Love story emerges from tragedy of Sept. 11

WASHINGTON — On Monday nights, the two groups met in the classrooms of Messiah United Methodist Church in Springfield, Va., pushing the chairs into a circle. The men and women were not there to cope with addiction or bankruptcy, but to seek the company of the few others who knew their misfortune. Once husbands and wives, they had become widows and widowers on the same day.

Ben Salamone in one group, Donna Teepe in the other.

Salamone was a broken shell. He would come home to Springfield from his job as a veterinarian for the U.S. Department of Agriculture and sit in the same chair he sat in when Marjorie was alive, crushed by the stillness. In family photos, the furniture and the travel mementos that decorated their home, she was everywhere. They had been married 31 years.

"I'd just sit there in that chair, constantly rehashing everything, every little event in our lives," said Salamone, 62. "I was so lonesome."

He and Marjorie met at Auburn University in Alabama, where Salamone grew up, and they were married soon after graduation. They reared two daughters, weathering frequent relocations for Salamone's 30-year career in the Army Veterinary Corps. Work and family were everything; with his daughters grown and Marjorie gone, he spent nights and weekends alone.

Monday nights were his escape.

Teepe, 63, was living the same loneliness, her home in Centreville, Va., empty without Karl. Like Salamone's daughters, her two children were adults, the younger finishing college in spring 2001, just before Sept. 11. She viewed everything in her life through the prism of that demarcation: before Sept. 11, after Sept. 11.

After Sept. 11, Teepe would come home from her job as the director of a nearby preschool to the house where she and Karl had reared their children, seeing his hand in everything. The deck he had built, the wooden cabinets he had crafted, the shelving system he had fashioned for her scrapbooking hobby. They were married 34 years.

When the Monday night sessions were over, the two support groups would linger in the hallways. Often the conversation would continue next door over coffee at McDonald's. Many, like Salamone and Teepe, were in no hurry to go home.

The McDonald's gatherings led to other group activities and outings, concerts and movies and card games. One day in October 2002, Salamone asked Teepe if he could take her to dinner.

He was tall, soft-spoken and exceedingly polite, a gentleman. She was blonde and also quiet.

They went to a Ruby Tuesday and met the next day for lunch. They were nearly the same age and similar in many other ways. Donna and Karl had been married for about the same amount of time as Ben and Marjorie.

Both men had long careers in the Army. Both couples had two children, and their daughters belonged to the same sorority at the College of William and Mary, separated by four years. They began to spend more time together and less time alone.

Then came the guilt. Was this new life a betrayal?

Love story

The love story of Donna Teepe and Ben Salamone is not wrapped in golden bows or ringed with little red hearts. There were no smoldering glances or torrid weekend trysts. Theirs has been a cautious courtship and an imperfect embrace, formed from the ruin and wreckage of Sept. 11.

On that day, Karl was in his office at the Pentagon, watching the twin towers burn on TV, when the nose of American Airlines Flight 77 came through the wall. He and six colleagues were killed. After a 22-year career in the Army, he was working as a budget analyst for the Defense Intelligence Agency, waiting to be moved to an office elsewhere in the building.

He and Donna grew up together in suburban St. Louis. They began dating when she was a sophomore in high school. "When he died," Teepe said, "I thought: How would I survive without this guy I have known since I was 11? I couldn't remember my life without him."

Salamone's Sept. 11 story is as familiar to Teepe as her own. Marjorie was a budget program analyst for the Army, working not far from Karl's office, though the two did not know each other. Ben and Marjorie's younger daughter, Amanda, called her mother from Midtown Manhattan after the towers were struck to say she was OK.

At 9:37 a.m., when the plane hit Marjorie's office at 550 mph, Salamone was at the Department of Agriculture giving a presentation she had helped him prepare. News of the attack interrupted the meeting. Salamone began to call, receiving no answer, and quickly calculated the odds, comforted by the improbability that she was wounded or killed. There are 25,000 people working there, he told himself.

He was one of the last to remain in the office that day. He still hadn't heard from Marjorie.

On the Metrorail ride back to Virginia, Salamone overheard two riders talking about the attack. The plane had hit the building on the western side, they said, the newly renovated section. Salamone interrupted them.

"My wife works there," he said as much to the other passengers as himself. The car fell silent.

Milestone reached

Salamone asked Teepe to marry him Christmas Eve 2006. That night, Salamone asked her to open a Christmas present. Inside was an ornament, an elaborately painted angel, bearing a diamond ring.

"Will you marry me?" he asked, and after a short pause, Teepe said yes.

It had taken years for them to reach that point. Both worried about what their children, friends and family members would think. A milestone came for Salamone four years after they began dating, when he took Teepe to meet Marjorie's parents in Georgia. They embraced her, and a great burden was lifted for him.

But it also took time for Salamone and Teepe to make the relationship all right with themselves, to not wake up in the middle of the night and feel guilty. "In your mind, you think, 'Am I being disloyal?' " Salamone said.

At every step, therapists assured them they weren't. "Our counselors explained that if you had a good marriage, you want that again," Teepe said. "You want what you had."

Little by little, they eased into their lives together, a process that continues. Almost two years after getting engaged, they have not set a wedding date. One reason, they said, is that they are preoccupied with the marriage of Salamone's younger daughter and the birth of his first grandchild.

Salamone and Teepe have not decided whether to live together, either. This is partly a result of convenience. They live close to their jobs. Teepe is minutes from the preschool, Salamone near the commuter slug line and its informal car-pool system he uses to get to work.

There are other reasons not so easy to explain. At Salamone's home in Springfield, Marjorie's clothes remain untouched in the closet, just as they were seven years ago. "My place is basically the same way she left it," said Salamone, who still refers to Marjorie as "my wife."

"If my wife came back today, she'd see her house the way it was," he said. "I try to keep everything the way it was. The thought of having to move just floors me."

At Teepe's home in Centreville, the family photographs in the bedroom of her with Karl are as he hung them, in identical wood frames and perfect rows.

They've discussed selling their homes and getting a place together. But, Teepe said, "we can't quite get it together to get rid of our houses."

As she explained it, "love is different the second time around." The pressures they once knew — children, careers, finances — are not there, so the pace is different. Sometimes during the week they meet for dinner, and every Friday, Salamone drives to Centreville to spend the weekend at Teepe's.

"We just enjoy being with each other," she said. "You need someone who's going through the same thing you're going through."

They are different people now, too, their lives changed by Sept. 11 but also by their new relationship. They travel often, attending plays and concerts. Recently, they began to take ballroom-dancing classes, Salamone dancing for the first time in his life.

"I'm so glad he has Donna," said Ann Marie Santillo, 31, Salamone's elder daughter, who lives in suburban Philadelphia. "We didn't want him to be alone in life."

Teepe's son, Adam, 29, an environmental consultant in Denver, said his mother's relationship with Salamone has brought "a sense of normalcy" to her. "Things will never be the same as they were, but having Ben in her life makes things a little easier," he said.

The pain of Sept. 11 is different now, Salamone said, but it doesn't go away. "Even today, it's there," he said. "It's an emotional roller coaster." There are weddings, birthdays and other milestones that serve as reminders of Sept. 11 in their indirect way. "At all those pivotal events in your life, you know there's a loss," he said. "There's an emptiness about it."

New memories

Together they are trying to create new memories, a new history, filling their homes with photographs of them as a couple or with each other's children. He and Teepe recently returned from an annual summer retreat in Maine for those who lost relatives on Sept. 11. Before that, they spent a week together in Hilton Head, S.C. The Pentagon Memorial would open soon, and they plan to visit it together.

"I think we've made a nice situation out of a bad situation," Salamone said.

"I think we both got lucky," Teepe added.