Last Year's Wound That Will Never Heal

By SANDY BANKS

Jan. 6, 2002 12 AM PT

Forgive Nikki Stern if she didn’t feel much like celebrating this year.

While the rest of us have embraced this new year as a chance to put the pain and horror of 2001 behind us, Stern and her friends--”the widows,” she calls them--worry that the dawn of 2002 will reduce their plight to last year’s news.

“People like to move on in this country,” said Stern, whose husband was one of the 3,000 who died in the World Trade Center attacks. “We want things fixed, healed, hidden from view.”

But she, and thousands like her, are shackled by grief to a year that holds one of our nation’s most painful memories. Stern spent the holidays with family in Southern California, away from her home in Princeton, N.J., and its physical reminders of her loss.

But here, she confronted a different kind of pain, as she realized that the grief that continues to rub the East Coast raw is but an abstract in much of the nation.

So she spent the last weekend of the worst year of her life fielding calls and e-mails from New Jersey widows who talked of “quitting, giving up” while listening to callers to talk radio shows rail about the ingratitude of greedy survivors, unhappy with government settlements said to average more than a million dollars.

“We were all vilified as greedy, petty complainers,” said Stern, bewildered that a sympathetic public could have turned so brutal. “Not that I’m taking it personally. I mean, what could possibly hurt worse than Jim being gone?”

Her husband, Jim Potorti, was at work on the 96th floor of the World Trade Center when terrorists struck and the buildings collapsed. He was no high-rolling bond trader or heroic firefighter, just one of hundreds of anonymous middle-management types, who vanished in the rubble.

“He didn’t live to work, he worked to live,” Nikki recalled, and for the first time in our afternoon together, smiled. She pulled a pile of photos from her purse--Jim gardening, Jim barbecuing, Jim holding her in his arms. “Look how handsome he is,” she said, brushing her finger across his face. “What a catch.” And I can’t tell if the break in her voice is a chuckle or a sob.

She and Jim were married 11 years. They had no children and were still as starry-eyed as newlyweds. If he were alive, they would have rung in the New Year together at home, with a home-cooked meal and a bottle of wine.

Instead, she traveled alone to Corona del Mar to visit her cousin Judy Sherkow, who has talked her through many a dark night since September. She figured to spend New Year’s Eve reminiscing with Judy and her husband about Jim and a trip the foursome had taken to Italy. Instead, the three of them watched a movie, then Stern retreated to the computer and the companionship of women from her “grief group” back home, who felt as alone and desperate as she.

“We’re just not ready for the year to end,” she said. “We don’t want this to be ‘what happened last year’.... That just puts us further away from the people we lost; the ones we depended on, we loved.”

Nikki Stern flew home Wednesday to her empty house, her grief group, her job as a consultant at an architecture firm, her 28 manila folders crammed with the official renderings of her life with Jim: birth certificate, marriage license, insurance papers, medical records, credit card bills--documentation she needs as she wends her way through the maze of agencies and services offering help to victims.

“People think, ‘Gee, they’re so lucky. They’re getting so much attention.’ But the amount of charity we’ve received has been exaggerated incredibly, and the hoops we’ve had to jump through for each little thing ... it’s pushed some of us close to the edge of insanity.”

She realizes now that the public perception of victims is shifting, as news spreads that families have been offered government settlements that, when combined with insurance and other payments, could leave them with an average of $1.6 million. But Stern said that the formula used to determine what each family actually receives will shortchange many and strip them of their right to sue for more. “It protects the financial interests of the airlines,” she said, “not the families.”

And she wishes those who consider them greedy could sit in for one night with one of the groups of survivors that meets regularly to offer support. They would see, “the financial problems are the easy ones to solve. What’s tough is the emotional recovery.”

Last month, a widow of one of the World Trade Center victims shot herself to death in the bedroom of the dream home her husband had just completed. The news of her suicide blew through Stern’s group like a gust of icy wind, she said. “That’s all we talk about sometimes, how close we are” to that edge. “You don’t think about making it through the year, just through the day, another week, the next month.... “

So this year, her resolutions are mostly wishes: More strength, less confusion, more courage, less pain. “I imagine things will get better for me,” she said. “It’s just awfully hard to see the forest for the trees, and to listen for reason when there is so much noise.

“How I miss Jim’s quiet voice.”

Sandy Banks’ column is published on Sundays and Tuesdays. Her e-mail address is sandy.banks@lati mes.com.