NJ service center opens to aid 9/11 families
NEW BRUNSWICK, N.J. (AP) — Lisa Cardinali and her family want to share with the world photographs, mementos and even a closely guarded cheesecake recipe treasured by their mother, who died in the World Trade Center attacks.
A new center serving the families of New Jersey victims of the Sept. 11 attacks is helping Cardinali and others organize their submissions to a "living 9/11 memorial" that will eventually be housed at a planned museum at ground zero. The center's mental health services and support programs are also helping families cope with their losses, still vivid nearly a decade after the attacks.
"So many years have passed, but it seems like yesterday, and the emotions still are very very raw," said Cardinali, who lives in Monroe Township. "For many people there is no cemetery, there is no place to go, so this is a nice place to go to speak to somebody, if you need to."
The New Brunswick center is the second facility opened by the group Voices of September 11, which was founded in 2001 by Mary Fetchet of New Canaan, Conn., shortly after her 24-year-old son, Brad, died in the attacks.
Fetchet said the group opened the new office because more than 700 New Jersey families were directly affected by 9/11, as well as hundreds of rescue workers, first-responders, and community members. She said as the 10-year anniversary of the attacks approaches, mental health services and support groups are still greatly needed by the families, especially for children who lost parents or who were born shortly after the attacks.
"I think we really have to learn from these families," Fetchet said. "We really, at this point, don't have a good model in dealing with victims of terrorism and we're hoping that's another contribution that we can make as an organization."
Fetchet's group will work in partnership with Rutgers University's social work school to offer families mental health support, workshops, referrals, annual days of remembrance, and assistance in documenting stories about their loved ones.
"We're focused on commemorating the lives, and focusing on the lives, and not the deaths of the individuals," Fetchet said.
Former New Jersey Gov. Thomas Keane, who served on the 9/11 Commission that investigated the attacks, attended the opening of the center.
"The families of 9/11 are an extraordinary group of people," Keane said. "These are people who have had terrible tragedies in their families — the kind you and I cannot imagine — and they've turned it into something positive."
Separately, some relatives of victims who died on 9/11 when Flight 93 crashed in Pennsylvania plan to depart from Newark on Sept. 3 for a cross-country motorcycle trip ending in San Francisco on Sept. 11.
The bikers plan to retrace the path that Flight 93 was supposed to have flown that day. They'll be carrying a section of chain link fence tagged with mementos similar to the temporary memorial at the crash site in Shanksville, Pa.
