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A parent's memorial pilgrimage

Joye Brown

9:03 AM EDT, September 11, 2008

Like mother, like son.

That was easy to see, even through the somber mood during a groundbreaking ceremony for a Sept. 11 memorial in Hauppauge Wednesday.

The son?

Glen Pettit, a Ronkonkoma boy the neighbors once called "Hurricane." One minute, Glen, always a prankster, was playing; the next, he was volunteering to mow a neighbor's lawn.

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The boy, who was dyslexic, finished Connetquot High School and, although it took a year longer than his peers, slammed through college, with a degree in communications.

As a teen, Glen was a volunteer firefighter, pedaling his bike, if need be, to get to the action. And he became skilled at capturing still and moving images with his cameras. As a young man, he kept all of those interests and joined the New York City Police Department, where he worked with the Technical Assistance Response Unit.

"He couldn't stay in one place," said Jane Wixted -- that would be Glen's mother.

"He had to be everywhere."

And, in a way, Glen still is.

Seven years after Glen died at the World Trade Center, Jane and her husband, Thomas -- Glen's stepfather since the boy was 8 -- do the work of tending his memory.

It's an unusually public (and for many families, almost unbearable) labor -- in the days leading up to the anniversary.

Yesterday, Jane Wixted joined Suffolk County officials wielding commemorative shovels for a (symbolic) groundbreaking.

"Do I have to give this back?" she asked, with a Glen-like smile. (She didn't.)

Later, she and her husband approached a drawing of the monument, which is slated to be finished next year.

Wixted already has selected a memorial photograph. "It shows off his long lashes and big blue eyes," she said.

And she already has written words about her son that visitors will read decades from now.

"I want everybody to know how proud he was of his work, his country and his Irish heritage," she said.

It was not yet 11 a.m., and Wixted was on her first stop.

She left Hauppauge and drove west to Pinelawn Cemetery, to place flowers at Glen's grave.

Then, it was east again, and off to Duffield Elementary School in Ronkonkoma, where she placed flowers at a memorial that bear's Glen's name.