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A Life Without Odessa
One Husband's Struggle to Remake a Life Since Sept. 11
 Listen to Alex Chadwick's story.
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Odessa and Tony Morris were married on Sept. 11, 1976. Twenty-five years later to the day, Tony lost his wife in the terrorist attack on the Pentagon.
Photo courtesy the Morris family.
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March 11, 2002 -- "Whenever I hear 11, it triggers whatever is in me and I think right there: 'Odessa.' "
That's Horace Anthony Morris -- Tony Morris to his friends. An immigrant American and
professor of English at Howard University in
Washington, D.C., Tony is a father, a grandfather,
and -- since Sept. 11 -- a widower. His wife Odessa was one of the 125 people in the Pentagon who died in the terrorist attack on the building. (Sixty-four more died on the plane that hit it.)
Tony had dropped Odessa, a budget analyst for the Defense Department, at the subway that morning. She was only going in for a few hours -- Sept. 11 was their 25th wedding anniversary. He drove to campus, began a class, and then heard the news. He waited at home, with friends and neighbors gathering, but received no word. Sometime after midnight, he drove down to the site, and authorities let him through.
"I stood there and looked at it, and it was one of those moments where you really realized what happened," says Tony. "And the picture was nothing like what was on television. And I said, if she's in there, she's burned completely. Or, when you have this great faith, and you think there's a hole in the bottom of the Pentagon and she's down there, just waiting for someone to rescue her."
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Odessa and Tony at a family friend's graduation last year.
Photo courtesy the Morris family.
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Even today, six months later, Tony looks as though some part of him, right at the core, holds on to that wild hope that she's not really gone. But she is. And Tony Morris has to remake his life.
Tony and the three Morris children -- 25, 21 and 18 -- live in the dream home he and Odessa built on 21 acres about an hour outside of Washington. He stays busy trying to help the kids and attending to Odessa's animals -- 20 pet goats, two heifers and a bull.
"She loved it. Her grandparents had a farm in South Carolina, I think that's what attracted her to it. I mean, I'm from Jamaica where we keep goats, but never anything like this. So here I am, with all these animals."
Odessa ran the house: She planted the garden, cooked the big meals and managed the finances. Now, Tony does all that -- operating, he says, on a kind of auto-pilot.
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Tony at the 21-acre farm where his late-wife Odessa raised pet goats and cows.
Photo: Tom Bullock, NPR
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Morning Edition correspondent Alex Chadwick, who visited Tony at his home, asked him how he's coping, what he's doing to help himself get by.
"What am I doing for me? I don't know," says Tony. "Maybe I'm just .... whatever I'm doing for her, I'm doing for me. I really can't answer that because what am I going to do? I can't holler at God. It's just like hollering at a wall, nothing happens. Just go on to the next moment, the next day, and live. What am I doing for me? I don't know. That's a good question."
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