Beloved North Fork Business Owner Reflects On 9/11 Terror: 'We Are Under Attack'

NORTH FORK, NY — Paula DiDonato, owner of The Giving Room in Southold, was working in lower Manhattan on September 11, 2001, watching firsthand as the terrorist attacks unfolded —and the unthinkable became grim reality as the Twin Towers fell.

And now, as the North Fork and the world mark 25 years since that dark day, DiDonato reflects on how 9/11, with clouds of ash and despair, terror and soul-searing agony, irrevocably shaped all that was to come after.

Speaking with Patch this week, DiDonato reflected on how it felt, 25 years later, to remember that day when the world shattered as the Twin Towers crumbled.

Today, more than two decades later, she said: "There are moments when the world becomes quiet enough to massage the heart," she said. "Not heal it. Not fix it. Just loosen what has been held tightly inside. And when it loosens, I remember. I remember the life I had before and hold it beside the life I have now. The life I have now is beautiful."

She is surrounded by extraordinary friends, DiDonato said. "I have the holy trinity of my three sisters, women who would come for me no matter where I was or what I needed. I have my business, The Giving Room, a remarkable community that offers me loving kindness every single day of the year, often giving back to me far more than I could ever give to it. I have my dog Lucy beside me in the grass. So, yes, I have a good life. A beautiful life. But it is not the life I had. And I miss the life I had."

Twenty-five years ago, on September 11, DiDonato said she was sitting in a corner conference room at the World Financial Center with about eight people when something roared past.

"It sounded like a missile," she said. "Then came the explosion. We ran to the windows and saw the top of the World Trade Center blowing apart into the sky — fire, glass, steel, paper, pieces of a building becoming confetti."

The stunned silence echoed.

"For a moment, none of us understood what we were seeing," she said. "I had been in the World Financial Center years earlier when a bomb exploded beneath the World Trade Center, so I already carried a heightened awareness of security. Something in me said, 'Get out!'"

DiDonato was responsible for the people working on the 42nd and 43rd floors.

"The people from the meeting and I scattered across both floors, telling everyone the same thing: 'Get out. Now!' As we were evacuating, Dorothy, my assistant, was right behind me. I thought she was coming with us. She wasn’t."

In the confusion, a female vice-president had stopped Dorothy and told her to return to her desk, saying that the threat was not imminent, DiDonato said.

"Dorothy did what she was told. She went back. And then the telephone rang. It was my sister Donna. The time was 8:56 a.m. Ten minutes earlier, the first plane had struck the North Tower. Seven minutes later, the second plane would strike the South Tower. Donna was trying to find me. Instead, Dorothy answered," she said.

DiDonato said she hadn't known the full story of that telephone call until this week. Her sister, Donna, she said, told her that Dorothy had been frightened. "She didn't know whether she should stay or leave. And my sister told her to leave. She told her that it was okay. 'Go,' she said. 'Get out of the building,'" she said.

"For 25 years, Donna carried the memory of that conversation without ever telling me," DiDonato said. "And for 25 years, I carried something else: A yellow Post-it note. Dorothy left it on my desk."

Dorothy, DiDonato said, "came from an era when things were done with extraordinary care and precision. She didn't scribble the message. She typed it, cut it out, and placed it on that little yellow square. It said: '9-11 . 8:56 a.m. Your sister Donna called to make sure you were okay.' Somewhere over the years, I lost that Post-it. I don't know how. But I have never forgotten it."

This week, DiDonato mentioned the Post it note to her sister.

"That was when she told me what had happened on the other end of that message. For 25 years, I had remembered a little yellow piece of paper telling me my sister had called. Donna had remembered Dorothy's voice. Only now do I understand that they were the same memory. Dorothy listened to Donna. She left. But precious minutes had passed. As Dorothy made her way out of the World Financial Center, she witnessed something no human being should ever have to see. From where she was, the people jumping from the World Trade Center were at eye level. She watched them fall to their deaths."

Dorothy, DiDonato said, barely made it out. "When the Towers came down, she was caught in the dust and chaos. Somehow she was put onto a ferry and taken across the river to New Jersey. She survived."

This week, DiDonato said, "I keep thinking about Donna's call. My sister was looking for me. She found Dorothy instead. And in those few minutes between two airplanes hitting two buildings, my sister told a frightened woman she could leave — go. Dorothy got out. Meanwhile, I believed she had been right behind me."

It was an unexpected twist of fate that stuns, she said.

Remembering the morning of September 11, the details for DiDonato are still as definitively clear as the deceptively blue skies overhead.

"We gathered at the elevators, which were still running, rode down together, spilled into the lobby and made our way outside," she said. "Then the second plane came directly over our heads. We watched it fly into the second tower. Even now, I don’t know how to describe what we saw. An airplane entered a building and did not come out the other side. It seemed swallowed by the tower. Then there was fire. An enormous explosion. It was something the mind could see but could not understand."

DiDonato, she said, had been trying repeatedly to reach Judy, "my partner and the love of my life — and my parents. The phones weren’t working. Calls weren’t connecting. Then, just after the second plane hit, one call went through. My mother answered. I asked what was happening. 'Paula,' she said, 'We are under attack.'"

The words chilled but the truth had already taken dark, clinging root in disbelieving hearts, she said.

"Of course we knew," DiDonato said. "We had just watched an airplane fly into the second tower. But hearing my mother say the words made it real in a different way. We were under attack. So we ran. Away from the Trade Center. Away from the Financial Center. Up the West Side Highway and through Lower Manhattan toward Canal Street."

For DiDonato, as for the thousands of others racing through streets with heels in hand, nylons torn, briefcases and business suits coated in thick, gray ash, there was a singular, fervent mission — to find the ones they loved, safe in the midst of the sheer horror.

"All I wanted was Judy," DiDonato said. "I called and called. Nothing. I tried to use a landline in a business. No. So I kept moving. What I didn’t know was that while I was running away from the World Trade Center, Judy was heading toward it," she said.

"She had been at an appointment in the Village when the attacks began. She knew where I had been that morning. While I was making my way uptown, trying to put distance between myself and the place we both worked, Judy went downtown looking for me. She went back toward the Financial Center. Looking for me," she said.

Judy, she said, had entered a complex connected to the World Financial Center, trying to find a landline so she could reach DiDonato and her mother.

"Then she felt the building shake," DiDonato said. "She knew one of the towers was coming down. And she ran. She came out of that building and found herself in front of the enormous cloud created by the collapse — a wall of pulverized concrete, glass, paper and everything else that had been inside those buildings, rolling through Lower Manhattan. Judy ran ahead of it. She made it around a corner before the cloud overtook the street."

DiDonato said she had seen none of what had been transpiring at that moment.

"I was somewhere uptown, still moving away, still calling her, still not knowing where she was. Twenty-five years later, I watched a video of that cloud," she said. "I had seen the images before, of course. We all have. But this time I watched knowing that Judy had been there. Running in front of it. And I don't know what to do with that image. The person I loved most in the world had been running toward the place I had just escaped because she was trying to find me — and then, she was running for her life."

Eventually, Judy's mother, Louise, reached DiDonato, she said, with the words that held a ray of shining hope, piercing through the clouds of smoke and darkness.

"Judy was alive. She was running uptown now," she said. "Trying to reach me while I was trying to reach her. Something fundamental changed in me then. Planes had flown into buildings. Buildings were collapsing. Fighter jets moved through the sky above Manhattan. No one knew whether another plane was coming. And somehow I heard myself telling Louise to tell Judy to get off the West Side Highway because that was where the fighter jets were. As if any of us knew what safety meant anymore. Run up Fifth Avenue. Run up Sixth Avenue. Just run!"

After DiDonato hung up, she saw a television through the window of a bar or restaurant. The Pentagon had been hit.

"I looked downtown," she said. "The World Trade Center was gone. I hadn’t heard the Towers fall. I simply looked toward the place where they had always been and there was nothing there. So I kept going."

Eventually, she said, DiDonato reached their home on 36th Street. "The landline worked. Friends called. My family called. But I couldn’t settle," she said. "I couldn’t make sense of what had happened, and I couldn’t stop waiting for Judy. I went outside and sat on the steps of our brownstone. My neighbor arrived in a black car. He was a doctor. The car was covered in dust. So was he."

The doctor, she said, ran inside to change so he could go back to the hospital and help the victims.

"We didn’t yet know how few victims there would be to help," she said. "People walked past me covered in that same gray dust. They looked like ghosts. And now I knew what that dust was. I knew where they had come from."

Judy, she said, still wasn’t home.

"I went inside. I couldn’t answer the telephone anymore. So I sat. And waited. Until finally the door opened. Judy walked in. Alive. Judy. My partner. My soulmate. The person I had built my life with. The person I had been trying to reach all day. The person who, while I was running away, had run toward the place we both worked because she was looking for me. The person who had felt the building shake as a tower came down and then run ahead of the cloud that followed. The person I had loved and will love for my entire life."

After the airplanes and the fire and the running, after watching the towers disappear from the sky, after spending hours wondering whether the person she loved most in the world was dead, DiDonato looked at Judy and said simply: "Where have you been?"

DiDonato also shared her memories of what happened next on that horrific day.

"By the time we decided to leave the city it was getting dark. We gathered our two dogs and started to walk to Penn Station — the trains were still running. The walk across town was harrowing. 34th Street was represented by an endless flow of firetrucks from every town on Long Island. It was a bone-chilling, continuous siren sound screaming alongside us. We wondered about the survivors. We wondered about our friends, colleagues, others who stayed in the buildings waiting for instruction."

They headed miles away from the smoking rubble.

"We stayed with my parents for a day or two and eventually made our way out to the North Fork where we had purchased a home a year before. We sat on the silent beach for days. We watched meteor showers and dreamt about planes crashing into buildings."

Twenty-five years later, the memories are just a heartbeat away, even now, she said.

"The impact of this day still unfolds. I still look up when I hear a plane too close. Crystal clear blue skies remind me of that morning. My life has been completely redefined as I found it impossible to work downtown without thinking about what I should be doing with my life. I felt called to change, but I continue to grapple with what that means exactly.

"There are many things I feel certain about, although that day has taught me never to be absolute about anything. But here is what I think I know," DiDonato said. "Our time on earth is a brief and absolute gift. Those we love need to be told daily how much we love them. Love conquers evil every day and we must never allow ourselves to become evil in response to pain."

And, she added: "New York City is the greatest place on earth, filled with compassionate and courageous heroes. I miss New York City very much."

Since 9/11, many untruths have been uttered, she said. "Conspiracy theorists cause great pain to those of us who watched what happened. Trafficking in lies about this day is evil in itself."

However, she said, "I feel great love for those I shared that day with. A bond that will never be broken."

And, she added, the North Fork has offered solace to a shattered soul.

"The North Fork is a place of great healing and love," DiDonato said. "I thank God that Judy and I were spared — along with countless other friends and colleagues. I pray for the continuous love, support and healing of those who lost fathers, sons, husbands, wives, mothers, friends, colleagues, daughters, nieces, and nephews, grandchildren . . . I pray. I pray. I pray."