Surviving 9/11: Elizabeth's Story (Widow of American Airlines Flight 11 aircrash victim)

Elizabeth was traveling to New York by train last month to tell David’s story to FBI investigators preparing for the trial against Zacarias Moussaoui, the so-called “20th hijacker.” If Moussaoui is convicted, the government plans to introduce the stories of 30 victims at the sentencing portion of the trial.

While there will always be unanswered questions about how David Kovalcin died, his 38-year-old widow is left to tell the story of how he lived.

It’s a goal that has seemed at best daunting and at worst impossible in the long year since her husband perished when terrorists flew American Airlines Flight 11 into the north tower of the World Trade Center.

But Elizabeth Kovalcin has two young daughters – Rebecca, 5, and Marina, 2 – who will know their father only by wisps of memory and the stories their mother tells. It’s a story she shares not only with her family, but also with the press, federal authorities and the world at large.

That’s the question Elizabeth was asked on April 10 when she went to Danvers, Mass., to be interviewed by members of the FBI.

She was one among thousands of relatives of those who died on Sept. 11 – wives, daughters, husbands, sons, brothers, parents – to be questioned by the FBI in preparation for the trial against Zacarias Moussaoui.

Moussaoui, the so-called “20th hijacker,” was arrested before Sept. 11 and now faces conspiracy charges in connection with the terrorist attack.

The FBI plans to pick the stories of 30 people from among the thousands of victims to represent a cross-section of everyone killed that day. Their stories would be used during the sentencing portion of the trial if Moussaoui is convicted.

Shortly after that meeting with the FBI, Elizabeth was convinced she contributed little to the overall picture of what was lost that day.

“I was supposed to write one paragraph describing David. I came out of there feeling badly that I had not been doing what I wanted to do since he died, and that was write down everything while I could still remember for the girls.”

If I can’t remember, how am I going to tell my daughters who their father was?” Elizabeth asks as she starts to cry.

“One paragraph – how am I supposed to do that? They asked me what I’d miss most about him. And I put down everything that annoyed me. I miss the way he’d slam the cupboard doors in the morning and wake up the girls. I miss seeing a trail of milk from the refrigerator to the stairs. That’s what I could think of – the things that bothered me – because right now they’re things I miss most.”

The day after the interview, she was sure she wouldn’t hear from the FBI again about testifying.

But Elizabeth was wrong. She was called back for a second interview. On a sweltering day in August, she took a train to New York City – she still won’t fly.

She carried with her a yellow manila envelope stuffed with memories – images of David, culled from family photo albums, fragments of his life both as a child and of them together. As she rode from Boston’s South Station through Massachusetts and Connecticut to New York City, she made final selections of photos to share with the FBI, and maybe someday the rest of the world. There were formal portraits, him with an electric guitar, holding trophies, with a favorite car, birthday cakes, weddings and trips to the shore.

In a hotel room a short walk from Penn Station, she spent part of the early afternoon being interviewed by federal agents. Forty-five minutes after arriving, she walked to the lobby looking despondent, clutching the envelope.

“I just don’t think I did a good job,” she said. “It’s very difficult when someone asks me to tell them about David. I have a thousand stories, but not just one. I can’t say he was a jokester. I can’t say he was the life of the party. But he was funny and people liked him.

“David was no different than any other American citizen – he was married, he was a father, he put his family before his work, before anything else. He could have been anyone, but to us, he was special. I just don’t know how to communicate that.”

On Father’s Day this year, she sat down with her daughters to watch home movies – David and the family on Christmas, birthdays.

“In this one video taken on Becca’s third birthday, David gave me a look that only a husband and wife can understand without having to say a word. Then Rebecca went up and hugged the television. I lost it and left the room.”

“There was so much life there,” she says. “This was all we have (left).”

Elizabeth says she still doesn’t think she’ll be among the 30 who will gather in Virginia to testify sometime in the future.

“Honestly I don’t think I want to be picked – but I’d go,” she says. “It’s just a very difficult thing to do.”

But whether she is picked to tell her story before a judge or not, Elizabeth still feels compelled to “build” a multidimensional story of her husband for the sake of her daughters, and the FBI questions made her more determined to do so.

She sees irony in the fact that as workers and rescuers labored the past year to clear away the rubble of the World Trade Center in New York, she has been working to assemble photos, memories, documents – the bits and pieces that tell the story of a human life.

On the same day she met with the FBI in New York, she also visited ground zero. A few minutes into the cab ride, the heat and humidity gave way to a heavy, warm downpour. Out of the cab and walking a winding route to the site, Elizabeth passed mounds of American flags, “I Love New York” T-shirts and amateurish photos in cheap frames being sold in soggy heaps on folding tables.

She said she gets upset by people selling 9/11 souvenirs on the street. As people make their way past a privacy fence surrounding ground zero to reach a viewing site, there’s a hush. A man holds an audience on a nearby sidewalk and talks about who occupied which buildings nearby. To Elizabeth, the visitors seem more interested in those buildings than the people who perished in them, including her husband.

Not wanting to look into the gaping hole another time, she stands still near a chain-link fence as a steady, thick stream of people flows by.

Several weeks before, on what would have been David’s 43rd birthday, Elizabeth baked a rainbow birthday cake and inscribed in frosting, “We Miss You Daddy.”

The family sang “Happy Birthday,” blew out the candles and released balloons into the air – including two with smiley faces, a symbol that David and Elizabeth used to express their love for one another.

As they did the year before, each member of the family then ate a piece of cake – including the family dogs. A few days later, 2-year-old Marina asked, “When will Daddy bring back the balloons?”

David Kovalcin was born July 25, 1959, in the steel-working town of Irwin, Pa. – about 20 minutes from the site where United Airlines Flight 93 crashed the morning he was killed.

David was the youngest of three boys. Both of his brothers – Ed, five years his senior, and Duane, two years older – still live in the area where they were born into a family of German/Slovakian descent.

David’s father, Edward, was a steelworker. His mom, Joanne, stayed home with her children until the couple divorced when David was about 12. As Elizabeth puts it, “David had a father who was less than adequate.”

So his mother became the center of his life – but she died when David was 18. As far as his father goes, Elizabeth says David didn’t have anything to do with him. He died when David was 21.

But he had his family. After his mother’s death, Duane, Ed and his new wife, Lisa, and their daughter stayed in the family home and watched over David.

Still, when David married Elizabeth and they started their own family, he never shook the feeling of dying young and leaving his family behind. Because of this, Elizabeth says, he was meticulous about things such as wills and life insurance.

While his brothers worked in local plants, David finished high school, and then, according to Elizabeth, he went on a downward spiral for about a year and a half.

He was able to shake himself out of it. He was always good at sports. He loved music and played the electric guitar. And he always got good grades.

His mother had hoped he’d go to college – the first in his family. And Elizabeth says he threw himself into making that dream come true. He applied for scholarships and attended Pennsylvania State University, where he went on to earn both bachelor’s and master’s degrees in engineering.

It was hard on his family in Pennsylvania when David moved to Boston to take a job with Digital Equipment Corp. after he graduated.

“For some reason he just wanted to get away and start a life somewhere else,” Elizabeth says.

Jim Smith of Sherborn, Mass., Dave’s close friend of 16 years, says he felt he saw Dave grow to full adulthood “from the time he came to Massachusetts in his pride-and-joy Chevy Malibu, when he wore only jeans and sneakers and spoke with a distinct Pittsburgh accent. I was with him when he bought his first penny loafers.”

He also veered from the family’s traditional liberal Democratic leanings and became an ardent Republican with conservative views – something Elizabeth says played into their choice of making New Hampshire their home.

David, who eventually went to work at Raytheon, married and divorced and then met Elizabeth when they were both walking their dogs.

The two were married six years ago and made their home in Hudson, where Elizabeth’s sister, Heather, also lives. David and Elizabeth loved to hike and loved the outdoors. They loved living in New Hampshire.

Still, the Kovalcin brothers stayed close. And David’s death last year has weighed on them in unspeakable ways.

In late June, Elizabeth, her daughters and her niece pack up her Honda minivan to drive to David’s hometown in Pennsylvania for the wedding of Ed’s daughter Crissy – the first trip back to Pennsylvania since a memorial service was held there shortly after David’s death. David was the bride’s godfather.

The group leaves Hudson at the crack of dawn, planning on making the trip in one day. Snacks are packed. A small television is plugged into the cigarette lighter on the dash. Disney’s “The Little Mermaid” entertains the girls in the back seat as the van rolls along.

Off the highway in Pennsylvania, close to their destination, they pass a huge homemade sign along the roadway. On it are the words, “To those responsible. We’re coming for you,” along with a caricature of a Middle Eastern-looking man’s head clutched in the talons of an eagle.

“It breaks my heart,” he says, sitting in his back yard, sipping a lemonade and watching his nieces splash in a kiddie pool. “It really does. . . . All the things he can’t do – take his daughters for their driving test, seeing them get married. You never forget about it one bit. Sometimes it’s a song on the radio . . .

“Dave was a good guy. And we tried to stay close even though he lived up there. My son and I would go to New Hampshire and we’d hang out together – typical brother stuff . . . he was the youngest in the family. He took his share of licks from us. He was the spoiled pain in the ass and at the same time we protected him. No one messed with our little brother.”

During the family’s visit to Pennsylvania, both Ed and Duane made a point of spending special time with their brother’s daughters. The day before the wedding, they all swam in Ed’s big backyard pool. He bent over on a bench under a patio umbrella and painted Rebecca’s toenails. He tried to show her how to throw a baseball. Ed, who looks amazingly like Dave, made a point of dancing with Rebecca at the wedding.

He knew David wouldn’t be able to do that himself at her own wedding. It was a moment that all but broke Elizabeth’s heart.

“I had to leave right after that,” she said. “It should be David dancing with his daughter. It should be David throwing that first baseball to them.”

“We came from a broken family,” Ed said at a quiet time during the visit. “Things were rough at home when my father was there. And then my mom died and it was just the three of us. And we promised we’ d stay together. And we did until he moved up there. He had to because of work. And he liked it up there. He liked it.”

Ed Kovalcin, who works as mechanic for a power company, described his baby brother as “the positive thinker” in the family.

“I lost my job three times,” he says, “and he’d always tell me that I’d work again, not to worry. He helped us out when we needed it and he was right, I did work again. Dave was the smart one. And he got a late start with his family – 42 with two small kids who will have irreparable damage because of this. I feel for Liz and the girls.”

“Sometimes it’s like he never existed,” he says. “I’ve got pictures, and that’s it. I miss Dave. He loved his politics. He loved his kids and he loved the outdoors.”

“It was weird,” Ed says. “I was supposed to go to my niece’s wedding and I said, ‘No, I want to see Dave.’

“It was a strange trip. Me and Dave didn’t talk a lot. That was unusual. That was the last time I saw him. It was an eerie thing. The three brothers were together and I handed Liz the camera. We all were laughing and I said, ‘You better take this picture, this may never happen again – the three of us together.’ ”

The Kovalcins are not the only ones who miss David and have spent a good part of the past year reflecting on his life.

Jim Smith, his best friend of 16 years, delivered a eulogy at a memorial service soon after Sept. 11. Smith and his wife, Nora, are Rebecca’s godparents, which Smith said has given his family an even stronger bond to the Kovalcins since David’s death.

In the eulogy, he listed those characteristics that made David unique and made him, as Elizabeth said, “like every other American.”

“I want to share with you who David was to me,” Smith said during the eulogy. “David was a guy who liked windsurfing, skiing, politics, movies, basketball, sports, economics, music, food, engineering and talking to you about any of these subjects. . . . When I met Dave he didn’t know a stock from a bond . . . one of our longest-standing jokes, David would start off a serious conversation by telling me he was interested in investing in some CDs and what did I think of Bruce Springsteen?”

Elizabeth’s sister, Heather, remembers the role her brother-in-law played in Elizabeth’s life.

“He respected my sister’s ability to make decisions without reasoning them out, which is impossible for an engineer to truly understand,” she said.

Dave’s father-in-law, Ken Bruce, remembers him as being a tea drinker who was highly motivated, keenly interested in politics, exacting in his daily routine, yet someone who always made time for his family.

The one she’ll tell his daughters. The one she’ll tell herself in years to come.

She is collecting pictures, recalling stories and remembering as best she can. But right now, she says, everything is still too raw, and that makes writing down the details of her husband’s life difficult. There’s Sept. 11 to get through first.

At first, Elizabeth and her family and the Pennsylvania Kovalcins planned to attend the memorial services at ground zero, but Elizabeth has decided instead to keep things close to home – where David lived his happiest days.

Perhaps she’ll be able to start the story then. Maybe not. But whenever she does begin to let those memories flow, she’ll keep going.

A touching heartbreaking story of what that terrible day did to the fabric of these families and America. Bless them and pray they find some comfort in knowing we all pray for them.

Thanks. I would have replied sooner but had to stop reading three times. Couldn't see thru the tears.

God bless these folks, and us, and FreeRepublic and America.

We will ALWAYS REMEMBER!

Elizabeth said, when questioned by the FBI as to what she remembered about her husband, "I remember everything he did that annoyed me". Ah, Elizabeth, so would we all. But know that now I ignore things like my husband hanging his clothes every place but in the closet, keeping his car like it's a garbage truck, etc., etc., etc. They still drive me crazy and always will, but I will always remember you and your husband and have stopped screaming like a lunatic at my own husband. And I pray that you and your daughters will once again know happiness - and you will. God Bless you.

"When will Daddy bring back the balloons?”

Moussaoui will be found guilty and will be sentenced to death.

He will be killed in a federal prison by fellow inmates.

Americans are Americans, after all, no matter where they are.

God bless this woman and her little family.

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