Jersey Girls

 

Patricia Cushing - Bayonne, N.J.

United Flight 93 | September 11, 2001

Patricia Cushing, 69, of Bayonne, New Jersey had never flown on an airplane - not even once - until Tuesday, September 11, 2001.  On that terrible Tuesday morning, she boarded United Flight 93 at Newark Airport in the company of her friend and sister-in-law Jane C. Folger for the flight to San Francisco.  They were heading west for a long-planned vacation.  

Ms. Cushing had been widowed in 1988.  She was the mother of five.  She was an opera lover, the proud holder of season tickets for the Metropolitan Opera in New York City.  A Maryland native, she had raised her family in Bayonne while she worked for New Jersey Bell Telephone for twenty years.  It was the job from which she had retired.  Her family referred to her, with simple eloquence, as "a classy lady".  

Jane C. Folger - Bayonne, N.J.

United Flight 93 | September 11, 2001

Jane C. Folger, 73, was the sister of Patricia Cushing's late husband, and these two branches of the family tree lived within four blocks of one another in Bayonne.  She had raised six children and once the youngest was old enough to permit her to seek work outside of the home, she did.  After beginning, literally, on the ground floor as a bank teller, over the course of a twenty-five year career she worked her way up to the position of Bank Officer at Commercial Trust, the position from which she retired in 1994.   

Ms. Folger endured a mother's worst nightmare twice as she was forced to bury two of her sons.  One was killed in action in Vietnam.  One was killed by AIDS in 1994 and as she, his mother, had also been his caretaker, his death angered her and hardened her.  One of the things that helped bring her back?  The time she spent with her friend and sister-in-law, Patricia Cushing.  

Two extraordinary Jersey Girls, related by marriage, bonded by life, and forever loved and remembered by those they loved and those who loved them most of all. 

-AK