By Bob Minzesheimer
USA Today
NEW YORK — A decade after nearly being burned alive at Ground Zero, Lauren Manning has learned to live with “my new normal.” Or, as she says, “I dwell in an imperfect place, but it feels just right to me.”
At lunch at Philip Marie, her favorite Manhattan restaurant — her husband, Greg, proposed to her here, on bended knee, in 1999 — she needs both of her hands to hold a glass of iced tea.
That’s because her hands, along with 82% of her body, were severely burned on 9/11 — part of the story she tells in her memoir, Unmeasured Strength (Holt, $25), published today.
Her daily life is “all compromises,” she says, rather matter-of-factly. “But I don’t dwell on the compromises. I think about the outcomes. So what if I can’t hold a glass in one hand? Or if I have to hold a knife and fork differently? At least I can.”
And if her arms and back are scarred, and her skin tears easily and bleeds, “that’s my reality. I put a Band-Aid on it, literally, and I move on.”
On a hot summer day, she wears what’s most comfortable: a sleeveless dress — as she does on the cover of her book. No hiding the red scars on her arms, or what she jokingly calls “my personal tattoos, my body art.”
At 50, Manning is the best known of the handful of survivors who were severely injured on 9/11 and lived to tell about it. Most everyone else at the World Trade Center that morning either died or escaped, coated in ashes.
A late morning — luckily
A phone call as she was leaving her Manhattan apartment put Manning a half-hour behind her usual schedule. Headed to her job as a managing director at Cantor Fitzgerald, a bond trading firm, on the 106th floor of the north tower, she got only as far as the lobby.
She writes:
With an enormous, screeching exhalation, the fire explodes from the elevator banks into the lobby and engulfs me, its tentacles of flame hungrily latching on. An immense weight pushes down on me, and I can barely breathe. I am whipped around I see people lying on the floor covered in flames, burning alive.
Like them, I am on fire.
At lunch, Manning says the hardest part of writing her memoir “was to put the pain into words. The pure, absolute pain. But after a while, it was almost as if I were writing about another person.”
She writes that on 9/11, “I prayed for death, in that unspeakable way that people who are experiencing unimaginable pain can.” But then she thought of her 10-month-old son, Tyler: “I can’t leave my son. I haven’t had him long enough I can’t die like this, stumbling into the streets in flames, surrendering my life in a gutter.”
Somehow, she reached a narrow strip of grass outside the trade center, where a man ripped off his jacket to help smother the flames.
“He’s one of the true heroes,” Manning says. “He ran toward trouble instead of away from it.”
He has never been publicly identified. Manning knows who he is: a bond trader and father of two who has “never wanted the recognition,” she says. “But his name is always in my prayers.”
In the chaos, it took 50 minutes for an ambulance to reach her. At first, she says, the EMTs stepped around her to help others: “I could see that I’d been pegged as a goner.”
Eventually, she and 17 others ended up at New York Presbyterian Hospital-Weill Cornell Medical Center, home to the nation’s largest burn center.
It was a long and painful recovery: three months in the hospital, including a month in an induced coma. Another three months in a rehabilitation center. She underwent more than 25 operations and skin grafts. The tips of four fingers had to be amputated. She had to relearn how to stand and walk.
Despite all that, Manning will tell you she’s lucky.
“I was dealt a tough hand,” she says, “but I still had a hand to play. And I never want to forget the enormity of that gift.”
At Cantor Fitzgerald, 658 of her colleagues were killed. Greg, her husband, also worked at the World Trade Center, at Euro Brokers, on the 84th floor of the south tower. Sixty-one of his colleagues were killed.
On 9/11, he planned to attend a breakfast conference at Windows on the World, the restaurant atop the trade center. At the last minute, he changed his mind to help a friend, who had foot surgery, vote in that day’s primary election.
Everyone at the conference was killed. She says, “It is a true miracle that my son isn’t an orphan.”
Eight days after 9/11, Greg Manning wrote an e-mail to 30 of his wife’s friends to update them on her condition. He signed it, and all the e-mails that followed: “Love, Greg & Lauren,” an affirmation of the future he hoped they shared.
Long before anyone was talking about social networks, Greg had inadvertently created one on his wife’s behalf. His daily e-mails, which, he says, became “vital to me to get through this,” were shared and forwarded. They reached a book editor and an editor at The New York Times (which on the front page labeled Manning a “symbol of hope”).
Six months later, as Lauren returned home for the first time since 9/11, a book of Greg’s e-mails, titled Love, Greg & Lauren, was published.
Greg, 54, who is now a consultant in intellectual property and the digital device market, says, “I always thought that only Lauren could really tell her story. But I was unprepared for the power of her words and the clarity of her voice.”
She writes:
I had a new mission: I wanted to survive and prevail on behalf of all those who had died I was sure I’d known some of the people who had jumped from the towers to escape the flames
I vowed to put every ounce of effort I could into battling back. My family would be proud of me. My survival had given me a chance to make things right, to see beyond the small sorrows of everyday life.
Roger Yurt, the burn specialist who treated Manning, remembers her as “a fighter. She got up out of bed and walked faster than I’ve seen anybody do.”
Manning says the idea for her memoir “evolved” as she gained attention. She and Greg were interviewed on The Oprah Winfrey Show and Today and shared the Norman Vincent Peale Award for Positive Thinking.
In 2004, she was named Glamour magazine’s Woman of the Year and chosen to participate in the International Olympic Torch Relay. (To cheering crowds, she ran three blocks in Manhattan.)
“I was asked by thousands of people if I was going to write a book,” she says. “A lot of them had shared in my story, and in ways I don’t quite understand, they had found it helpful to them.”
She approached her physical rehabilitation as it were her job, writing: “I was used to pressure and unforgiving competition. There in the hospital, I turned that attitude to my advantage and used it to fuel my recovery. Some people say, ‘Oh, life’s not always about winning and losing,’ but a lot of the time, it pretty much is.”
She vowed not to “surrender to the terrorists” and let “those cowards define me. I would never surrender or hide. I would stand tall in the world.”
Remembering friends
On the 10th anniversary of the attacks, she will attend a private Cantor Fitzgerald and Euro Brokers memorial service in Central Park, and she says she plans to visit the memorial at Ground Zero, because “it is dedicated to the memory and lives of so many of our friends.”
She keeps her political opinions to herself and would rather talk about her sons.
Tyler, who’s 10 now, once threw her a baseball and was surprised she caught it.
“Of course I can catch,” she said. “I used to play on a softball team.”
“I know, Mom,” he replied. “But you’re really good, especially for an injured mom.”
And after what their doctor called “unexplained infertility,” the Mannings found a woman to be a “gestational carrier” for their sperm and egg. Their younger son, Jagger, who’s nearly 2, “brought us back to a world of innocence and trust, one that had been taken away from us when Tyler was 10 months old.”
Lauren Manning is undecided about resuming her Wall Street career, which she says would mean 12- to 14-hour days again in a “do-or-die, eat-or-be-eaten” atmosphere.
With a laugh, she recalls the early part of her career, when “I resented having to take a vacation. ‘Four weeks! What was I going to do with all that time?’ That certainly wasn’t healthy.”
She writes:
I reach down to smooth Jagger’s hair and am jarred by the intense scarring on my left arm and hand. The flawed skin seemed foreign, even though it is very much a part of me. Then I realized that is the hand I raised to shield my face from the fire, and I smile. My hand, however imperfect, is a living talisman, not of suffering, but of something divine: the power to survive and to heal.
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