LARK ASCENDING
Posted on October 31, 2025 Leave a Comment
I stand in the opening of the garage in my home in Vermont, chucking balls for the border collie to chase. The yard is veiled under a heavy blanket of leaves, the amber and bittersweet tinge of fall’s bruising. I’m wearing winter fleece under my rain jacket. The dog doesn’t care about the cold or the soaking rain. The shifting late afternoon light catches a faint stain in the concrete, where my son last parked five years ago. This deluge has cloistered me. But I need to move beyond the long private pass, breath fresh air, lift my spirit. I drive to a nature preserve, harness the dog, and grip the leash as if it’s the only thing left to hold onto. It’s 5:00 PM. The cold feathers my spine. I don’t want to step into this darkness. Is this baptism worth suffering for…?
On this day in 2020, just after I prepared the house for my sister’s arrival, my son has hugged me goodbye and says he’ll plan supper. COVID has cancelled Halloween so I hike the nature preserve with my dog. Tuned to a radio app, a beautiful pastoral composition sings from my pocket— “Lark Ascending” by Vaughan Williams. Violins resonate in rising and drifting motion while starlings undulate in the fading light, like a dark veil. My son has already risen into the firmament, but I don’t know this yet. What I know is that he will love this music. I pause in the meadow, pull out my phone, and tap the title into a note. The October sky blushes over a nearby field, where a herd of banded cows rush toward the pale with their throaty bellows, scouting us with their big black eyes. They don’t know about larks, only fences and boundaries and meadow and mountain and hoof and breath.
The earth tilts toward darkness and I quicken my pace to loop back. Stones scrape against the tread of my boots. Leaves dapple the path ahead like copper coins cast from a heist, masking my impression. The citrine sun illuminates an opening where the silhouettes of two massive junipers vignette a tinting reflection. The way out is longer than anticipated and I cannot outstep the glow sinking into the mirror pond. I think my son has returned home with a bag of groceries, perhaps he’s slicing onions, draining clams, tempering cream. Anxious to share the splendor, I prepare to text the photos I snapped with a note of my return, idling in the unpaved lot. But I don’t. Instead, I think of sitting together, scrolling through photos, listening to violins, holding the beauty.
… I return home to unfurl a line across the verge, so no goblins and fairies with a sweet tooth ring the bell. No Jacko-lanterns or violins or mask. I want to light a fire, curl under a soft blanket, thaw leftovers, and write this story.
2025 Deborah Garcia, All Rights Reserved. Photos from personal photo stream – October 31, 2020, Jericho VT.
Autumn Reflecting Absence
Posted on September 22, 2025 Leave a Comment
Image created from personal photographs, enhanced using photo editing tools and Microsoft Copilot.
Fall was once another woman’s favorite time of year. For her, cooling temps renewed energy, darkening days shifted from strawberries and cream to steamy apple pies, falling colors signaled lifecycle tinting toward her October birthday. This woman holds a precious contemplative space in absence alongside her living son, through the gilded equinox— The September remembrance of meeting her lover and his death; the hallowed October parting of her beloved son; the September 22 birthday of a mother who blew out her last candle in 1981.
© 2025 Deborah Garcia, all rights reserved
THE NEWS IS MOSTLY TRUTH
Posted on September 11, 2025 Leave a Comment
Wendy and Barb sit on either side of me like the sibylline lions, Patience and Fortitude. I’m looking toward the corner of Morris and South Bay, listening for the rumble of a school bus, but all I hear is my heart pounding. I imagine Dylan’s morning: he’s humming a new tune; made a new friend; drawn a picture of his family.
Sue parks at the curb. I’ve forgotten the sitter was coming, that I have an afternoon of feeding tubes and language games. Startled, I turn to face her. Sue sees me the way you see tragedy, no matter how dark the shades are.
“Oh no Debbie, please don’t say it.”
A simple statement, don’t say it. A window slamming shut on your life.
I see her. She is real. This is real. Monday, David was to stay home. Sue was not coming to the doorstep, now she is.
I want to go back inside, savor my coffee and flip the open news page. It’s the wrong day and I know everything now. I want the phones silenced before noises form words that are all wrong. I want to push the green call button, sob to Dave about Dylan’s first day of school, while he pauses on the concourse.
The four of us sit on the stoop in silence, and I wonder if I can forestall a terrible thing from happening, by simply remaining still.
A yellow bus pauses.
I move alone to the corner to embrace the innocence, and walk our four-year-old into his new world.
The driver whispers, “I hope you don’t know anyone in the buildings. It’s terrible.
“Mommy, I had a great first day of school. Dasani is my best friend!”
The blue sky is now veiled in a milky haze, the breeze has become a wind, and the air is silt, and sea, and ash.
“What did you do today?”
“We had circle time, I got my name on my cubby, and we made pictures. I had fun in school today.”
“That’s very good Dylan.”
© 2025 Deborah Garcia, all rights reserved
URGENT ACTION CALL to Family and Friends of 9/11 Victims
Posted on September 8, 2025 Leave a Comment
Use the Letter Template Download below. Email Subject line: Bring the AVTCA to the Floor—“Honor Your Promise on 9/11.” Address 5 members of congress as follows:
Congressman Lawler: Courtney.Kaufman@mail.house.gov
Congresswoman Malliotakis: Kevin.Rodgers@mail.house.gov
Senator Cornyn: Leslie_Slaughter@judiciary-rep.senate.gov
Leader Scalise: Meg.McGaughey@mail.house.gov
Speaker Johnson: Chris.Jaarda@mail.house.gov
THANK YOU.
DAVID GARCIA, 40: A Life Composed of Courage and Passion
Posted on September 7, 2025 Leave a Comment
(May 11, 1961 – September 11, 2001)
David Garcia, 40, loved music: YES, Miles Davis, Acoustic Alchemy, Stevie Ray Vaughn, Debussy. Music underscored his challenges, triumphs, and dreams, a passion he enjoyed sharing with his young sons. “You could almost relate anything to music,” he said. College breaks were spent feverishly recording vinyl albums to cassette, listing the discography on 2×3 cards and arranging them alphabetically in the stereo cabinet he built himself. “I’m just sittin’ here, recording,” he noted, whilewriting song lyrics in letters to me, through the dating years. He built a pair of console speakers and shouldered a 20lb boom box built from car speakers and plywood. In his 30’s, he avidly supported the IMAC Theater (Inter-Media Arts Center) in Huntington Station, NY, friending the owner. We had tickets to see Acoustic Alchemy at the IMAC September 29, 2001.
Born and raised in the mid-Hudson town of Wappinger’s Falls, David graduated from Roy C. Ketcham High School with honors in 1979. Despite receiving devastating news that he was losing his eyesight to Retinitis Pigmentosa two years prior, he left home in the fall for SUNY College at Cortland, earning a B.S. degree in math and computer science, where he met his wife in 1981.
David and Deborah were 25- and 23-years-old when they married in July 1987. They purchased a ‘fixer-upper’ home in the seaport village of Freeport, Long Island, where he went to work replacing plaster with sheetrock, re-wiring, re-plumbing, and building tiered flower boxes along the front of the house for Deborah. This father of two sons put in twelve-hour workdays, taking over childcare after returning home. On the side, he coached his sons in little league, skiing, and building Lego worlds. He also loved spending weekends in his hometown, racing his newly purchased boat along the Hudson River.
He did not let the absence of a driver’s license or employment discrimination due to his disability keep him from moving forward. In 1985, he moved to New York city where he began his professional career as a mainframe programmer. Over sixteen years, this devoted family man carved a robust career as an IT professional and CEO of his consulting LLC, Rapid Business Software, developing a sought-after reputation in software-engineering with leading global financial companies, ultimately bringing him to Marsh & McLennan at One WTC in 1999. He had been planning a career shift from software engineering to web development in the Summer of 2001. Three weeks after 9/11, Deborah discovered a To-Do list on his computer synched from his Palm Pilot on September 9— Send web resume to concentric.net, Morgan Stanley… . A resume was sent 9/10, interviews were scheduled for 9/27. Also noted, Wills – Due Date, 9/10/01: Discuss simple will with financial planner: ask for testamentary trust and guardianship of children.He journaled, “There are many things to do in the time that is left.”
He was always willing to help family and friends with home repair and computer jams. His boys knew that Daddy could fix anything. A basement bench held a rotating supply of broken toys, notably a prized remote control boat that he had stayed up late repairing on the 10th.
David’s enthusiasm for life was not lost to the questionable future of his vision. He moved through the world with such finesse that few noticed his blindness. “The one thing in life,” he wrote, “is to try and get a lot of fun”—a mantra that epitomized his resolve to capture rich experiences before his world went dark.
Portions of David’s remains— recovered from the rubble of the World Trade Center— were identified between February and August 2002. He was among 295 colleagues whose lives were taken in the attacks.
© 2025 Deborah Garcia, All rights reserved
BREAKING NEWS: Path Clearing In the 9/11 Case For Kingdom of Saudi Arabia To Face Trial
Posted on August 28, 2025 Leave a Comment
Judge Daniels, of the Federal Court in the Southern District of New, just delivered a decision and order to deny KSA’s motion to dismiss.
This motion was initially brought to the SDNY by KSA in 2004.
Judge Daniels accepted evidence that undeniably links Saudi officials to provide financial and logistical support to hijackers.
The judge did not buy that the drawing of an airplane with equations related to the height and distance of a plane’s flight path, (found in Omar al-Bayoumi’s London apartment) had any reasonable explanation, dismissing a claim of being his son’s high school homework assignment, asserting the drawing “facially (directly) connects Bayoumi, with knowledge of the 9/11 attacks.” The judge further finds that Bayoumi’s 1999 videotaping casing of the Capitol, supporting FBI documents indicating him as a Saudi intelligence asset. Additional evidence proved he had frequent contact with consular official and Imam Fahad al-Thumairy, employed by KSA’s Ministry of Islamic Affairs (MOIA), also alleged to have direct links with two of the 9/11 hijackers with whom Bayoumi lived in California. Thumairy was chief Imam at the King Fahad Mosque in Culver City, California and a diplomatic employee at the Saudi Arabian Consulate General in Los Angeles. The judge finds that “KSA sent Omar Al Bayoumi and Al Fahad Thumairy to the U.S.,” as government employees, concluding that “Plaintiffs have shown that Bayoumi, Thumairy, and KSA knowingly, or at least with deliberate indifference, supporting the hijackers’ terrorist activity,” by “providing assistance to the hijackers” in the U.S.
Much of the evidence presented had been turned over to the FBI in the early weeks after the 9/11 attacks, by the British police force, and questionably mishandled by the FBI and CIA, downplaying the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia’s ties to al-Qaeda plotters and their role in the 9/11 attacks. Here.
Further, The court asserts, “Plaintiffs present sufficient facts to support a reasonable inference that their claims satisfy the JASTA exception.”
The years of investigation and arguments that this ruling builds upon, has been bolstered by the efforts of 9/11 families in the 2016 passage of the Justice Against Sponsor’s of Terrorism Act (JASTA- Public Law No. 114-222). JASTA law amends the Foreign Soverign Immunities Act, Anti-Terrorism Act, and the Effective Death Penalty Act. It allows all victims of international terrorism to file suits, holding foreign governments not designated as State Sponsors of Terrorism, accountable when providing support to terrorism acts inflicted upon American citizens. The act waives soverign immunity for foreign states casuing injury or death in the United States by an act of international terrorism in the U.S. or tortious acts of agents of that foreign state while in office or employed regardless of where the the acts occurred here, and here.
Promise of Justice demands transparency and accountability. We will not stop until every line of truth is unveiled and every path of justice is secured— for generations to come!
© 2025 Deborah Garcia
VOICES 2025 NYC Symposium
Posted on August 27, 2025 Leave a Comment
9/11 Victims, Families, Responders, Survivors, and Providers are invited to attend FREE of charge, September 10th at the NY Marriott Downtown, in-person or virtually.
Meet members of VOICES Center For Resilience. Engage with 9/11 community members who witness the Military Commission proceedings at Guantanamo Bay. Get live updates from attorneys on the Multi-District (MDL) legal proceedings regarding Saudi Arabia and the USVSSTF. Get updates on the VCF from the fund Special Master, and more.
Lunch is included with registration.
ON RESONANT LOVE
Posted on August 1, 2025 Leave a Comment
Deep within the fifth-floor galleries of MoMA, a modest-sized shadowbox frame contains the hypnotic canvas of limp pocket watches draped over figures objectifying time and life’s impermanence. The three prominent dreamlike figures appear fluid and denuded, are fixed in a surreal minimalist landscape stroked in soft hues of blue-grays and golds resemblant of dawn’s wakening glow. Equally as iconic as the flowing drapery in Ruben’s allegorical painting of the Three Fates (housed in the Louvre), are the melting clocks that captured Salvador Dali’s imagination in The Persistence of Memory (1931). The imagery blends politics, symbolism, and metaphor to confront notions of cosmic order, temporal guise, and destiny that embodies the melancholy caused by time and space.
A leafless tree limb supports a slackened timepiece, pointing toward the horizon beyond a sea flanked by a golden empty terrain of possibility. A soft pocket watch, visited by a fly, bends over the sharp edge of a wood mantle, facing upward to reflect the blue-gray firmament and the winged shadow of perseverance and transience in a new dawn. Cast in contrast, a locked timepiece is fixed beside the melting mantle clock, covered in ants imbibing on the decay of time. A pillowy-white figure with dark lashes, resembling a partial human profile, floats in the unconscious darkness— a clock blanketing the tenderness drapes over the softness as though saddling the cusp of becoming.
Dali’s clocks are blurred, near opaque. Light reflects on the face’s curvy metallic edges, like the burnished glint on tarnished spoons, the white-gold band I wore as a bride in my twenties, or the silver Mercy Band I’ve worn on my right wrist since entering Ground Zero on September 11th, 2002. Anniversaries have rarely brought joy. The bend of time has sculpted a groove beneath the gold band.
The evening of July 25, 2001 was a balmy 95 degrees, like our wedding day fourteen years before. Enjoying our first meal at our new patio dining table on the deck completed two weeks prior, evoked an atmosphere of triumph and contentment. Aside from the milestone time stamp, a trip to Fehn’s Bakery (formerly Gersts, where our wedding cake came from) in Seaford, Long Island, and the diamond-flanked ruby necklace wrapped in gold foil, it was an ordinary Wednesday— Dave worked a full day, I wrote reports, the boys chased each other with water guns. It was too late and humid to consider hair and eye shadow, and in everyone else’s case, shirts. While David grilled the steak, I hurried to toss potato salad and squeeze a red #14 atop the ceremonious carrot cake, the edge marred from racing around a corner. The effect of squeezing a gelatinous ribbon of color from a plastic tube rendered an imprint that looked elementary— wavy bands with globby orbs— as though there would be more anniversaries to hone the lines. By the time the cake blessed the table, our 4-year-old had passed out, legs draped over the arm of a chair.
On the table was a whimsical card with a pink cartoonish rose on the cover. Inscribed inside— “Dew me,” Dear Still going after 14 years! With Love and Affection, your Husband. Though this instance of dew was a playful twist of glistening beads on morning petals and action, the tropes of love I’ve carried into courtrooms, memorials, and conference rooms have defined my life since the closing of that sappy sentimental fold.
The Merriam-Webster dictionary describes the word husband as first used in 13th century Old English as a noun meaning master of a house, to dwell as in— remaining for a time, also akin to the Old Norse etymology meaning to inhabit as in— to be present in any manner of form.
* * *
I’ve learned over the years that it is not presence alone that inspires connection, but something much more elusive, some kind of cosmic alignment between a personality and an imprint.
Recently, someone asked, How do you know?” Having been in a few long-term relationships they said, “I never had that level of connection.”
“The relationship is easy, I said— It just is.”
48 days after our 8-year-old lit our faces in the flash of a joyful moment, the image would remain on a negative ribbon rolled tight in a date-stamped cartridge until time developed and slipped it into the frame positioned behind a candle across from the chair where I ponder poetry.
Glowing in the eternal flame is a resonant love, an energy intensified by triumphs, failures, and adjustment, that expands beyond what is tangible.
Contrary to unrequited love, where love returned hardly ever resembles love given, resonant love is a synchronous relational vibration. Some people describe it as soulmate love. Like violins made by the Italian master Stradivari, the vibrations possess a quality of resonance that later violinmakers can never precisely duplicate.
When I stepped out onto the front porch of our Long Island home— waiting for my 4-year-old’s school bus— after witnessing the sudden death of my husband, my world shifted. Everything familiar of my physical surroundings was unfamiliar. It was as though I had died and re-awakened into a distorted universe with my senses misaligned, the world muted— the sky had no color, words lacked meaning, and air scorched my skin. I stumbled against the force of gravity.
The moment David left the World, the shadow of time halted then cleaved into simultaneous instruments of time— a durante vida and a post mortem— the shrinking span of existence and the expanding arc of surrealism, reflecting a collapse of a perceived fixed cosmic order. Like Dali’s melting timepieces, the rigid clock that holds hands over to-do lists, Day-Timers, and wealth plans softens to a fluidity of time that bends and warps certainty, memory, and the subconscious. A state of confusion bending reality.
In a chaotic world fraught by continuous discontinuity, the evolution of relationship sundered by the black flower of death, unfurls into the chrysanthemum of continuity. The resonant love becomes vibrational echoes, a slow incantation that shapes the landscape of what endures. An ache to reach toward what is known, a homeland grounding in the surreal and familiar.
Poet David Whyte writes about unrequited love in Consolations (Many Rivers Pres, 2016); “… a love returned rarely ever resembles a love given, but unrequited love is the form that love mostly takes. Requited love may happen but is a beautiful temporary… an aligning of stars coming only once every long cycle. The great discipline, he writes, seems to be in giving up control in how we are requited.” I don’t know which specific elements of our relationship depart from this wisdom. Dating game aside, there were no severe elements of unmatched wanting, need, or control in our marriage. Movement mirrored need.
Perhaps it was the unique bond formed as a response to his blindness, a practical need and trust described by Andrew Leland in Country of the Blind, as though we were “a single human blanket organism.” David and I checked in with each other several times on workdays, planned individual activities together, and shared clearly defined roles in childcare and life management. Our schedules were intricately synched— boys in tow, we navigated the hardware store, car tune-ups, and eye appointments. The four of us moved through life with the “full intimacy and unmeditated experience” of being like a single organism with four voices and eight legs.
Maybe, our love was predestined in the alignment of the cosmos, an energy which bumped us together on a campus sidewalk and thrust us apart in a twenty-year span framed by a single calendar page— September 11th. Is it possible that we embody a meta-human quality of affection that is un-measurable and transcendent— a resonant love, a radiant ethereal energy inhabiting the afterlight?
Perhaps it is pretentious for me to assert that Whyte’s meditation on love contradicts our own truth. Throughout the twenty years of our relationship, David and I had become best friends, each other’s cheerleader, confidante, shoulder. Meeting at 17 and 20, we sculpted adulthood together, four hands on a lump of spinning clay, pushing towards a center, shaping something functional. I was the fire on the stove, the eyes on the road, the hand in the dark. He was the bread on the plate, the point of interest on the map, the embrace in the night. He needed my sight, I needed his vision.
* * *
Since David’s departure I have worn and tossed another’s ring, moved the deck chairs to another home, and perfected the lines and edges of hundreds of celebratory cakes. At this thirty-eight-year mark of our marriage, we have been physically apart more years than together. Throughout the twenty-four years of his absence, I have raised our sons, championed for justice, and rooted in the world the legacy he never got to carry forward. What I have learned in the shifting landscape of intimate remembering is that love is the throughline upon which transformation occurs. Evolution bends the lines forward. Continuity holds its shape. No measure of time diminishes the persistent resonance of memory.
This July 25th, I honor our anniversary with reverence to the requited love we share. Seated alone at the table, I fork a single slice of carrot cake in a take-out box, raise a martini glass to the cosmos, and toast—
“Dear, with love and affection, your wife X/O!”
© 2025 Deborah Garcia, all rights reserved
Image by Deborah Garcia
Card by Hallmark
UPDATE ON MILITARY COMMISSIONS AT GUANTANAMO BAY
Posted on July 7, 2025 Leave a Comment
Presented by: John Ryan, Colleen Kelly, and Deborah Garcia — Wednesday, July 16th – 7:00 PM EST
Join the Voices Center For Resilience in a conversation about the experience of attending Military Commissions hearings with Lawdragon journalist John Ryan, and September 11th family members Deborah Garcia and Colleen Kelly.
This presentation is intended as an overview of the history and experience of attending proceedings, and will not discuss viewpoints about the potential outcome.
Upon FREE Registration, a Zoom link will be sent to your email.
