Twenty-eight-year-old men, who are husbands and the father of a beautiful, sweet five-month-old daughter, are not supposed to die. They are supposed to grow old, walking arm-in-arm with their wives and, later perhaps, with their daughters on the latter's wedding day. They are most assuredly not supposed to die.
Tragically, and emblematic perhaps of the inequity of life, Donald L. Adams - at age 28 the loving husband of Heda Adams and the doting daddy of baby Rebecca Adams - was killed on Tuesday, September 11, 2001. He was a Vice-President, eSpeed Sales at Cantor Fitzgerald and was in his office on the 105th Floor of the North Tower when the cowards who hijacked jet airliners and bastardized them into weapons, flew one into the building.
Don and Heda have a great "How did you two meet?" story. A big man (captain of the Fairleigh Dickinson University football team and a stalwart on its offensive line), he was working as a bouncer at a bar down the Shore one night in the summer of '92 when she, underage, tried to gain entry. She did. It turned out to be one of the best decisions he would ever make.
He commuted by train from the family's home in Chatham, New Jersey to Cantor Fitzgerald's offices in lower Manhattan. In the summer of '01, Heda and baby Rebecca would sit on the home's front porch and wait for him to walk up the road from the train station. "There's my girls!" he would exclaim as he approached them, smiling. They would smile right back.
May they still - even if only at the memory.
-AK
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