All these years later, November comes and I can’t stop thinking about that hospital lobby. All around us, people were weeping, holding torn and burned fragments of garments that had allowed them to find and know their loved ones. We were empty-handed; we didn’t know where she was, and it would be many hours before we did. It was a full day before she was identified, and so there was a lot of time to imagine other ends to the story. There were a few cases where people thought to be there were not after all. Those were the happy stories, the miracles: the people who were disappointed that Boston College had lost to Holy Cross and decided to go home instead of getting a drink; a doctor who was called to deliver a baby; a young woman from Lowell too young to be served. By the end, my father and I had gone to all the places where we were told people had been taken: the hospitals, Southern Mortuary, even an empty store across the street from the club, which served as a holding place for bodies. Too many bodies. There was a place on Warren Street filled with purses that were unidentified. I paced the aisles there; so many small black clutches. There was also jewelry waiting at the mortuary, inscribed rings and bracelets.

It took 89 hours to identify all the dead. The newspaper stories told of orphans left behind, whole wedding parties lost—one couple just married at Our Lady of Pity. They wrote of blackened bodies, and those untouched by flames but dead nonetheless, their lungs filled with deadly gases. I didn’t want to read the paper, but I couldn’t help myself; my father threw the paper away, but I retrieved it when he wasn’t looking and ran my finger along the column of names. Then one day, her name was there. We already knew by then, but it was still a shock to see it in print. I’ve saved all the clippings so you can read for yourself. Here’s a whole folder of them, sad stories filling the Globe for weeks and weeks. I go back and read them sometimes, all of it still so shocking.