A Simple Life, Well-Lived

I did not know Antoinette Duger.  It was never my pleasure to make her acquaintance.  It has been my great good fortune over the years to have become friends with her cousin, Gerard Gonnella.  Through G, I have developed an appreciation of just how much I missed out on by not knowing her. 

In a world in which far too many of us covet that which someone else and devote more time and energy than we should to peering over the fence into our neighbor's yard to admire the greenness of their grass, Antoinette Duger was exceptional because she was an exception to that rule.  She valued the things that were most significant to her.  She appreciated the life she had and enjoyed living it.  First and foremost for her was her family (including but not limited to her husband, Raymond, and her little girl, Megan).  She made it home from lower Manhattan to Belleville, New Jersey by 6:30 every night so that she, Raymond, and Megan could eat dinner together. Megan was just eight years old when Antoinette died.   

She enjoyed her work at First Union, on the North Tower's 47th floor.  She was a throwback in the sense that while people often move from job to job, she did not. Her first job upon graduating from Barringer High School in Newark at age eighteen?  First Union, as a clerk in an office on Broad Street in Newark.  Twenty-six years later, she enjoyed telling her family how much she loved her view from the 47th floor, an office into which First Union had moved from another location in New York City only eight months before September 11, 2001. First Union was her one and only employer.  Remarkable. 

Since the National September 11 Memorial opened in lower Manhattan in 2011 on the tenth anniversary of the attacks, every September when Margaret and I are in the city for the Tunnel to Towers 5K, our visit to the Memorial includes the placement of an American flag at Antoinette's name.    

Antoinette Duger - National September 11 Memorial

Photo Credit:  Adam Kenny

It is a simple gesture, to be sure.  Perhaps it is for that reason it is the single-best way to honor her, her memory, and those she loved who have lived with only the memory of her for nineteen years and counting. 

-AK