Originally from Commonplace CommonSense » Blog Archive » From Taneytown to the Towers: The Life & Death of JoAnn Heltibridle.:


09
Sep
From Taneytown to the Towers: The Life & Death of JoAnn Heltibridle.

JoAnn HeltibridleJoAnn could have been any of us. She did all the same things that most Americans do. She had family & friends, a home & two cats, Taz & Ivy. She had a job she loved. And on September 11, 2001, all that was taken away from her.

I don’t think that growing up in Taneytown in western Maryland she ever thought that this is how her life would end. Taneytown is just like any other small town in America. Looking at their news stories over the past week, you’ll see the same issues that take up newspaper space in every paper in the country. Local firefighters & city hall. School issues. The Chamber of Commerce. Growing up there for JoAnn must have been very similar to how so many of us grew up in the 60s & 70s.

But she grew up, married, divorced, and left Taneytown to work for an insurance company in Morristown, NJ. When Marsh & McLennan took the company over, she went with them, all the way to New York City & a senior vice president’s job at the top of the World Trade Center. Imagine for a moment, Mary Tyler Moore tossing her hat in the air. JoAnn was living that sort of American dream - a great job in a great city with friends & family only a trainride away.

She often returned to Taneytown for long weekends with her family, especially after her father passed away from cancer. In Taneytown, her mother, her brother Daniel and her niece, Lori, still lived there. Lori adored her & called her Joey or Jo-Jo.

“She was more like a second mom than an aunt,” Lori said. ”JoAnn decided to have a career rather than a family. When I was born, I became like her adopted daughter. We were very close. My mom always called me a miniature JoAnn.” 

So JoAnn was living a good life with many people who loved her when she went work that Tuesday morning, the eleventh of September. She went to work that morning with her best friend, Susan Murray, who usually worked at Marsh & McLennan’s New Jersey office. Neither woman made it out of the building.

For her, it was probably a morning just like any other, the way we all go to work each morning. To her, that morning probably was a good one. It was a brilliant blue day with the hint of autumn in the air. She might have been thinking of work that morning. She might have been thinking of family.

JoAnn went to work living her version of the American dream and she died living all of our worst nightmares. And while we can and must never forget the horror of that morning, let us also never forget the lives of those we lost that day. Rather than just remembering her as a name on a list of victims, let us celebrate her life. Let us remember all that she was & all that she could have been.

For her family, her brother, her niece Lori, JoAnn will forever be more than a name on a list. Let the rest of us remember her that way, too.