The performance was a big deal for Laura Lee DeFazio Morabito, an event she had really wanted to see. On Sept. 10, 2001, Laura Lee and her husband Mark were in the audience for the first national tour of “Mamma Mia” at the now-Emerson Colonial Theater in Boston. Elated, they hurried home to catch a few hours of sleep.
Laura Lee had a flight to catch early the next morning.
Mark Morabito remembers two things, specifically, about the ensuing hours that he hopes might do the rest of us some good. The couple were both pretty tired once they arrived home, and somehow — this was in the era of answering machines — they knew it was Laura Lee’s mom calling that night, when the phone rang.
They were weary. It would have been easy to do what all of us do all the time, which is to simply say, hey: Let it go, and return the call the next day. Behind an impulse Morabito cannot explain even now, he abruptly picked up the receiver and said hello to his mother-in-law. He handed the phone to Laura Lee, who spent a while in conversation, then went to bed.
“She talked to her mom,” Morabito told me Thursday, with emphasis.
In the morning, the couple hurried to get ready. Laura Lee was leaving for a conference. Morabito gave her a ride to the car service that would drop her at the airport, which gave them both a little more time to talk.
The departure was rushed. As soon as Morabito had a chance, on a September morning of seemingly perfect beauty, he found a place to call Laura Lee from his mobile phone, hoping to catch her before she left.
She was already on the plane at Boston Logan International Airport, settling in for takeoff, when she answered. Morabito told her:
“I love you. Call me when you get there.”
After a quarter-century, he never stops being grateful he had the chance to say those first three words.
Laura Lee had boarded American Airlines Flight 11. Hijackers serving al-Qaida seized the jetliner and then used it as a missile, flying it into the north tower at the World Trade Center in Manhattan.
Both of the legendary twin towers, that morning, would burn and fall — part of a catastrophic series of attacks that killed Laura Lee and nearly 3,000 other people. Mark, an Auburn native and a West Genesee High graduate, was 39 on that day, and he remembers the immediate years afterward as a time of rage and disbelief.
As long as he lives, he will think about the raw fear Laura Lee and the other passengers must have endured, inside that plane.
Yet 25 years later, at 64, he said he fully appreciates how the presence of three monumental women in his life are the bedrock of helping him to reach this understanding:
“You don’t move on,” he said, because to him those words somehow involve forgetting. “You move forward.”
For that, he gives thanks for Laura Lee, and for everything she taught him about embracing life. He said his second wife, Kristen, has been pivotal in his healing, in helping him find the way back. And there is no way for him to fully express his love and gratitude for their teenage daughter Julia, whose departure two weeks ago for her first year of college at Boston University has left a giant sense of absence in the house.
Kristen drove their daughter to school from their home in Victor, near Rochester. Mark couldn’t go along to drop her off. At the time, he was still attached to IVs as a result of a frightening struggle with his health: He collapsed this summer during a trip to Saratoga. He had septicemia, blood poisoning, that made its way into the muscle of his heart.
He spent nearly two weeks in the hospital. Mark, a diabetic, ended up having a toe amputated — the fifth one he has lost. The illness followed a sequence of serious medical problems over the last 20 years that included four heart attacks, dozens of stents and bypass surgery.
With a certain disbelief, he said out loud: He’s still here. This week, Morabito connected with a group of buddies at the Sherwood Inn in Skaneateles — he describes them as his “Sept. 11 friends” — for a night of appreciation and celebration.
Before he met Kristen, they were the ones who helped him find his balance after Laura Lee’s death, and they stayed close to him as the years rolled past. Now it is 2026, and it is estimated that more than 25 percent of today’s Americans were born after the attacks — meaning millions upon millions have no memory of the day when Morabito’s wife boarded the plane.
Morabito said there is no consolation for a piece of him that will always be angry. Laura Lee was a national sales manager for her company. She was warm and funny and empathetic, Mark said, a person of sweeping and memorable personality.
What he always remembers is that everyone who died that morning — travelers or workers or rescue personnel of staggering bravery — had lives of equal magnitude and meaning that were taken in a sequence of unimaginable horror.
He and Kristen were looking at old photos the other night, and Morabito reflected upon the cascading ripple of how much was ripped away or changed forever when two jetliners collided with the towers. He figures the best way he can honor Laura Lee — and the best thing he can say to all of us — is to take whatever lessons made clear after such a loss, and try to use them as bedrock in daily life as a human beinge.
Morabito describes himself as a much “better guy” than when he was in 2001: “Before all this happened, for me, it was about status, all about money.” He lived hard and fast and worked what he describes as preposterous hours. Losing his wife tore all of that scaffolding down.
He is long retired. Ten years ago, he took part in a communal reading of all the names at the Sept. 11 national memorial in Manhattan, but today he intends to stay close to home. His focus — in the same way that he and Kristen try to raise their daughter — is to think a whole lot less about what he owns or what he has, and a lot more about what he can do for his family and the people he encounters, every day.
Morabito is grateful for Kristen, grateful for his friends, grateful in a certain way for even the close calls he endured while he was ill — because those struggles tore everything down to what matters. A turning point occurred in 2007, when investigators identified Laura Lee’s remains, and the state police — doing the transport in a solemn Upstate relay — arrived at his house with the wedding ring his wife wore onto the plane.
It was bent, reshaped, by the sheer force of impact. The moment — actually holding that ring in his hand — allowed him to finally begin coming to terms with his grief. Mark gave the ring to Laura Lee’s family, who used the material to make new rings for several young women in the family.
Laura Lee is now buried at St. Joseph’s Cemetery in Auburn, near many generations of Morabitos. Mark and Kristen went there Thursday to put down flowers. It occurred to Morabito how every stone in the place represents a similar life of substance — sudden loss that deeply affected all those left behind — and it reinforced the code that he believes is the best thing he can share with us, this morning.
He hopes those of us who are old enough to remember can think back on the brief communal weeks after Sept. 11, when the entire nation — joined by fear and grief — collectively realized it could have been any one of us in a seat on those planes or working quietly in an office or riding an elevator, at the instant when those worlds caught fire.
There was a collective see-one-another kindness afterward that seems almost unimaginable now — the way people in the following days actually smiled and waved each other on at four-way stops, or bought coffee for the person behind them at a Dunkin, or for a moment understood that the true and best response was in realizing the stranger on the street was no stranger, at all.
If we want to honor Laura Lee and the thousands who died, Morabito suggests we try to conjure up that feeling. He understands how easy it is to put off resolving some dispute with a good friend, or to allow a family fight to go on for all too long, but he never forgets what he considers the two luckiest breaks in his life.
Think about it, Morabito said. Who really believes, on a typical day, the chance will never come again to do a simple and kind thing for someone you see every day? He is so thankful he took the two seconds to say “I love you” before his wife’s plane left the tarmac, even if he assumed he would have that same chance another 10,000 times.
He also contemplates the instant when Laura Lee’s mother called the night before, and how – despite being exhausted – they chose to answer it. In this age when we always know with a glance who is reaching out every time our phone vibrates, when it is so easy to see the call is from someone we love and to say that conversation can wait until tomorrow or down the road…
Mark Morabito, on another blue sky September morning, has this counsel.
Take the call.
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