A woman widowed by the September 11 attacks spoke about how workers searching the wreckage for the dead found her husband’s heart.
After the initial horror of the attacks, workers had the important but unenviable task of sifting through the wreckage, searching for the remains of the people who died in the attacks in the US.
A report by 60 Minutes explained that if they wished to know, the deceased’s loved ones could choose to be told if their loved one had been found either once at the end of the searches, or every time that workers found human remains that had a DNA match.
Nicole Petrocelli lost her husband Mark Petrocelli, a commodities broker who had recently had a promotion and had been employed in one of the towers. His remains would not be found by searchers until the day after a memorial service.
She told 60 Minutes that she is one of those who ‘choose to know every time’, but this has meant that she ended up finding out things about her husband’s death that she said she had ‘never imagined’.
“A couple of weeks ago I got a phone call that they found his heart,” she said. “I never imagined that his torso wasn’t intact, and I never imagined that his heart would be picked up off the ground in the middle of fire and rubble.”
She explained why she had chosen to be told every time part of her husband’s remains were found, even if it would give her a horrible impression of how he had died.
“I feel like if he was sick and he was dying I would have taken care of him, so this is the way I can take care of him, and when he’s identified I want to know, and I want to take him home,” she said.
Nicole was asked about how most families would not be notified at all that their loved ones had been found, as searchers simply hadn’t found anything.
“It’s important for the families to remember that the recovery, the identification process, will continue at the medical examiner’s office for quite some time, probably almost a year,” she said, “so there is hope.”
She shared that there was still one thing that she clung on to in the hope it would be found.
“I never give up hope that I’ll get his wedding band back that I want so desperately, or that I’ll get another phone call about some other remains,” she said, describing herself as the ‘the luckiest of the unlucky’ to have been told that some of her husband’s remains had been found.
Nicole would be able to bury her husband in August 2002, and spoke to New York Magazine about when the medical examiner told her how they believed Mark had died, telling the outlet: “He said Mark was probably killed by the initial blast of the plane. He was thrown so far out of the building he was killed instantly.”
The next day she would receive the phone call telling her that they had recovered Mark’s right foot and his heart.
“I could hardly breathe,” she said. “But I suppose, as time went on, I thought of it as ‘You have my heart; I love you’. And that’s how I think of it now.”