Another Kind of Hero
Deena Burnett is moving on with the same strength and conviction her husband demonstrated on hijacked Flight 93.
By Josh Sens • Photos by Barry Muniz
Even months later, the mail was still arriving by the barrelful, more correspondence than the postman could carry in a single trip. There were letters from priests and politicians, care packages, and Hallmark cards of canned condolences from strangers scattered around the globe. Children sent stick-figure crayon drawings. Fathers sent photographs of their sons. A young boy back East penned a heart-rending poem. A woman in India scrawled a four-page letter in broken English that implored, “Please, I would like to do friendship with you.”
The volume of mail was so overwhelming that she had it rerouted to the Pleasanton company where her husband had worked. There it was sorted, then shipped in bundles to her doorstep—the prayers, the patriotic proclamations, the unsolicited pledges of financial support. Often, when she’d open a letter, money would fall out and flit to the floor like an autumn leaf: a check for $50, a $10 bill.
Some people sent nothing more than cash donations. No card. No note. Not even an address. Just succinct instructions that were all the post office really needed: “To Deena Burnett, wife of Flight 93 hero Tom Burnett.”
It will be a year this month since that surreal morning when, at 6:27 her time, Tom called from his cell phone, gathering threads of information that were spreading like a web around the world. In a flurry of brief calls, he asked about the attacks. How many planes? What were the targets? He told Deena that he loved her. He told her to stay calm. He told her to take care of their three children.
So she sent the kids to school—five-year-old twins Halley and Madison, three-year-old Anna Clare—her mind concocting normalcy that wasn’t there. She imagined what they would have for dinner, never thinking, she says, that her husband wouldn’t walk through the door that night. It would take another six months and two memorial services, one in California and another in Tom’s native Minnesota, for the shock waves to ebb and for Deena to take in a clearer picture. But even now, she says, she still lies awake at night, waiting for Tom, knowing but not knowing that he’s never coming home.
People ask her how it feels, what it has been like. She has heard the questions more times than she cares to count. It is part of her fate as a once-private person transformed by tragedy into a public figure. She is 38 years old, a widowed mother of three, and a human face on a monstrous occurrence—a source, because of what she has suffered, for others trying to make sense of it all.
What sense is there to be made? People want to know, but when they ask, her answers vary. If there’s a lesson, a meaning that we can pull from the wreckage, it’s that we must be kind. She says that sometimes. Other times she tells them that we must respect each other.
She will never understand the 19 men and what drove them, she says, to “their acts of barbarism.” But she is certain of the way she must react.
“I don’t ask why me, or why has this happened,” she says. “My belief is that God has a plan, and that somehow this fits into his plan for me. If this is the cross that I’ve been given to bear, then let’s pick it up and walk down the road with it.”
We’re Going to Do Something
She spoke with Tom three more times that Tuesday morning as his plane hurtled back toward the eastern seaboard. Their conversations remain a blur in her memory, but every now and then snippets of what he said come back to her, “like gifts.” How he asked her to pray. How he was upset about his parents’ knowing what was happening. How he closed their final phone call with a promise: “We’re going to do something.”
“We’re going to do something.” The phrase became famous in the aftermath, a sound bite echoed on the network news. It was adopted as a slogan by a company in Texas. They put it on a placard and sent it to Deena, who pinned it proudly in the window of her car. “We’re going to do something.” The words were Tom’s, and yet, she says, they weren’t. He was the son of an English teacher, a lover of language, a man whose choice of speech was impeccably precise. The vagueness of Tom’s plan, hurriedly relayed from the chaos of the airplane cabin, was, in retrospect, her most telling indication of the pressures he was facing, of how horribly and irrevocably things had gone wrong.
That he really would do something was never in doubt. Tom Burnett was a man in constant motion, an executive with a medical device company who spent more than half his days on the road. Amid the whirlwind of his schedule, he loved to dwell on details—how many shirts to pack, how much to stash away in a savings account. He was a planner, organized almost to a fault.
In their partnership, she was the risk taker. He was cautious. He refused to have folding chairs in the house, afraid that they’d collapse if the children stood on them. He drove with two hands on the wheel. When he got on an airplane, the first thing he looked for was the emergency exit.
There were times, though, when Tom abandoned his caution—like when he met Deena in Atlanta in 1989.
She was working—of all jobs—as a flight attendant. It was girls’ night out, just Deena and a dozen or so friends from Delta Air Lines, in a bar, having drinks. At one point, her roommate introduced her to a tall man with thinning brown hair. “I was terribly bothered by him at first,” she says. “Who was this man, with not much hair on top, but confident almost to the point of arrogance?”
A few weeks later, she agreed to meet him for dinner at an Italian restaurant. A lamp hung low over their table for two, an interference in the atmosphere.
Tom reached up, unscrewed the bulb, and tossed it over his shoulder. It shattered like a wine glass near the wall. She was slack-jawed, speechless. “I’m trying to create a mood here,” he explained.
Following that date, she called her mom. She had met the man she was going to marry.
Infamous Tuesday
On that infamous Tuesday morning, as Deena waited white-faced for information, her neighbors formed a human chain around the entrance to her subdivision off Bollinger Canyon Road to prevent the TV vans from streaming through.
Tom had once told her, “If I ever come home and find you watching Oprah, you’re going back to work.” He had said it with a smile, and the line became their little inside joke. But Deena knew he was only half kidding. Tom despised the vacuum of daytime TV.
Now, in a grotesque turn, Oprah’s people were calling. Could she fly to the Chicago studio next Thursday for an interview? No? Okay. Would Monday do?
Deena declined. But a few days later, her face appeared on Oprah anyway. They’d taken footage from an interview she did with a local station, then cleverly spliced it. In the final cut, it looked like Deena was answering questions on Oprah’s show.
“I called the show directly to complain,” Deena says, “and they sent me this lame bunch of Gerbera daisies as an apology. Tacky. And my husband would roll over in his grave if he knew I had been talking about him on that show.”
By then, of course, Tom was being talked about everywhere, and Deena’s house was filled with more flowers than a funeral home. When the delivery men would arrive with colorful arrangements, she’d wave them in, letting them tread on the white carpet in her living room. There was a no-shoe policy in the Burnett household, but Deena didn’t have energy for enforcing rules.
She was sleepwalking through her waking hours, fulfilling responsibilities by rote. It would take months to regain some semblance of clear-headedness, months to emerge from a zombie’s haze.
She took the kids to school. She picked them up. She made lists of what to do and promptly lost them. She wandered aimlessly through grocery stores, where shoppers recognized her and enveloped her in hugs. “People would come up to me, embracing me, sobbing,” Deena says. “And what I would be thinking was, ‘What’s your name?’ ”
She understood, of course, that September 11 was momentous. She wasn’t mystified by the public shock. But for Deena Burnett—it sounds so strange to say this—for Deena Burnett, whose husband had been killed, the events weren’t a complete surprise.
Ten years before, her best friend, Elizabeth, had lost her husband in a plane crash. Deena had long imagined that one day she would suffer the same fate.
Just after the birth of her youngest, Anna Clare, she was lying in bed in the hospital, her mother sitting at her side.
Her mother told her: “Now that you have three girls, it’s time to have a boy, so Tom can have a son.”
Something unthinkable came to her, and Deena voiced it, not to be dramatic, but because it struck her as simple fact. “We’re not going to have a son,” she said, “because God is not going to let Tom live long enough for him to watch his children grow up.”
Deena’s mother was stunned. In the hospital room, she stared in amazement at her daughter. But she attributed the comment to the intense emotions of having a child.
Deena told Tom of her premonition one afternoon when he was pressing her to plan what each would do if the other died. Tom nodded. He somehow understood.
Not long after September 11, five-year-old Halley woke in her bedroom and found, on the floor, a patch of gold lamé, a shiny fleck of fabric that seemed to have materialized out of nowhere. She brought it to her mother.
“Mommy,” she said, “do you think Jesus brought me this to show me that Daddy is in a nice place?”
Deena nodded, forcing back tears, overcome by the contrast, in the wake of the violence, that her child could have such a gentle thought.
The girls’ thoughts weren’t always so innocent. After Tom’s death, Deena watched her children drift toward bad behavior. When she told Anna Clare she loved her, her daughter would blurt angrily, “Well, I don’t love you back.” Deena understood this as her daughter’s attempt to distance herself, the self-protective instincts of a young child afraid of losing someone else, but it was almost more than Deena could bear.
She and Tom had been rigid parents, not strict in an old-fashioned, knuckle-rapping manner, but in a firm, levelheaded way. No candy between meals. No junk food in the house. No gifts aside from birthday and Christmas presents.
Deena gradually let out slack. After what they had been through, the girls deserved indulgence. That was her thinking.
“But I figured out pretty quickly that, in this situation, what the girls really needed was more order,” Deena says. “Discipline was good for them.” She reset some limits, and her daughters’ moods improved. They stopped their sniping. But there was no way to shield them from their loss.
When she would drive with them through San Ramon, they would point out flags dangling over doorsteps, poking from the roofs of SUVs. “Look, Mommy,” they’d say, “that person must have really liked Daddy. Their flag is really, really big.”
Deena couldn’t help being struck by the strangeness of her family’s calamity swept up in such widespread collective grief. But her daughters’ pain was strictly personal, confined to the universe of children, and she worried how it would shape their lives.
At a doctor’s office one day, Halley sat playing with a little boy. She pointed to her mother.
“That’s my mom,” she told the boy. Then she pointed to a man sitting next to Deena.
“But that’s not my daddy,” Halley said. “My daddy’s dead.”
Deena tried not to let the children see her crying. But some days, after school, they would sit in the kitchen drawing pictures of their mother, depicting Deena with tears streaking down her face.
In February, on Anna Clare’s fourth birthday, a small family occasion, the young girl cast a sad glance at her cake. “I wish Daddy would come down from heaven to be with me,” she said.
Deena told her: “What do you think Daddy is doing? He’s up in heaven, looking down at you right now.”
Anna Clare smiled, closed her eyes, and blew out the candles. And her mother went into the other room and wept.
The Gift
At night, after putting the kids to sleep, Deena would sit up, driving herself crazy with contingencies. What if. What if.
What if Tom hadn’t gone on that business trip? What if, that morning, he hadn’t changed his schedule? He was always in a hurry to get home to his family and had been scheduled to leave on a later flight. What if he hadn’t bumped himself up to an earlier one?
A person could go mad mulling over such matters. She knew better than to do it. But even during daylight, when her mind wandered off to pleasant distractions, there were constant reminders to drag her back. The war had started. White powder was turning up in D.C. mailrooms. There were ever-present warnings of fresh attacks.
Acquaintances would call, asking her how she was doing. “I’m fine, thank you,” she’d say as conversational filler—an empty pleasantry masking a polite lie. She considered offering a more honest answer. But would they want to hear how she sat alone at night, longing to hug a husband who wasn’t there?
The children were a blessing, and requests for her time were an oddly welcome diversion. She was asked to write a book, to be the subject of a TV documentary. Goldie Hawn’s production company called to gauge her interest in a film about the passengers on her husband’s flight. (Deena told her story and is waiting to hear if it will be in the final cut.)
She also met the president and received a message of gratitude from Dianne Feinstein. The letters kept coming. A father back East, whose son had been touring the White House on September 11, sent Deena a photograph of his family. In a note, he wrote that his son’s life had been spared because the hijacked airplane, bound for D.C., had been diverted. He told Deena that every Thanksgiving, from that day forth, before they carved the turkey, his family would give thanks to Tom Burnett.
In her grief, Deena Burnett, a mother from San Ramon, was acquiring a gravitas that she never wanted, but now accepted as a gift.
In the spring, she flew to Seattle for a baseball game between the Mariners and the New York Yankees. On the field, before play started, Yankee manager Joe Torre handed her a check from the Moyer Foundation (named for Seattle pitcher Jamie Moyer), part of a relief effort for surviving family members.
“He had tears in his eyes and he said, ‘It’s such an honor to meet you,’ ” she says. “And I was thinking, no, it’s an honor to meet you. But I also realized that I had been given a kind of power, and that I could use it to make a difference.”
She threw her weight behind several charities, then focused her efforts on one: the Tom Burnett Family Foundation, which will raise money for college scholarships in Tom’s name (see box on page 164).
She also used her power to pressure the government to release information that wouldn’t change anything but her state of mind. She knew that it wouldn’t. That didn’t matter. She needed to hear the cockpit recorder from Flight 93.
In April, the FBI finally relented. And so she flew to New Jersey, huddled in a room with headphones and 100 or so relatives of the victims, and listened to sounds of horror that were far more soothing than she had dreamed.
She can’t describe the details. She signed papers promising not to, so as not to taint the trial of the suspected “20th hijacker,” Zacarias Moussaoui. But what she heard was a struggle, the whoosh of high winds, and the distinct timbre of her husband’s voice.
“When I heard his voice, I started to cry, but then I realized that my crying was interfering with my ability to hear the tape,” she says. “I was there to gather information. And I can say that the information helped give me some peace.” She is more convinced than ever that her husband acted heroically—that all the passengers on Flight 93 did.
That same month, she and Tom’s parents and sister went to Shanksville, Pennsylvania, to see the scarred stretch of earth where the Boeing 757 went down. The site had been cleaned up and combed over in the hunt for evidence and in the search for remains, most of which had been collected in the branches of trees. The coroner told her this, and he pointed to an expansive pile of wood chips. Her husband, he said, was somewhere in there.
His body had been identified by fingerprints, which made Deena wonder: Did they find his left hand or his right? She hadn’t gotten back his wedding ring.
“His left hand or his right. This is what my life has become. These are the kinds of horrors I lie awake thinking about at night.”
She and Tom’s family accompanied Tom’s remains to Minnesota, where Tom was raised, where his parents still live. They held a burial service in a nearby cemetery, next to an empty plot that Deena has reserved for herself some day. She hadn’t brought the children, and sitting there that morning, drowning in the emotion of the moment, suffocating in its finality, she watched Tom’s parents, weeping, broken. She was glad she had left her children at home.
Rhythms of a Normal Day
“Oh, God, oh, God, why have you for-saken me?”
The congregation sang in a low and mournful minor key. It was Palm Sunday, March 24, at St. Isidore Church in Danville, the church where Deena and her girls had sought solace every week.
Halley was hunched over in the pew, playing with a palm frond that had been handed to her. Deena sat upright, her gaze directed upward, singing a query that was actually an affirmation of her faith.
Deena Burnett has never felt forsaken. She feels blessed by her family, grateful for her friends, humbled by the groundswell of support. There are so many people she would like to thank. This article, she says, is one way for her to express her gratitude to the local community that rallied around her. It is also a way for her to say goodbye.
She has sold the house in San Ramon, not out of desire but out of a sense of duty to her children. Since his death, Tom has been engaging her in conversations, whispering comforts, offering advice. She hears his voice, and even when she can’t, she knows what he would say. Because they always spoke of everything, planning in tandem, Deena says that she and her husband are still parenting together, deciding on what’s best for the girls. And so she has moved back to her native Arkansas, to a big house with a big yard and lots of family nearby.
By June, the house in San Ramon was packed up and boxed. The movers arrived to haul everything away. As Deena watched the men work, a camera crew watched Deena. Reporters asked questions. NBC was shooting footage for a documentary-style prime-time show set to air this month.
She and the kids were sleeping at a hotel. On June 16—Father’s Day—the girls would give a ballet recital in Pleasanton, and that would be their farewell gesture.
In the weeks leading up to their departure, Deena spent hours wandering through the house, sifting through Tom’s unboxed possessions—his hardcover books on politics and presidents, his weekly magazines on current events. She went to his closet, packed up his shirts—she didn’t want them now, but one day, she knew, she would feel the need to touch them.
She paused in the bedroom, pressed his clothing to her face, and inhaled deeply. Her husband’s scent was no longer on them, and sensing this, she began to cry.
She has other ways of remembering him.
In the months after Tom was killed, Deena never dreamt about her husband. That bothered her. Then, around Christmas, when she slept, he began to slip into her subconscious. There was nothing remarkable about the dreams, except in how mundane they were. There were no flashes of violence, no fleeting images from 9/11.
In Deena’s dreams, she and Tom were simply walking with their children, enjoying the rhythms of a normal day. DM
Josh Sens is a freelance writer who lives in Oakland.
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