Channelling Grief

In the Boston Globe Sunday Magazine, reporter Charles M. Sennott follows the path of Sally Goodrich, whose son died aboard a hijacked plane on Sept. 11, 2001. To honor her son's memory, Goodrich built a school for girls in Afghanistan. Sennott writes:

It’s a journey that began in the aftermath of September 11, 2001, when the Goodriches’ son Peter, 33, a software developer living in Sudbury with his wife, Rachel, boarded United Airlines Flight 175 bound for California. Peter hated flying and worried his whole life about hijackings. The flight he was on became the second plane that would crash into the twin towers of the World Trade Center.

Four days later, standing in lower Manhattan, a steady rain tamping down the ash and smoke amid those ruins, Don and Sally held each other and wept. It was from the despair and rubble of ground zero that they would embark on a nearly six-year odyssey to honor the memory of their son by responding to the crime of terrorism the way they believe Peter would have wanted them to. But getting to that place of understanding would first take them down into terrifying depths, where they felt everything was lost. That is, until they found themselves at a turning point that would draw them to the place from which the September 11 attacks were authored.