What else I lost

I thought my dear friend's death on 9/11 would be the extent of my loss that day. But his wife -- my best friend -- left my life as well.

Editor's note: This article continues a Salon series exploring the impact of 9/11 five years after the attacks.

By Tristin Aaron

Read more: Life

Sept. 8, 2006 | Five years ago, someone I had known for many years was brutally murdered. I spent 30 years prior to 9/11 believing that my misfit life was one of total singularity, an untransmittable, unshareable truth. Then a profoundly collective tragedy hit me.

My friend, Karleton, was murdered when his flight, American Airlines Flight 11, was hijacked and crashed. Karleton was married to my childhood best friend, Haven, whom he had dated since we were all in high school in Durham, N.C. They were very much like my brother and sister. When I traveled to Boston after 9/11 to be with Haven, I flew as her sister on a special chartered plane only for victims' families.

I passed about four weeks in Boston after the terrorist attacks. They were the worst days and nights of my life. But not for the reasons I thought. I had never imagined, and I still have trouble explaining to anyone, how grief can alienate people from each other. What happens to friendship in the face of unsupportable pain? What happens when you remind your best friend, through no fault of your own, of the past, a past she no longer wishes to acknowledge?

Haven and I met when we were 14 years old. We were both poor, and both extremely interested in being beautiful and sophisticated. I worked as a prep cook in the restaurant where her mother worked. The first time we ever hung out, we white-trash 14-year-olds, we went to see a foreign film with Ben Kingsley and Glenda Jackson called "Turtle Diaries." We would have done anything to seem remotely mature, stylish and wise beyond our years. Our girlish love for one another had an innocence and a tenderness that came from a deep need. Both only children, both with depressed single mothers, we were very intrepid in our attempts to transcend our origins.

Haven met Karleton at the grocery store where they both worked. He was tall, and shy, funny and skinny. He was smart. He had a vague Southern accent, although his parents weren't Southerners. When he died, I had known him half my life. He was my best friend's boyfriend, and then husband, the subject of her analysis and complaints and swooning and devotion. As time passed, he was almost like a corrective brace on a scoliotic back. His sureness, his confidence in her, his respect, gave her a core of faith in herself that she never had before him. But in his normalcy, he remained enigmatic to me.

I don't think it was until their wedding in 1994 that I became aware of what a tender and loving person he was. I was the maid of honor and I sang the song for their first dance, "Our Love Is Here to Stay." I was very drunk because the caterer had brought far too little food, and Haven had asked me to forgo eating, as she did, to leave more for the other guests. So I had consumed only wine since arriving at the beauty salon some 10 hours earlier. I don't remember doing it, but the wedding photos later proved that at some point, perhaps while the jazz band was warming up, I had removed my uncomfortable strapless bra from under my gown, and left it hanging across one of the hedges in the formal gardens where the ceremony was held.

I was 23 years old and my closest friends in the world were getting married, and it probably seemed as though that bra was cramping my style on an otherwise perfect day. Karleton was so appreciative that I shared their sense of joy. Before he left, he said to me, "You are the kind of friend that people name their kids after."

Karleton called me in California when Haven first went into labor in Boston. "How soon can you get here?" he asked. A few weeks later I was holding their perfect baby in my arms. When I spoke to Haven on 9/11, we cried together about the adoring father that her son would never know. And she told me her other news: She had discovered she was pregnant again, only the day before.

Next page: We weren't the same, and it was asking too much of her to pretend we were