks County Courier Times: How one Bucks County 9/11 widow learned to live after tragedy | Exclusive