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Esta página no está disponible en español. THE NEW YORK TIMESImpulse To Help Allows A Wife To UnderstandBy MARY WILLIAMS WALSH
December 10, 2001 NEWARK – When Harry Ramos died while trying to help an incapacitated stranger, named Victor, escape from the burning World Trade Center, the world turned him into a hero. His wife, Migdalia, was angry. She was angry at herself, angry at Victor, angry at all the wives whose husbands had come home safely and even angry at her husband. Still mourning the death of her mother 10 days earlier, she was left alone with two children, a half-built house, a six- figure mortgage, a flood of bills and questions that would not go away about why her husband put a stranger ahead of his family. Just three weeks later, however, as she and her relatives cleared the apartment here where her mother had lived, a fire broke out. She found herself running into a smoke-filled stairway, intent on saving her mother's elderly neighbor. Suddenly, she understood why her husband had done as he did. Mrs. Ramos recalls how she was barely awake when Harry called her at 8:49 on the morning of Sept. 11, exhausted as she was from caring for their infant son, from getting their 5-year-old son off to school, from working at her part-time job, from spending long nights at her mother's deathbed, from overseeing the construction of a house that was already four months behind schedule and $30,000 over budget. All Mr. Ramos said was that something awful had happened, that she should not panic, but he had to go. Mrs. Ramos was so groggy that she did not answer. Before he hung up, she could hear him shouting, while others screamed in the background. They were on the 87th floor of 1 World Trade Center, where Mr. Ramos was head trader at the May Davis Group, a small investment firm. She turned on the news, saw the burning tower, and ran to the phone. Within hours, friends and relatives arrived by the carload, sending teams to every hospital, handing out fliers, putting up posters, doing everything to find Mr. Ramos. Mrs. Ramos rode a roller coaster of grief and hope, buoyed one day when someone thought he had seen her husband, crushed the next when the sighting proved false. One night, at 3 a.m., the phone rang, and a woman named Rebecca Wald said that she had read about Mr. Ramos in the newspaper and was sure he was the man who had tried to save her husband, Victor. "I didn't want to say anything at first," Mrs. Ramos said. "I thought, `Who is she?' But then she started telling me about herself and her children." Mrs. Ramos was struck by certain coincidences. The Walds had two little girls; the Ramos's, two little boys. One of the Wald daughters was named Alex; so was one of the Ramos sons. Even the name Victor was shared by Harry's best friend, the best man at their wedding. The two women agreed to meet, at a gathering of May Davis employees. Mrs. Wald came with a photograph of her husband. One May Davis worker who had seen Victor in the stairway confirmed that he was indeed the stranger from another company who Harry Ramos had stayed behind to help – then burst into tears. Mr. Ramos, who had helped 12 of his colleagues to safety, was the only May Davis employee still missing. The others all survived. In the anguished days that followed, as she moved toward accepting the truth that her husband was dead, Mrs. Ramos began weaving what she had learned about Victor into a torturous tableau of what-ifs. Had her husband's death been preordained? What if the man in the stairway had not been named Victor? Would Harry have stopped? Or, what if she had not been so sleepy on Sept. 11? What if she had screamed into the phone that Harry should get out of the building as fast as he could? "If I had said something different," she thought, "maybe it would have turned out differently." The management of her mother's apartment building warned her that she had only until the end of September to clear everything out of the apartment, on the seventh floor. So at the very last moment, on Sept. 30, she went there with a retinue of brothers, in-laws and small children. As the Ramos kin, now twice bereaved, were hauling out boxes and furniture, the fire alarm sounded. Mrs. Ramos looked out into the hallway and saw smoke. She first ran down the stairs with everybody else, asking her sister-in- law to grab the baby. Learning from the superintendent that the firefighters had not yet arrived, she did not even stop to think. She turned and ran back up. Her in-laws were gaping, but she knew that her mother's neighbor across the hall was nearly blind and could not get out by herself. "When I was running up the steps, I was thinking, `Harry, what am I doing?' " she said. "The feelings I was having, it crossed my mind that he had had those same feelings. The fear. The anxiety. The heart palpitating. The adrenaline rushing." No one answered when she banged on the neighbor's door, so Mrs. Ramos continued down the hallway, right toward the source of the smoke. It was coming from an apartment. The door was open, so Mrs. Ramos went in and found a kitchen fire. In the bathroom, a frightened woman about her mother's age was holding a scarf over her nose and mouth and struggling to breathe. Mrs. Ramos opened the windows to let the smoke out. She subdued the fire, which had started in a toaster oven. Believing the woman was then safe, and suddenly worried about her 5-year-old, she ran back down to her stunned relatives. "I'm O.K. I'm O.K.," she told them. Then she looked up to the sky, and said, "God? Why am I going through this? Tragedy after tragedy. What's next? Why so much pain?" Her sister-in-law had an answer, saying, "Maybe Harry's trying to tell you something." He wanted her to understand why he stopped to help Victor, Mrs. Ramos has decided. That was why she got the impulse to run back up the stairs toward the fire and smoke. It was a sign – a message from her husband. "I did the same thing Harry did," she said. "It took me to how he would be feeling. I realized that Harry did what he did because that was Harry's nature." Her anger dissipated. She stopped brooding about her husband's motives, wondering how he could have left her with so many worries. That does not mean her heart has stopped aching. Far and wide, her husband's selflessness has inspired acts of charity and respect. A scholarship in California, a golf tournament in Puerto Rico and a bowling league in Newark have all been named for Harry Ramos. This year's New Jersey Puerto Rican parade was dedicated to him. His memorial service last month drew some 900 people, including the mayor of Newark and several other elected officials, who announced plans to name a city street after him. As for Mrs. Ramos, she has stayed in touch with Victor's widow, Mrs. Wald. At the end of the Thanksgiving weekend, she came home to a startling message on her answering machine: Victor's body had been found, intact. There would be a burial. Since the two men apparently died side by side, Mrs. Ramos now wonders whether she is about to get word about her husband's body. "It would be closure to a certain extent," she said. "When I go to my mother's grave site, I pray for her, and I can talk to her. I can't do that for Harry."
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