Like the rest of New York City, the residents of Park Slope came together on September 11th. As white ash and dark smoke floated toward Brooklyn and tiny pieces of paper rained down on the neighborhood, many of us ran to PS 321 to check in on our children. Later we waited for friends and neighbors to come home from work. I’ll never forget the site of a friend walking toward the school, his shoes covered in ash, as he told us what he’d seen that day in Lower Manhattan.

Some didn’t come home. Marian Fontana’s husband, Lt. David Fontana of
Squad 1 on Union Street in Park Slope, was one of the missing. It was weeks before we truly believed that he was dead. 

That first awful night, a group of Marian’s local woman friends gathered in her garden apartment on 4th Street and waited for Dave to come home. We took turns calling hospitals in New York City and New Jersey  to see if he had turned up. Bravely, Marian lay on the couch in her small living room  letting friends massage her and hold her hands as we all waited for Dave to walk through the door. We were sure he would.

At midnight, a firetruck pulled up to the house. "Oh No," Marian cried. I remember thinking: this is just like in the movies when the soldiers come to the door to bring news of a death. Their faces bright red and covered in dirt and sweat, the men smelled of toxic smoke and death. They came to say that they hadn’t found Dave yet, but were still holding out hope. These men were clearly traumatized by what they had seen that day but they urged Marian to have faith. "There are voids out there, Marian. The guys are probably waiting in one of those," the firefighter said.

For many, Marian became the face of 9/11. She was relentlessly interviewed because  her natural charisma and articulateness made for great sound bytes. She threw herself into the spotlight as a way to lobby on behalf of the underpaid firefighters; it was also a way to keep Dave’s memory alive.

And in Park Slope, she was a local hero. She could barely walk down Seventh Avenue without being stopped for conversation, a hug, a moment of shared grief. After a while this became overwhelming. Marian needed to retreat from the attention, from her status as the official 9/11 widow, so that she and her son could begin to heal alone.

Tonight at Brooklyn Reading Works at the Fou Le Chakra Cafe, Marian Fontana will be reading from her memoir, THE WIDOW’S WALK, which will be published this summer by Simon and Schuster. In it she writes with honesty, passion, and great humor about her life before and after Dave’s death.

The reading tonight is a reunion of sorts because quite a few of her friends who were there that first terrible night will be at Fou Le Chakra. One of them, essayist and fiction writer, Susan Karwoska, is reading an excerpt from her work-in-progress, THE RIVER  FROM NOTHING. Although I knew Susan before, on the night of 9/11, I learned what an enormous heart she has. It infuses everything she does, including her work teaching children to write poetry in the NYC public schools.  Marian nicknamed her "The Soup Lady" because she would bring soup over to the 4th Street apartment every day during the weeks after 9/11. "And it was really good homemade soup," Marian says.

That night I forged a bond with everyone who was in that apartment. As we made phone calls to hospitals, endless cups of tea, and well-meaning efforts to comfort Marian in the early moments of her  unfathomable pain, none of us could really imagine what she was going through. None of us had ever been in a situation like that before and we were scared out of our minds.

Tonight we will join with others to listen to the writing of both Susan Karwoska and Marian Fontana. And we will celebrate the power of art to help us understand the world and the life that’s been given to us.

Brooklyn Reading Works at Fou Le Chakra Cafe. Thursday May 26th at 8 p.m. 411 Seventh Avenue between 13th and 14th Streets in Park Slope.