Joy and Al Shepard
09/08/2002
Joy Shepard escaped from the 61st floor of the World Trade Center and is haunted by the fact that so many did not make it out. Her husband, Al Shepard, faced the agony of not knowing her fate for hours. (from the Union Tribune)
MEMORANDUM
Date: 9-11-2002
TO: LeaderFOCUS Readers
FROM: Ken
SUBJECT: Joy Shepard's Response to AMAZING GRACE - LeaderFOCUS for Monday 9-9-2002
This most recent LeaderFOCUS triggered many responses. It is an incredible story.
I met Joy on Friday morning at a community service club breakfast where she was the featured speaker. I was deeply moved by her story. My source for this edition of LF was her twenty-five minute talk, some personal conversation afterwards, the San Diego Union Tribune Article which appeared on Sunday,
Joy is an extraordinary woman. She is becoming a friend. She is on a remarkable journey.
I shared my re-telling of the story with her knowing that I probably missed a few details. She wrote back, a wonderful e-mail, in which she straightened me out on a couple of things (I made some corrections, only minor), but much more important, she filled in more detail from a fateful morning which has captured the rapt attention of the entire world.
I wanted to share her words with you. She writes beautifully. Here's more...
* * * * * *
September 9, 2002
Hi there, Ken.
I believe that you've captured the spirit and heart of my experience - although some of the facts are not quite correct.
I arrived in NYC on Saturday, Sept. 8 in the late afternoon. I enjoyed the week-end in the city and watched the Tennis Match in Flushing Meadows. A spontaneous parade in Times Square put on by the stars in the broadways shows - singing and dancing on hardwood floors pulled by large trucks.
I was to be in NYC for 3 weeks of that final training with the firm. I was on a break at a little after 9:30 AM. Went to the restroom. While at the mirror, I thought I felt something. Then I walked over to the break area for some decaf and water. A young broker told me we were bombed... that Tower I was bombed. I walked over to the window and peered out to my left and saw it...that huge fireball.
I was 61 at retirement in June 2000. I had taught over 28 years in the san Dieguito Union High School District plus a year in San Diego City Schools as well as subbing and -before that- student teaching at Arcadia High School in Arcadia, CA and Oak Ave Junior High in Temple City. I waited until all my boys were in school all day long before I began my teaching career. Al and I both agreed and thought it important that I stay home with the boys until then.
I had made it to the 44th floor when I stepped out into the hallway to hear the 2nd announcement to return to our rooms... That is when the elevator filled up with people and they held the door open for me and I hesitated... but decided to go back to the stairwell and walk on down and I said, "I can't do this. If everything is o.k., I'll take an elevator back up. (As I told the manger on the 61st floor) God Bless you all." to them and proceeded to the stairwell and had taken 5-6 steps when the plane hit our tower - Tower II. It was very hot, became smoke, jet fumed, and debris filled in there. The skylight blew out and a huge lightning shaped crack appeared on the wall opposite me. I could see daylight through it. On the way down, I spotted high heeled shoes, jackets, spilled coffee, broken eye glasses, briefcases...mugs...in the stairwell.
I recited aloud the Lord's Prayer and the 23rd Psalm at least 4 times. Also, aloud I said The Prayer to My Guardian Angel "Angel of God , my guardian dear to whom His love commits me here..... Ever this day be at my side ...to light, to guard, to rule and guide" and The Hail Mary. I spoke to my mother's spirit for guidance asked protection from our Lord in my own words . I asked Him to forgive me my sins and wash them away as I prayed with a contrite heart and then made an Act of Contrition in order to prepare my soul to meet Him. We sang "Amazing Grace" together. We pumped each other up and stayed positive with a "can do" attitude.
We moved together as a giant organism deliberately down the stairwell. We kept each other calm and positive. There were no firemen who ran up our stairwell. It was a narrow one...just room for two people. But, there were two who greeted us at the bottom. They took the lady whose hand I held all the way down and placed her on a stretcher with oxygen and carried her away.
It was pitch black/dark at the bottom of the stairs. The firefighters stood at their various posts in the darkness as centurions - my golden angels - with their golden stripes on their helmets and jackets glowing in the darkness waving their flashlights in circles guiding us in the proper direction. We could not see a thing.
As we exited the building... huge chunks of concrete - some as large as a bus - as well as all manner of human carnage and other debris were falling around us. I don't know how/why I was missed - just by the grace of God - so many on the ground were hit. I just walked straight through all of it and prayed and spoke to the departed souls - "I'll give you dignity - I will not stare at you - I commend your souls onto the Lord today. He loves you." Oddly enough, I felt protected as everything fell all around me as MIke and I proceeded..
I met a young man, Mike, on the 30th floor and he helped me, held my hand and guided me north from the WTCII. We were just up the street a little way from WTCII when it came down. We ran north and into Greenwich Village. God was with me there, too, by the chance meeting of Mike.
Again, Ken, thanks for your tribute and witness to my experience in WTCII on 9/11/01. Your article was written with sensitivity and heart. Thank you, Ken. Please excuse this long post.
Take good care. Give all my best to Carolyn.
Blessings,
Joy
NOTE: The following article appeared in the Sunday Edition of the San Diego Union Tribune 9-8-2002 KEK
SURVIVING
She escaped the tower, but she won't abandon memory of those who didn't
When she closes her eyes, even
these many months later, Joy Shepard sees bodies plunging to the ground,
concrete and glass raining down and people on the street pelted by debris.
In her mind’s eye, she pans across the startled faces she left behind, victims — both doomed and destined to survive — who were at her side before the last, awful moments of the World Trade Center collapse.
“I’ve had a hard time falling asleep,” said Shepard, an Escondido financial planner who pushed through 61 flights of smoke and panic before making her way to safety Sept. 11. “It’s more distant as time goes by, but it’s there.”
One of thousands of people who made their way out of the twin towers that morning, Shepard now says her triumph brings with it an unexpected sense of guilt and responsibility.
“I know I have a separate reality from everybody else who did not experience it firsthand,” she said. “It separates me, in a strange way, from others.”
She feels she owes an unpayable debt to the strangers who could not figure their way out before the towers caved in. Now, as a means of somehow honoring those who were not as fortunate that September day, she fixates on things she can do to assist other people.
“All of these beautiful young people,” Shepard thinks back. “We all got up before going to work; we all had plans. And their lives were abruptly cut off. It tortures me.”
She has become something of a local celebrity since she returned home to Escondido, to her husband, Al, who watched helplessly as the national tragedy unfolded on live television — and prayed for the telephone to ring.
Hours passed before Joy was able to reach her husband and tell him she was safe. They were the worst moments of Al’s life, darker even than his time at war in Korea.
A 63-year-old former schoolteacher who launched a career in investment planning after retiring from the classroom, Joy speaks frequently to students and community groups about her experience surviving the tower attacks.
At every opportunity, she cautions listeners about the importance of faith, that undefined strength she says guided her home. The same foundation, a decade ago, helped her prevail in a bout with breast cancer.
When the south tower’s public-address system urged people to return to their work stations 10 minutes after the first plane struck the north tower, Shepard said an inner voice told her to leave anyway.
When a group of co-workers from the firm asked her to join them on the elevator, something made her turn away. To this day, she wonders about their fate.
“I went into the stairwell again, and about five steps down, that’s when we (in the south tower) were slammed,” Shepard said. “I cried for two days about the people in the elevator.”
Joy and Al have always been close to their sons and their friends, but never more so than in the past year. Now they go out of their way to check in with people they might have taken for granted before the attacks.
“We do a lot more family activities, barbecues, get-togethers,” said Al, a 70-year-old retired engineer. “We realize more now what’s important in life.”
She has not yet been back to New York, although she vows to one day revisit the site, this time with her family close by.
And she will not shy away from the pain of Sept. 11. The events no longer dominate her days, although she feels obliged to share the grim details with anyone who asks.
“I owe those people that much,” she says. “Their story needs to be heard, and it needs to be remembered.”
— JEFF MCDONALD