ELISSA NADWORNY, HOST:
Yesterday marked 25 years since 9/11, a lifetime since Flight 93 crashed in Western Pennsylvania after the passengers and crew tried to take control of the plane from hijackers. There's something about milestone anniversaries where people step back and take stock. Ahead of the 20th anniversary, ALL THINGS CONSIDERED host Scott Detrow produced a radio documentary for NPR about Flight 93 called Sacred Ground. He worked on it with Tim Lambert, a longtime reporter for WITF in Harrisburg. Scott Detrow joins me now. Hello.
SCOTT DETROW, BYLINE: Hey, thanks for having me.
NADWORNY: So tell us why you did this documentary.
DETROW: At the 20-year mark, I wanted to see if we could get a sense of how grief, how processing, changes over the course of decades. We were able to have access to the family members that a lot of other reporters didn't because Tim's a journalist. But Flight 93 also crashed on land that his family had owned for generations. So from Day 1, he had been closely tied to the story and had gotten to know these people really closely, and they talked to Tim in a way that they didn't talk to most other reporters, including myself. So we approached it and just - we wanted to have conversations about what 20 years looks and feels like to you.
NADWORNY: So it was about those feelings, but it was also about the Flight 93 crash site itself, right?
DETROW: That's right, and the way those two things often merge together in interesting ways. You know, the day after the attacks, for a long time, the field was a hellscape. It was burned. It smelled like jet fuel. The plane broke into so many pieces that actually, 20 years later, when Tim and I were reporting the story, we came across small pieces of the plane even still.
NADWORNY: Wow.
DETROW: And yet, the family members over the years - they found peace in the nature of the site. And as it transformed into this truly stunning, beautiful memorial that really centers wildflowers and things like that, they felt like it was theirs, and it became a place of healing, not a place of pain, and that transformation was really interesting. One person who really helped me understand that was someone named Lori Guadagno.
NADWORNY: Let's listen to her story.
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DETROW: Lori Guadagno and her brother Richard had been together right before 9/11. He'd flown in from California to visit her in Vermont where she was living.
LORI GUADAGNO: And he was absolutely blown away by Vermont. He loved it.
DETROW: Then they headed south to New Jersey for their grandmother's 100th birthday party, a big, Italian American gathering with lots of cousins. When it was over, they drove back to their parents' home, where they'd both grown up.
L GUADAGNO: Then, both of us looked at each other in my mom's kitchen, and at the same time, we knew that there was a serious piece of eggplant parmesan in the refrigerator, and we both wanted it. And so he jumped on my back as we fought for this coveted piece of eggplant because that's the kind of siblings we were.
DETROW: They'd been that way since they were kids.
L GUADAGNO: You know, we share the same DNA.
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DETROW: The next morning, Lori left early for the long trip home. Her last glimpse of her younger brother was him standing in the window watching her drive away. On September 11, Rich headed to the airport before dawn. In an oral history for the National Park Service, Rich and Lori's mom, Beatrice Guadagno, remembered those last moments - how Rich kissed her forehead and told her he loved her.
BEATRICE GUADAGNO: I opened the door to the garage, and I'm waving goodbye, and he's waving. (Crying) And - and that was it.
DETROW: A few hours later, Rich boarded his nonstop flight from Newark to San Francisco - United Flight 93.
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DETROW: For Lori, those first few months after 9/11 were a blur. More than anything else, she just felt angry.
L GUADAGNO: I really wanted to be alone. I wanted to remain isolated. It was not a pretty side of me. I'm not proud of it at all. But I'm just being honest.
DETROW: That November, Lori's parents went out to Shanksville. Beatrice Guadagno wanted to see - needed to see - exactly where the plane went down.
B GUADAGNO: I had to climb up an incline to see, and it had to be brutal. It had to be awful. The plane - what happened to that plane.
DETROW: Lori didn't accompany them. When she thought of that sight, she thought about what she had seen on TV that day - the burning trees, the ugly gash in the ground. Rich had always loved nature. As a little boy, he'd spend hours collecting tadpoles and trailing the old, Italian men in the neighborhood as they tended to their tomato plants. So it seemed wrong to her that the nature Rich loved was so ugly.
L GUADAGNO: I didn't want to be present in all of the devastation that was there.
DETROW: Still, as the first anniversary neared, Lori knew she'd have to make the trip to Shanksville to support her parents.
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UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: Richard Guadagno.
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DETROW: She sat through the ceremony, resentful that their grief was on public display. When it was over, she wandered alone toward the crash site. The field was now covered with grass and flowers.
L GUADAGNO: And I remember looking up to the sky, and really pissed off, I said, Rich, if you can hear me, just show me a sign. I need to know you know I'm here. I need to feel you here. And I took one step, I looked down on the ground, and there is this perfectly formed, preserved bird nest at my feet. And I am running in the field with the nest screaming, Mom, Dad, where are you? Where - it's Rich. It's Rich.
DETROW: The nest was one of many moments over the years where Lori felt her brother's presence. Several months earlier, her family had been passed an email that came from an FBI agent. He had been working the 9/11 investigation at the Pentagon. On his first day off in more than a month, the agent rode out to Shanksville on his motorcycle. He walked down to the crash site and back into the woods where debris from Flight 93 had scattered throughout a grove of hemlocks. Something caught his eye. It was a leather law enforcement credential case, opened to reveal Rich's fish and wildlife badge.
L GUADAGNO: That's how the credentials were found - from a tree.
DETROW: The fact the badge was found in the trees and not in the field told Lori and her family something important. It told them that at the time of impact, Richard was likely up at the front of the plane, in or near the cockpit. That meant he had almost certainly been one of the passengers who had fought back against the terrorists to keep the plane from striking another target - likely, investigators later determined, the U.S. Capitol.
L GUADAGNO: I think it was something we already knew, but it was that little extra piece that just confirmed it.
DETROW: Other items came to Lori over the years. When I visited her home in Florida recently, she brought out some of her relics.
L GUADAGNO: This is the beloved nest.
DETROW: Lori has it preserved in a glass case. And there's more - the guitars Rich made by hand, his brown fish and wildlife uniform. Suddenly, her entire demeanor changes.
L GUADAGNO: This - this was not an easy thing to receive.
DETROW: It's a white, three-ring binder. The cover reads, unassociated personal effects of Flight 93. It arrived at Lori's house in 2002.
L GUADAGNO: Unfortunately, we all had to go through page by horrifying page and see if we could identify articles.
DETROW: The table of contents is a mundane list of things any of us would pack on a trip - bathing suits, hairbands, belts, shoes. The simplicity is what makes it so startling.
L GUADAGNO: I went through every, every single page, every page, because the thing is, I knew what was in his suitcase. So I was ready to look at these items and say, there it is. There's his Pearl Jam disc. There's his running shorts, you know? And the only thing I was able to identify was the wallet.
DETROW: A hemp wallet Rich had bought during that visit to Vermont - it still had the receipts inside, including from a meal he and Lori had shared.
We're talking about memories that were clearly painful, but the way you talked about it, it felt like you had settled it in your soul, in your mind. And your voice has changed as we go through these things.
L GUADAGNO: Now, these are things that I tuck away and I don't really ever look at or touch. I know they're there. I need to know they're there. But just last night gathering these things, it's so much harder than I even think it is or would be.
And I'm at a place where the pain never goes away. Obviously, I've never had closure in this story. I never will. But I found a place to put it so that I can lead a happy, productive life. And I know that's what Rich would want. But when I touch these relics, it's - this is really tough.
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DETROW: For all the pain that still surfaces, for all the closure that's never come, Lori has found a place that brings her peace.
L GUADAGNO: I want to be there because also I know how the wind feels.
DETROW: A place she once hated, the crash site.
L GUADAGNO: I know how that land smells.
DETROW: She gets there when she can. She says it brings her a certain closeness she can't tap into anywhere else.
L GUADAGNO: I know what certain tree bark feels like to touch. I know what the soil feels like in my fingertips.
DETROW: Lori says, as much as she wishes Rich had not been a part of 9/11, this was a good place for him to be. It suits his soul.
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NADWORNY: Wow. I mean, it's powerful and also, like, just makes something so kind of, like, historical and big feel so small and real.
DETROW: Thank you. I really enjoyed getting to know her over the course of that story. I actually talked to her earlier this week. She was at the memorial ahead of the anniversary. She had gotten there a few days early just so she could have time there by herself before all of the crowds came.
And it was interesting. Lori said that, even though she has gone on this journey in terms of how she feels about the site, when she's about to go there, she still feels apprehension. She still feels like, I don't know if I want to be there. And as soon as she gets there, she feels that calm and peace that she talked about.
She said 25 years does feel bigger than 20 in a way that she didn't fully expect it to. But just the enormity of a quarter-century - she just feels like she's overwhelmed by these feelings of this happened so long ago, and so much has happened in her life, but Rich's life ended that day, but this is still a place where she can feel close to him.
NADWORNY: Wow. That was NPR's Scott Detrow talking to us about his radio documentary Sacred Ground, which he reported with Tim Lambert. Thanks, Scott.
DETROW: Thank you.
NADWORNY: You can find the full hour of Sacred Ground at npr.org. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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