A 9/11 survivor’s perspective, six years later

Some memories are as clear as snapshots. Shoes were everywhere. Not pairs of shoes, single shoes. Everywhere. She’ll never forget that.

Six years ago this morning, Lisa Lee became a survivor of the attack on the North Tower, One World Trade Center, the first target of terrorists on Sept. 11, 2001.

“I was on the 19th floor,” said Lee, 43, who lives in Chicago with her husband, Zaden Lee.

A 1982 graduate of Mariner High School — she was Lisa Bartholomew then — Lee is a changed person since that harrowing day. She’s more thankful, and less concerned with small problems.

Her mother, Pat Harris, still lives in Mukilteo, and Lee visits often.

As Lee wrote in a Christmas letter that first December, “I want to hold tight to the lessons that I learned this year, what it means to help others, and that the daily hassles and frustrations that seem so important are no comparison to seeing and being able to hold that person you love,” she wrote to family and friends in 2001.

Talking from home in Chicago, Lee said last week she’ll now go days without thinking about her real-life nightmare.

“Here’s what I think about, little mundane decisions that made such a big difference,” she said. “The people who were late for work that day, or the decisions you made in the first five minutes. For so many people, that determined whether they lived or died.”

The 9/11 Commission report estimated that some 16,000 people were in the towers below the impact areas. Most of them survived. Lee, who worked for a division of Empire Blue Cross Blue Shield, escaped with co-workers down a stairway.

When the first plane hit, she said, “we absolutely felt the building shake.”

“First I thought it was an earthquake,” she said. “Some people I talked to later had smelled jet fuel. I didn’t,” said Lee. Her husband would also have been in the building if he hadn’t gone to Rhode Island for a meeting that day.

Lee and her co-workers had no idea what was wrong. “We had no clue,” she said. “We weren’t by a window. One of the biggest things in the whole experience is that everyone in the whole world knew more than we knew.”

She recalls neither panic nor screaming. Her boss, a woman, made a quick and lifesaving decision. Despite smoke in the hallway, “the president of our company came and said ‘Go out and go down the stairs.’ A few people in the stairway were really quite upset, but generally everybody was helping,” Lee said.

Even then, Lee was living in Chicago. She and her husband flew to New York every Sunday for the work week. They worked with two other women from Chicago, Phyllis Fredette and Carolyn Brashars. “Phyllis was in her 60s and had had a heart attack,” Lee said. She stayed with Fredrette through the whole ordeal.

“On the stairway, I was carrying Phyllis’s purse and the strap broke. It dumped stuff out on the stairs,” said Lee, recalling a man stopping to help pick things up.

All three women got out without injury, but Fredette died a year later. “I miss Phyllis every day,” Lee said.

In her Christmas letter, Lee described smoke getting thicker as they went down. At the 13th floor, some wanted to go back up. After hearing shouts of “No, go down!” they resumed their descent, while seeing firefighters passing them to go upstairs.

Emerging from the stairwell, they came out into what Lee thought was a back hallway. It was the tower’s severely damaged lobby, unrecognizable. “There were big slabs of marble and granite down. And there were really injured people in the lobby,” Lee said. An elevator shaft had filled with jet fuel, she said, causing terrible damage and burns.

As they escaped through the Marriott Hotel between the towers, she heard a police officer or firefighter command them to “cover your head and run.”

“We covered our heads and went out onto Liberty Street. At the moment my foot hit the median in the street, the second plane flew directly over my head,” she said. “You know how a plane, right when you’re taking off, revs the engine? That’s exactly what it seemed to do.”

For a few eerie minutes, they watched the buildings burn. Lee tried calling her husband but couldn’t get through on a cell phone. They made it to a dry cleaner’s, where a woman let them use a phone.

In Mukilteo, Pat Harris got the call from her daughter. “We normally get up about 8 o’clock,” Harris said last week. Lee’s call, shortly after 6 a.m., woke her up.

Harris recalled Lee saying, “I need you to do something for me,” and asking that her mother call her husband and the other women’s husbands to let them know they’d made it out. Harris had no idea what her daughter was talking about.

“I realized afterward that I never really told her what was going on,” Lee said. “She was really so calm. She said, ‘Are you all right?’ “

On a car radio, they heard about the Pentagon attack. From a cell phone, someone said TV was reporting that one tower was leaning and they should get as far away as they could.

They walked and walked. When the first building fell, Lee and her friend were engulfed in a white cloud. Using her jacket, she tied the two of them together.

On foot, they made it nearly to the Brooklyn Bridge before catching a ride with a stranger. The man, who had picked up several others, took them to a hotel near John F. Kennedy International Airport. There, a woman saw them covered with dust and paper. Although there were about 80 people trying to get rooms, the woman gave them hers.

Lee’s husband made it to them in his rental car, which they drove home to Chicago the next day.

A few days later, a belt broke on Lee’s washing machine. Hearing the sound and smelling smoke, Lee burst into tears — for the first time.

Within weeks, they traveled to Mukilteo to touch base with Lisa Lee’s mother and siblings, and then to Texas to see Zaden Lee’s family. And not long after the tragedy, they were back in New York working in a hotel where their company rented space. She now works from home.

Once, the summer after the attacks, she was on the 34th floor of a Chicago building during preparations for an air show. “I ended up leaving, the sounds really bothered me,” she said.

To this day, she is angered by second-guessing, “what the firemen should have done, things like that. How could anyone prepare for some maniac thing like that? They did a really amazing job.”

Mostly, though, she doesn’t think about it.

“You can’t not live your life,” Lee said.

Columnist Julie Muhlstein” 425-339-3460 or muhlstein@heraldnet.com