By Khalida Sarwari
Cathy Stefani’s alarm went off at 5:45 a.m. and she sprang up out of bed to get ready for work. Her husband, Wayne, was already at work and she knew her daughter, Nicole Miller, was flying back from New York that morning. She turned on the TV and had to sit down on the edge of her bed to take in what she was witnessing on every news channel: a plane piercing the second tower of the World Trade Center.
Stefani called her daughter Tiffany at Chico State and told her to turn on the TV. In between reports of a third plane striking the Pentagon and then later a fourth plane overtaken by hijackers in Pennsylvania, Stefani jumped in the shower and got herself ready for work
“They said another plane crashed, but they’re not saying which one,” she recalls her daughter telling her over the phone. And then an announcement: United Airlines flight 93, which had departed earlier that morning from Newark Liberty International Airport and was bound for San Francisco, had crashed in Somerset County, Penn. No survivors.
“I went, ‘No, not my baby, not my baby.’ I remember my son just grabbing me and that was it.”
Stefani describes the rest of that morning on Sept. 11, 2001, as a roller coaster. The news reports continued pouring in, mixed with the sound of phones ringing, waves of shock and family members screaming and crying.
Over the next six months, as the local coroner started identifying the crash victims, Stefani would begin gathering what remained of her 21-year-old daughter from the burnt wreckage and debris scattered on a field almost 3,000 miles away. There was Miller’s homework from her Spanish class at West Valley College, bikinis she’d taken to wear on her vacation in New York City, a part of a belt, clothes, credit cards.
And then the day after her birthday on March 4, 2002, Miller finally came home to San Jose in a casket, and a week later she was buried at Mission City Memorial Park in Santa Clara, where her grandmother and aunt are also buried.
Thirteen years later, Miller lives on in the memories of those she touched–at the Chili’s on Blossom Hill Road, where she was working at the time and where her photo still hangs on the wall. At Pioneer High School, where she played varsity softball and competed for the swim team, and where today there is a garden in her memory. And at West Valley College, where she was studying at the time.
At a remembrance ceremony there on Sept. 11, her mother and stepfather sat on a bench dedicated to her memory, a framed 8-by-10 photo of a smiling Miller by their side. Across from them, the family of Mark Bingham of Los Gatos, a West Valley College alum who died on the same flight, sat quietly on another bench dedicated to him.
Students lined up to pay their respects, each picking up a single rose from a basket to give to a member of the two families. “I’m sorry for your loss,” some of them murmured.
After a few speeches, a moment of silence and reflections by military veteran students, the two families were asked to take part in the planting of a California vine maple tree at a memorial garden across from the two benches.
Afterward, facing the large crowd of students and faculty that had gathered, Stefani said, “I used to tell her to slow down. She was constantly busy. Now, looking back on that, I’m glad she didn’t slow down.”
