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To: oldirtybastard who wrote (168453)	5/28/2002 9:20:09 AM
From: JHP	Respond to of 436258

Families of victims not found in N.Y. live with emptiness by Peter Gelzinis Tuesday, May 28, 2002 They have yet to find either Katherine Wolf or Sean Lugano. Every piece of twisted steel has been picked up and catalogued. A billion tons of rubble that was New York's World Trade Center has been sifted through, shipped across the harbor to Staten Island, and sifted through again. What's left is a sacred canyon on the tip of Lower Manhattan. It spans 16 square blocks and goes down at least a dozen stories below the street. Firefighters, cops and construction workers took only eight months to create it. When they weren't digging or searching, they formed weary corridors of tribute through which they gently carried the remains of the lost out of the ruins. Neither Katherine Wolf nor Sean Lugano were among them. On Memorial Day, Charlie Wolf sat in his Greenwich Village apartment and spoke of a modest wish he's come to nurture recently. ``Someday, I'm hoping to hear they've found (Katherine's) ring,'' Charlie said, yesterday. ``That would be nice . . . lovely, in fact.'' Katherine, his wife of 13 years had just begun a new job at Marsh & McLennan on the 97th floor of the North Tower. What peace Charlie Wolf has managed to take away from 9/11 has come out of a deep belief that his wife did not suffer. He's certain she was vaporized in the moment American Flight 11 became a fireball. ``In my heart I know . . . I know Katherine was gone by the time the sound of the explosion hit my ears and rattled my apartment windows,'' he said. For Eileen Lugano, knowledge brings its own pain. What little she knows of the last minutes of her son's life has left her family still grappling with uncertainty. After Flight 11 crashed into the North Tower, Sean Lugano was on the 88th floor of the South Tower. The 28-year-old broker phoned his brother to say he was OK. No need for panic, his building had not been hit. Eileen Lugano knows her son, John, pleaded with his kid brother to leave. But Sean apparently chose to heed the advice echoing throughout tower two, and remained at his desk. ``There was a second call,'' Eileen said, ``after the other plane hit Sean's building. My youngest son is convinced that Sean probably said things to his brother, John, or maybe John heard things in the background that the rest of us still don't really know.'' A front-page story in Sunday's N.Y. Times sampled frantic cell phone calls from doomed office workers stranded on the upper floors. Eileen Lugano said it also spawned more anguished soul searching within her own family. Still, like Charlie Wolf, Eileen Lugano plans to be at Ground Zero Thursday, when the digging and searching officially comes to an end, and the workers march out of an empty canyon. ``I have to be there,'' Charlie Wolf said, ``for all the firefighters and construction workers who brought their hearts down into that hole each day for these last eight months. I have to be there to show my gratitude for the way they toiled, for the love they showed us.'' The last time Eileen Lugano brought herself to the place where her son, Sean, was lost, she was humbled by what she called ``the sight of war.'' She had grown up with her father's stories of Pearl Harbor. Gazing on the mountains of burning metal, she understood the hell he tried to describe. ``It was the only other time I've been there,'' Eileen said, ``and I felt I was standing at the edge of a battlefield where all these people - not just Sean - had been killed. ``On Thursday,'' she said, ``I think it will be more intimate, maybe. A moment that I can keep to use in the future when I need it.'' Eileen Lugano will also bring a heartfelt gratitude to Ground Zero on Thursday. As a veteran New York schoolteacher who now instructs adults, many of her students were among those who dug and searched around the clock. Come Thursday, a husband will survey the vast empty desolation of place where his wife was lost and try to feel her spirit. A mother will wonder what happened to her boy, and whether God in his mercy will ever see fit to have some small trace of him located. Charlie Wolf says his life can't go forward if he wallows in the ``blame game'' of post-9/11. Eileen Lugano, meanwhile, has come to believe ``we were duped'' by those who failed to pay attention. She will take her questions to a Washington rally June 11. They have no choice but to live with the hole in their hearts. Yet both these New Yorkers said they want the hole in their skyline not repaired . . . but rebuilt. ``I want something big and full of life,'' Charlie Wolf said. ``I miss looking up and not seeing them. I know Katherine would, too.''