Lending a hand until the very end

Joyce Grant misses most the times she and her husband, Winston Grant, prayed together.  She misses the kisses he used to give her before he left their Lakeview home every weekday morning to catch the 6:56 a.m. train into Manhattan, where he worked on the 32nd floor of World Trade Center 1, the north tower. It was near there that he died on Sept. 11, 2001.

“He was a great listener and he was very compassionate,” Grant said, “very caring, very loving, and I miss all that. I have it in my sons, but it’s not the same when it comes from your husband.”

Grant and her husband raised four children together: two sons from Grant’s previous marriage, and the two children they had together — daughter, Joya, and son, Winston Jr. He treated them all as his own, Grant said. But then, he treated everyone he met with kindness and respect, and he was always there to help.

Winston took care of his wife, who suffers from ALS and is wheelchair bound, during their 35 years of marriage. He would wake up in the early morning hours to prepare food for her before he set off for his job with Empire Blue Cross-Blue Shield. Winston, who would now be 70 years old, called his wife two or three times a day to check up on her. But it all came to an end on Sept. 11, 2001.

“From then on my life became a nightmare,” Grant said, “a real, living nightmare.”

But she was sure he had gotten out. He was on the 30th floor and surely had enough time to leave the building before it collapsed more than one and a half hours later. Maybe he was hospitalized or roaming the streets, she thought.

“It was a beautiful, beautiful day. That stays in my mind,” Grant said. “It was a beautiful day, but man turned it into something horrific.”

It wasn’t until five months later, in February of 2002, that Grant was forced to the face the truth: two female police officers knocked on her door and told her, through tears, they were sorry to report that some of Winston’s remains had been located at Ground Zero.

“I behaved terribly,” Grant said. “I was  screaming at the top of my lungs. … I must have looked like a wild woman. But they understood, for which I was grateful.”