Remembering Carrie Progen 1980-2001 (Aon Corp. employee, died 9/11/2001)
I came to the on-line Guest Book for Carrie Progen and was struck by the fact that people – not just family members - are still writing about her/to her ten years later on every anniversary of 9/11. What brought me to her page? My growing sense of my own mortality. I’m looking for family connections.
Carrie Progen and I were distant relatives, but we never met. Carrie was from Gen X, whereas I’m a baby boomer. Her great grandmother (Hattie) and my grandmother (Katherine) were “Carey girls”: modest and fun-loving sisters (and horsewomen) born around 1900. They grew up when women in N. England were pulled out of school to learn a trade at 14, and whose lives were greatly impacted by WWI. My Mom (nee Margaret Landers in 1926-2003) was Carrie’s grandfather Howard’s cousin. The family is very big and some branches are estranged from others, but the passing of certain beloved members (such as Carrie and Uncle Franklin) has had the effect of pulling distant family members like me back into the fold. I grew up relatively untethered to any family except for an unconventional one comprised of my mother Margaret, her brother Richard, and their mother Katherine Carey Landers. These “Landers” relatives all failed at marriage, and banded together to survive. Somehow they managed to raise me until I left home at 16. From early on, I also knew I was rejected (i.e. I did not exist for) my father’s side of the family (the Atkinson-Nichols from Appalacian Virginia and South Carolina) so I grew up feeling out of step with the “mom and dad” families that surrounded me. I even identified with the orphan’s experience despite having a close relationship with my own mother. Fast forward five decades and I’m grateful to my Mother’s side of the family – the Carey side from which Carrie came. This kind and loving branch welcomed me back after my Mother’s death.
I found out about Carrie Progen because of the tragic ending of her life. In many ways, her life mirrored certain stages of my own very closely, so I can relate to her right up until that Tuesday in 9/11/2001 when she was in the Aon office on the 103rd floor of the WTC, working at her first real job after college. My time in NYC spanned 1977-1983 but the worst thing that ever happened to me there was being pistol whipped. I had also left a small backwoods town in Central Massachusetts for college and then went to the Big Apple to start a career . Going back further, my mother had taken me on week-end shopping and theater trips to NYC since 1965, so NYC was a focal point of my life for two decades. In addition, my mother loved celebrating with friends at the restaurant on top of the World Trade Center, whereas I had only been up there once, as I found the elevator ride creepy.
On Sept. 11th, 2001 I was on Cape Cod. My Mother had sold her house there and I had finally disposed of some family furniture (and its emotional ballast) early that morning. At 8a.m. I experienced a great sense of relief. It was short-lived. I went to my favorite beach in Centerville and was in a great mood. Then before I knew it, I was listening to the chilling updates on NPR. By 9:30 a.m. my mother and I were standing in a roomful of strangers watching the horror unfold on a widescreen TV at a local laundromat. Neither of us had any idea that a distant relative – much less such a young one as Carrie – was dying as we watched.
Here I am today, middle-aged and writing a few words on a foggy gray evening on the Central Coast of California, where I settled in 1985. The recession of 2008/09 has not been kind, but I seem to have come back from the brink. Carrie’s loss of her one life reminded me to count my blessings and work to make sense of what’s left of the life and gifts I’ve been given. And to take pride and comfort in the generations of good people (and strong women) in our family who faced tremendous difficulties over the decades, the loss of a child too soon in 2001 being only the most recent example.
