By Daniel Massey
Sept. 11 began just like every morning for Amenia Rasool, a 33-year-old mother of four.
She woke up in her Richmond Hill home at 5 a.m., prepared breakfast for her husband of 10 years, packed his lunch and said goodbye as she did everyday. She then cooked breakfast for her children, Aneesa, 8, Aseefa, 6, and Saeed, 3, and prepared bottles for her baby, Farhaad, 11 months. She woke up Aneesa and Aseefa, bathed and dressed them, and prepared fresh lunches for them to take to school.
At 6:45 a.m. Rasool left the house and walked to the Lefferts Boulevard subway station, where she boarded an A train to her job as an account clerk at Marsh & McLennan on the 98th floor of Tower 1 of the World Trade Center.
At 8:05 a.m. she called home to make sure the babysitter had everything she needed to care for Saeed and Farhaad. That was the last time Rasool’s family heard from her. She is among the 292 Marsh & McLennan employees who are missing and feared dead in the collapse of the World Trade Center. Tower 1 was hit by a hijacked passenger jet at 8:48 a.m.
“She was an exceptional, unique person,” said her husband, Sadiq Rasool. “She was a working person, a great mother, an excellent wife.”
Amenia Rasool, who came to the United States from Madia, a small village in Guyana, 11 years ago, worked through lunch each day so she could leave the office early and get home to see her children. “Her kids were her life,” her husband said. “Her intention was to raise her kids in a good home.”
He said his children “were asking a lot of questions” in the days after the terrorist attacks on their mother’s workplace. “Where is Mommy?” “ When is Mommy coming home?” they would ask.
He finally decided to tell them their mother was not going to return.
“It was the hardest thing to tell them, that Mom is not coming back,” Sadiq Rasool said. “The little girl, Aseefa, said: ‘I didn’t know that. I thought Mom was coming back.’”
He was concerned that Aneesa, his oldest child, was initially keeping her emotions inside herself. More recently, she has opened up. “She will sit with me and start crying and tell me she misses Mom,” he said.
Since the day of the attack, Rasool has worried about how he is going to take care of the children.
His mother, Farida Rasool, took a four-month leave of absence from her job at a bank to help care for her grandchildren.
“I have to do it,” she said. “I don’t want them to grow up with a babysitter. Since they don’t have a mother, I’ll wholeheartedly take care of them.”
She said she plans to quit her job when her leave runs out. “I can’t leave my kids,” she said. “They come first.”
The grandmother recalled that her daughter-in-law always said, “Mom, why don’t you quit your job and take care of your grandkids?”
Sadiq Rasool, who works for the city’s Department of Transportation, is worried the family will not be able to cope with the financial strain.
“She has a mortgage,” he said of his mother. “She has things to do.”
He has traveled to the family assistance center at Pier 94 in Manhattan, but so far nobody has been able to help him figure out how he can care for his children and work to support them at the same time, a job his wife had perfected.
“She did it all,” he said.
Reach Reporter Daniel Massey by e-mail at Timesledger@aol.com or call 229-0300, Ext. 156.
