Sgt. Maj. Larry Strickland It was supposed to be his day off: Son's death 'makes you believe in destiny'

Sitting in his living room, Larry's father says he thinks of his son every day. Both parents find it difficult to talk of Larry without tears. Lee doesn't speak much, and he touches his eyes with a blue handkerchief when he does. Mostly he listens.

Larry, 53, was a musician, a percussionist who once played with the Cascade Symphony, and later a father of three, a gourmet cook and a senior adviser to the Joint Chiefs of Staff. On what should have been his day off, he went to work last Sept. 11 for a big meeting at the Pentagon.

"It makes you believe in destiny," Olga says. "Why did he go to work? Why did the plane hit that corner" of the Pentagon? "I guess it was just his time."

Larry was listed as missing for more than a week. Ten days after the attacks, an Army chaplain and grief counselor carried the official news into the Stricklands’ home, the home where Larry had grown up. But his parents already knew. Olga had known the moment she turned on the television and saw the Pentagon's smoking ruins. She never believed he had survived.

"My daughter-in-law, she always felt there might be a chance," she says. "But I just knew."

The Stricklands will attend the symphony on Wednesday, the anniversary of Larry's death. Olga has heard that the musicians will wear little hearts pinned to their chests, little hearts carrying the names of Sept. 11 victims. "I hope someone ..." she gasps suddenly and involuntarily. Then she continues, "I hope someone remembers to wear a heart with my son's name."

Lawrence Kim Closure elusive for sister of man killed on first day at new job

Catherine Fleming received a call Jan. 11 with the same news that has brought relief to hundreds of other families. But the call offered her no solace. Four months to the day after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, workers had discovered remains of her younger brother.

Fleming, who lives in Seattle, had already spent months trying to accept that Lawrence Kim, 31, was dead. The idea that her brother had died on his very first day at Marsh & McLennan, on the 97th floor of the North Tower, was beyond belief. Fleming spent days calling every hospital in the New York area, certain Larry would turn up at one of them.

She eventually came to terms with the inevitable. Life resumed a certain normalcy and the months passed, though her grief did not. And then she got the call.

"That just totally set me back," Fleming says, her arms crossed. She had trouble sleeping and surprised even herself with outbursts of rage at co-workers or other drivers. Worse, every now and again she got another call or e-mail from a friend who, months later, had only just learned that Larry was dead. And every time, the well-meaning gesture hurt just a little more.

"I cannot believe I'm having such a hard time dealing with this," Fleming told herself in April. But she was. And in some ways she still is.

Virginia Mason Hospital's Separation and Loss Services clinic has helped greatly. So did her vision of Larry looking down, concerned about her anger. She's let a lot of that go now. "The space between the numbness and the grief has gotten bigger," she says.

Still, Fleming cannot bring herself to watch the news or read newspapers. The images are always there, the towers aflame. And everyone talks about it all like it's just, well, news. “The rest of the world has gone on," she says, "but we're still trying to figure out what happened."

After much deliberation, Fleming and her husband will join her family in New York on Wednesday for the city's commemorative ceremonies. "I think it's going to be difficult," she says, "but I think it will bring everything around full circle."

Roberta Krause, of Kirkland, avoids hotel rooms except those on the ground floor. After first jet hit, sisters embraced, expected to die; now it helps to talk

Some internalize memories of tragedy, locking them away deep and tight, the better to contain them. Some, such as Roberta Krause, of Kirkland, broadcast their memories, forcing them out, the better to disperse them.

When the first jet hit the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, Krause was finishing a light breakfast in Room 1624 of a hotel that stood adjacent to the twin towers. Her sister, Jane, was in the bathroom, brushing her teeth. The impact felt like a bomb exploding. Unsure what had happened, Krause ran to embrace her sister, then told her they were going to die.

They didn’t die. They followed fleeing maids and other guests down the stairs and scrambled out of the hotel. Later, boats carried them across the Hudson River to New Jersey. Before the two sisters left New York days later, the manager of a Holiday Inn gave each of them a gray T-shirt depicting the city's skyline in sparkly gold.

Krause, 65, still wears that shirt every time she gives a speech recounting her experience. By the end of the month, she will have given 37 one-hour talks, to civic groups, to schools, to whomever asks. "I think that has probably helped me get over all this," she says.

Talking has helped quell the nightmares and helped her sleep again. She has spoken to groups as large as 700 and as far away as Spokane, creating for her audiences vivid scenes of the attack itself and the frightful days afterward. The spirit of her message is best summarized by her own written account, drafted the night she returned home. "All of our lives are forever changed," she wrote. "Everything in the country changed at 8:45 a.m. on Sept. 11, 2001. It can never be like it was. Pray for us."

She's not entirely back to normal. "I get scared a lot more easily than I did before this happened," she says. The sound of low-flying jets still startles her, and she'll accept only ground-floor rooms at hotels.

Krause will give two speeches on Wednesday to commemorate the anniversary of Sept. 11. She declined an invitation to give a third one, at the Bank of America Tower, Seattle's tallest skyscraper. "When I heard that, I could feel every inch of my body, and I could feel the squeeze," she says. "And I just said no."