Doug Mello finds weddings especially difficult. He can handle the first hour, give or take, but the thought of his son Chris dancing with the bride consumes him and drives him out of the room.
This is why Melo despises the “time heals all wounds” notion. 25 years ago Friday, the father of a young man who was one of the victims of mass killings targeting America’s pillars of economic and military power by turning planes into missiles, time has come.
Melo’s sons, JD and Chris, are suburban New York football stars at Ray High and athletes at Princeton — JD, the oldest son, was a member of a two-time NCAA championship lacrosse team, and Chris, a bit undersized for Division 1 football, was instead a rugby player.
The father loved to talk about Chris’ strength as Ray’s leading tackler and senior co-captain who helped carry his high school. Doug was more proud of that loss than any of his previous victories because Chris faced an opponent who weighed nearly 100 pounds, “and he was fighting the sucker all day,” he said.
As a 25-year-old analyst at a Boston venture firm, Chris was taking boxing lessons — and impressing his trainer as a natural — weeks before boarding American Airlines Flight 11 to Los Angeles on September 11, 2001. He told his girlfriend and childhood sweetheart, Christy Walsh, that he had been promoted to the flying business. Christy tells him he has a beautiful day to fly.
Chris, three of the five hijackers who attacked passengers and crew, were seated and at 8:46 am crashed a Boeing 767 into the North Tower of the World Trade Center.
Days after the crash, Doug told me: “I have no doubt in my mind that Chris was struggling with them. Psychiatrist friends tried to explain that this was the first time, that they had no knowledge, that the pilots were cold-blooded.”
Some families of 9/11 victims find it difficult to attend large ceremonies to honor the dead. (Kenna Betancourt/AFP via Getty Images)
Photos of a smiling Chris Lover’s life — here in a pirate outfit, there in a Mets uniform — adorn Melo’s living room. A white envelope addressed to Mello’s family and from American Airlines sat on his desk.
Du and I have been in touch for years, sometimes discussing his love for the Red Sox and, later, his disdain for PGA Tour stars who took big Saudi bucks to play for LIV Golf. In the year We talked a lot about the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, which killed six people, including a pregnant woman, injured over a thousand, and shook my husband’s Bankers Trust office violently.
Doug was a telephone company executive and worked that business center position with compassion and integrity. With power out and trapped workers constantly calling their loved ones, Doug refuses official advice to cut the phone lines to save the seemingly crumbling system. He wasn’t the only one cutting off the lifeline those people had for their families.
After the 93 bombing, he met with federal agents and did what he could to help police, firefighters and displaced workers. “The sad funny thing is, my son was killed in the World Trade Center,” Doug said eight years later.
But as he continued to struggle with his anger and grief until his death last year at the age of 82, Doug always turned back to something the terrorists stole from Chris and it hurt him deeply.
“He would have been such a great dad because he loved kids so much, and they took that away from him,” Doug said.
Doug and his wife Ellen and their son JD and family members have felt that pain every day since 9/11. As the nation mourns the nearly 3,000 victims (is that even an appropriate word?) to mark the 25th anniversary, their families will come to terms with their unfathomable loss for the 9,131st consecutive day.
Theirs is not a once-a-year public celebration, but a personal calendar that the uninitiated cannot understand.
Carolee Azzarello understands. While working for Cantor Fitzgerald, she lost her two brothers, Tim and John, longtime New York Yankees shortstop Hank Grazioso.
Carolee says she will stay home on Friday with the TV off. “I can’t stand the image of the North Tower with smoke coming out of it,” she said. “Everybody sees that as a symbol of 9/11. I see my brothers dying in there.”
“As much as I appreciate “Never Forget,” I don’t appreciate the constant attention. It’s been 25 years since 9/11 earlier this year, and it’s hard to have such a personal and personal loss. No one knows the anniversary of a parent or sibling’s death on a baseball cap or t-shirt.
Carroll’s father, Hank, who worked in the ticket office, could say that Mickey Mantle, a fanatic and rare baseball lifeguard, had conversations with Babe Ruth (as a child in a garden in Clifton, NJ) and Derek Jeter (at a Turks and Caicos restaurant, no less). In the year On the morning of 9/11, watching coverage of the burning towers, Hank knelt and prayed with Frank Swain, the Yankees’ vice president of ticket operations, who had lost his son John, another Cantor Fitzgerald employee.
I had several conversations with Hank before his death in 2023. In one of them, he listed the remains of his children, descriptions that are not available in print. On the other hand, we spoke the morning after US special forces killed Osama bin Laden in 2011.
“I hope you’re having a great day,” I said as he answered the phone.
“Of course I am,” he replied.
John, left, Hank, center, and Tim Grazioso. (Courtesy of the Grazioso family)
Hank says he sat in his bedroom alone with his thoughts as he tried to do the bin Laden news. Among the “eight million emotions running through me,” he noted, “relief” was the most prominent emotion. When he woke up that morning, he said, “I thought to myself, ‘Well, at least the kids need some closure.’ I think they’re celebrating there now.”
Months after the slayings, Grazioso would see visions of his children every time he opened the ticket window at Yankee Stadium. Two years before his death, Grazioso said he had another fleeting vision of Tim and John smiling in a bright light in his bedroom.
John’s wife Tina and their three children and significant others are scheduled to attend Friday night’s Yankees-Mets game in the Bronx. Hank loved bringing his kids and Carolee to the old stadium, back in the day.
Karolyi will not be at the game or the morning ceremony downtown. “I have no desire to face the world on Friday,” she said. Like many 9/11 family members, she privately honors her lost loved ones.
Jeremy Glick with his son Emerson, July 17, 2001 (Reuters)
Jed Glick said by phone Wednesday that he has felt personal stress every day for a quarter century, but in Shanksville, Pa. He said he was heading to the ceremony, in part because of the local community after his brother Jeremy’s heroic death in the United Airlines Flight 93 crash.
“I think it’s important to educate everyone who wasn’t there or doesn’t have memories of 9/11,” Jade said. “The public must know the tragedy of that day and the issues of heroism and unity.”
Representing a school called Rochester, Jade’s brother, who didn’t even have a team, won the 1993 National Collegiate Judo Championship in the 86 kg division. According to Ncjajudo.org, Fresno State’s top contender “surprised everyone” by losing to little-known Jeremy Glick.
Jeremy Glick, now considered one of the world’s most heroic souls, fought off the hijackers on the Newark to San Francisco flight, preventing them from making a direct attack on the famous Washington, DC target, and brought the plane down near Shanksville.
“As sad as it was, it really helped that my brother went down in combat,” Jade said. “It’s not amazing to me that he was able to do that because that’s what Jeremy was. It was the first time we were able to fight him that day, and if that saves the Capitol or another target and a lot of lives on Earth, there’s something good you can get out of it.”
Jeremy talks to his wife Lizbeth and tells her to take care of their son Emerson before he leaves the phone and charges the terrorists.
“My daughter Ellie is seven and my daughter Birdie is 10 months old, so I’ve had eight more months with my son than Jeremy has with his son,” Jade said. “So I think about things like this, this year, everything starts to come back, the shock, the suddenness, when I was there, when I knew the rest of your family, the weather is like that day.
“I was 23 on 9/11, so it’s been a long time since I was with my brother, which is painful.
In the early years after the attacks, Ellen Mello attended one 9/11 commemoration at the World Trade Center site, but she hasn’t been back since.
“It was so big, so big,” she said. “I felt like something was lost inside me. I thought it was incredible what they were doing, but for me personally, I was very worried.”
Like her son J.D., Ellen is involved in the 9/11 Memorial and Museum, an annual ceremony and foundation named after Chris and his Alta Communications partner, David Rettick, who have distributed $4.2 million in philanthropic grants to develop young leaders.
Ellen thanks Doug’s Pride and Joy for supporting the Chris Mello Scholarship Fund, which awards money to outstanding students on each side of the Rye-Harrison football rivalry.
But Ellen said, “We are private mourners.” “I separate my grief over Chris’s death from the historical event. It wasn’t just an accident. Everyone who died had a family life taken away.”
Ellen said her husband had a hard time dealing with his grief. “It bothered him,” she said. Doug was not alone.
“Chris would have been my best man,” his brother said. JD and his wife Gina have two sons, Jaden and Jack, born after 9/11. “It’s hard to describe your uncle to someone you don’t know or have never met,” JD said. But Chris comes around often…and the sad thing is that they loved him, and he would have been a wonderful addition to their lives.
Chris was known for his easy smile and generosity of spirit, and his mother was comforted by the fact that her youngest son was so happy with his life. Ellen still feels joy when she looks at pictures of Christ, including a photo Doug took of his young children two decades ago near the Statue of Liberty.
JD, left, and Chris Melo as young children. (Courtesy of the Melo family)
There’s a little Jedi on the left and a little Chris on the right, the Twin Towers rising into the sky behind them. Ellen had the picture framed in her bedroom. One day, as she was walking, the image stopped her cold.
“Oh goodness,” said Ellen. “To think what will happen there after so many years.”
A hell-on-earth event for the nearly 3,000 families who still suffer every day.
