By Anthony Tripicchio
Sept. 18, 2004 -- Elsie Caldwell stood front and center as she told her heart-wrenching story, all the while clutching to her son’s memory manifested in an enlarged photograph. Her voice trembled, her eyes watered, but her grip on the photo of her son Kenny and his smile exuded a love and tenderness that seemingly said she wasn’t going to lose him a second time.
A divorced mother of three, Caldwell recently detailed to a Villanova journalism class the traumatic experience of losing her son, Kenneth Caldwell, in the tragic events of September 11, 2001.
With desperation remaining ubiquitous in her voice more than three years after the horrific occurrence, Caldwell relayed the events chronologically to the class.
“He
called to tell me he loved me,” said Caldwell of her son as he told her of the
frightening situation he was in. “He
said there was smoke and a bomb in the building and he had to get out.”
Only after Caldwell’s conversation with her son had ended and she turned on her television did she fully comprehend the enormity of the situation. As she sat and watched the agonizing tragedy unfold, she received numerous calls from friends and family members inquiring about Kenny’s health. Losing control of her emotions for a moment, she tried to tell her audience about some of the cell phone messages she left for Kenny as they attempted to locate him.
“I love you so much, baby,” she said to her 30-year-old son. She paused and her wavering voice continued as she addressed the class, “We haven’t forgotten you, and I’m going to come get you.”
To this day, Kenny’s body has still not been found as New York City continues to sift through the carnage. The optimism that once surrounded the Caldwells about finding Kenny has since vanished. At one point, they had held hope that Kenny had, in fact, escaped the building, but was in a state of amnesia. Signs were posted around New York area hospitals asking the public “Have you seen Kenny Caldwell?”
After looking through countless hospitals and having no luck, friends and family were deflated. Elsie Caldwell is now resigned to the fact that her son will probably never be found alive, but has mixed feelings on finding his body or parts of it.
“A part of me wants to be able to touch his face and tell him I love him and that I’ll be with him again soon,” she commented. “But, if they told us they had found a hand or a foot or something I don’t think I want to know that because that means he suffered and was in pain. I don’t want to know that.”
The disastrous events of September 11, 2001 deeply impacted all Americans, but few can cognize the position of parents who lost children in the wreckage. Support groups have been formed since the defining moment in this century has taken place, and Caldwell stated that her particular group has offered her some sense of consolation. She belongs to a group of twenty mothers who all lost children in the terrorist attack.
“The group has helped,” she said definitively. “We’ve become like an extended family. It’s great because we can do whatever we feel. If we want to be angry, we’re angry. If we want to be sad, we’re sad. If we don’t want to talk, we don’t talk. We all love each other and we’ll be together forever and ever.”
Through all the adversity, and despite the nightmare that her life has been over the past three years, Elsie Caldwell is not bitter. She seeks no revenge, realizing that will accomplish nothing. Her son is gone.
“I’m anti-war,” she proclaimed. I don’t want another mother to experience the same horror that I’ve been through.”
