9/11 widower: ‘You just have to deal with it’

By Jolie Lee
Federal News Radio

Sept. 11, 2001, was supposed to be the day that Horace Morris and wife Odessa would “paint the town red.” They were celebrating their 25th wedding anniversary.

But Odessa Morris, a financial analyst for the Defense Department, was one of the 125 people in the building who died when American Airlines Flight 77 was hijacked and crashed into the Pentagon.

Although it would be weeks before he heard official word that his wife’s remains had been found and identified, Morris said he knew the day of the attack that his wife did not make it when he went to see the building in person.

Watch Morris desrcibe what he saw at the Pentagon the morning after Sept. 11. Story continues below video.

In the weeks after the crash, Army officials came to Morris’ home daily to brief him on the search.

“At least you’re in touch hearing something,” Morris said. “But it’s not one of those things like, ‘OK, we found her. She’s alive somewhere.’ You understand it’s the way things happen and you just have to deal with it.”

Dealing with it has meant turning to church, where he first met Odessa. The two had bonded over her interest in his Jamaican upbringing and his interest in her photography. A long-time part-time pastor, Morris accepted a subsidy from the Federal Employee Education and Assistance Fund after his wife’s death to get a degree in theology at Howard University, where he teaches English. FEEA also helped put his three children through college. Given the circumstances, “it turned out fairly well for us,” he said.

The small farm where they were going to move to after retirement used to have goats, chickens and cows. Now, Morris still keeps some of the animals but not the “flocks of this and that” Odessa enjoyed tending to. Ten years later, Morris said he still thinks about his wife everyday but he doesn’t dwell.

One memory of that day 10 years ago stands out. He was visiting his grandson — two years old at the time. Morris said he knew his grandson would come running towards him as always calling out, “Dada, Mama.” That day, his grandson, seeing Morris alone, asked, “Where Mama?” Morris only told the boy that his grandmother was at the Pentagon.

“I felt, she is at the Pentagon is what is a fact,” Morris said. “The details I couldn’t handle.”

More from the Federal News Radio special report, 9/11: A Government Changed.

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