9-11 Tribute

Thomas Fitzpatrick is the man that I am paying tribute to today. This blog is a part of the 2,996 project. I don't know much about Thomas Fitzpatrick but here is what I do know: He was a husband and a father of a little boy and a little girl when he died. He was 35 years old. He lived with his family in Tuckahoe, New York. Thomas Fitzpatrick was a Bond Salesman Financial Adviser, Sandler O'Neill & Partners. He had to be Irish...Fitzpatrick is a pretty well known Irish name. These words are not enough and this tribute is not what he deserves. I read something recently in the Zero Boss blog . He says it better than I ever could. How can I call forth the people who knew him to give him a proper remembrance? It doesn’t matter who he was or what he did or didn’t do in his short lease on Earth; he deserves this memorial. We all do. After all, it could have easily been me.

And isn’t that the moral of this story? It could have been me. Hell, I used to work across the street from the Towers in Bankers Trust Plaza. Why Karen Helene Schmidt, and not Jay Andrew Allen? No reason. Circumstances sent her one way, and I another. The particulars of our two lives are divergent; our fates, however, are interchangeable. We are all equally conditional creatures. Strip us down to brass tacks, and we all sparkle with the same radiant essence. That my essence is still attached to my body and Karen’s does not is the result of a coin toss, and nothing more. But Karen’s memory means more to me than a sermon on the sins of procrastination and sloth. Thinking of her agonizing over my memory the way I’m agonizing over hers, I feel a vivid connection to the moral core of our species. Through her memorial, I awaken my own humanity.

As for the particulars…no, I don’t know that much detail about Karen Helene Schmidt. Yet. My tribute to her is that I’m posing those questions, and searching for answers.

My tribute is that I care enough to ask.

Have a good day and say a prayer or think a good thought for Thomas Fitzpatrick and his family. Remember.