Listening to 9/11 Stories

Mary Mick Davis: Giving Respite and Finding It

The first time I saw Mary Davis in the spring of 2002, she was wearing a hard hat and overseeing a group of volunteers at a respite center at St. Peter’s Church near Ground Zero. She clearly had a lot on her mind and she was clearly in charge of the smoothly running operation that provided a place of rest and sustenance for those who were working at the site.

When I saw Davis again, it was at the mega-church in Southern California where we had both taken jobs. It was early 2003 and she had just been diagnosed with Shingles, which can be induced by stress. She was exhausted, burnt out, and in need of respite herself.

Davis lives in Kentucky now, with the husband she met and married in California and their young son Mickey. I talked to her last week by phone about her memories of working at Ground Zero. Some of the details have grown fuzzy, but the people she served are etched into her heart and mind.

Davis worked for the relief organization Safe Harbor International and came to New York in fall 2001 to do ministry at Ground Zero with Firefighters for Christ and Police Officers for Christ.

“We had this event down there and offered coffee and cookies and were going to offer dinner,” said Davis. “Then it went from dinner to breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and open 24 hours a day.
When we realized it was going to stay open, we realized somebody needed to stay, so being single, me and another gal stayed behind.”

Residents who had been traumatized by the attacks had moved out of their apartments in Battery Park City and a church rented a few on a short term basis for relief workers like Davis. For six to nine months her days and nights were spent managing volunteers, picking up food from a restaurant on Canal Street, and simply listening. For another nine months she ministered to recovery workers’ wives, mothers, sisters, and daughters from an outpost in Old Bridge, New Jersey.

Davis had been based in Nairobi, Kenya, before coming to New York. There she had helped facilitate Safe Harbor ministry in Southern Sudan. The experience prepared her for the challenges she faced at Ground Zero, she said. “It takes a lot of coordination to put people into a war zone." 

Running a respite center that was open 24 hours a day and operated by a volunteer workforce that turned over weekly while simultaneously caring for devastated people was a different kind of challenge though. Even so, Davis said it was a special time in which a real sense of family developed among recovery and relief workers.

“I still get emails from one of the sanitation workers. He was really impacted. Sometimes I worry, but he’s wanted to keep everybody in touch, so he sends an email out to a lot of people who were at the respite center,” said Davis.

“My brain still goes to some of the people that I talked to, some of the people who were so deeply traumatized. I wonder where they’re at now. I wonder what is their mental health right now,” she said.

“I had this one young man come. He shared stuff that he saw that nobody should ever have to see,” said Davis. “I talked to him for a little bit and I let him know that it was okay to talk, because I had been down there for a little bit and if I heard something overwhelming, I wasn’t going to buckle under it. ... He shared these images that he saw and then, all of a sudden, he was gone and I remember just wanting to find him again and give him somewhere where I knew he would get help because I knew he had been so deeply scarred by what he saw with the jumpers and things. He was just such a young guy.”

Davis still prays for him and others like him, she said. When she looks back, she wonders why, out of all the people in the United States, God chose her to do this work.

“When it first happened, I remember being glued to the television and all of the rescue workers speaking. I remember thinking, ‘If they need to talk, I need to listen.’ Even though it was TV and that makes no sense, all I can think is that maybe God knew I was one of the people to be there to just listen,” she said. “I do feel sometimes like maybe I didn’t do enough to tell them about God … but I think we were just supposed to love, and trust that God will put other people in their lives to take it further.”

Davis had difficulty articulating how the experience impacted her.

“Did I get changed? Yeah, stretched. Do I have life experiences that you could never imagine? Absolutely,” she said.

“After it all happened, we took classes on post-traumatic stress syndrome, and what amazed me on the spiritual side was how much God equipped us to do exactly what these classes taught. I remember sitting there thinking, ‘I did this. This is how I did it!’” said Davis.

“It was amazing to realize that God had put me to deal with these post-traumatic stress situations with no training. That was definitely a God thing,” she said.

Paula Griffin: Taking and Making Difficult Calls 

Paula Griffin, Pt. Pleasant, worked for  when the Spring Lake couple was killed on Flight 93, but she also considered Jean a friend.

“That was a true relationship, because she gave so much of herself to everybody,” Griffin explained.

The Petersons were on their way to California to visit Jean’s mother, Griffin said, and called her before they left to tell her to take a paid day off. Griffin was at home that morning when her husband came in from 7-11 and told her to turn on the TV. She watched the second plane fly into the World Trade Center.

“I knew right away something was wrong and then it clicked. Immediately it set in: ‘Oh, my gosh, what flight were they on?’” said Griffin.

The Petersons had arrived at the airport early and had taken Flight 93 instead of the later one that they had booked.

“I just didn’t know what to do at that point. I just knew that I needed to go over there,” said Griffin.

None of the Petersons' children were living at home at the time and Griffin knew people would start calling the house for information. She took the call from the airline saying that Don and Jean had been killed, and then faced the lonley task of calling their family and friends to deliver the news.

“I was the one that was telling people and it felt so wrong,” said Griffin.

The phone didn’t stop ringing, she said, and then family and friends started showing up at the house.

Don Peterson’s son David Peterson moved into his father's and Jean's house for a while. He and Griffin spent many hours talking about what had happened. David also allowed her to listen to a recording from Flight 93 that he had been given.

“It was very haunting to listen to, after the fact, because you were searching for [Jean’s] voice for a little comfort, because you knew that they were praying for people and they were probably the calmest people on the plane, in my opinion, helping other people on that plane dealing with dying,” Griffin said.

David had also received his father’s Bible. It smelled like jet fuel, but was otherwise undamaged, said Griffin. “It’s something to hold on to.”

Griffin took Tuesdays off for about six months, she said. “I felt like every Tuesday I would remember, ‘Oh my gosh, I’m supposed to be at Jean’s.”

“I never had anybody like them in my life,” she explained. “They presented something I admired in their communication with each other, and in the way they talked to their children.”

“They changed my life so dramatically by their example," she said. “They never preached anything. They just lived their lives and they just tried to help people. I don’t even know that they were conscious that they were helping by their example.”

Griffin was devastated by the loss, she said, but also angry.

“I didn’t understand. I did understand how the Lord might need them on the plane, but I could not understand for the longest time how he could take them, of all people. It rocked my faith for quite a long time,” said Griffin.

Eventually she found resolution for herself by realizing how the impact of their example had been magnified by the tragedy.

“I think everybody loved, appreciated, and knew what Don and Jean did, but I think it just really sank in. It was like somebody hit you with a ton of bricks."