Memories of a 9/11 firefighter: "Even on holidays I would go down to look for my father's remains"

New YorkFor Ray Downey, 9/11 was his final act of service as the fire department’s chief of special operations. For his son Joe, also a firefighter, it meant eight months sifting through rubble and smoke in search of his father’s remains. For his grandsons, Connor and Joseph, it is a memory inherited from their father: that of Joe leaving them at a neighbor’s house as he rushed toward the World Trade Center.

In the same year that marks the 25th anniversary of the attacks, Joe is about to retire at 64 — one year older than his father was when he died, at 63 — while his own children have just joined the New York Fire Department.

“I didn’t go home that day. For the next five or six days, my brother, who is also a firefighter, and I stayed there. We slept right there on the ground. They brought us food and we ate there. We stayed in case they found any of the colleagues we had lost, but especially because if they found our father, we wanted to be there to pull him out ourselves.”

Joe returns to that day with the same firmness with which someone might run a finger over the raised line of an old scar. He does it every morning when he enters the office.“This is the office from which my father responded to the first call and then headed toward the World Trade Center. For the past four years, I have held his position, even though the title has a slightly different name: I am the chief of rescue. They are mixed feelings. Obviously, most of them are good, because in some way I have been able to continue his legacy,” explains the firefighter from behind a mahogany desk piled high with papers.The crackling voices over the radios fill the modest room at the station, in the middle of Roosevelt Island.

Photographs of Ray from his years of service with the fire department are interspersed with family photos. On one of the shelves, inside a small display case, sits a navy blue cap still covered in a fine layer of white dust. Embroidered in white and red are the words “Chief of Rescue Operations. FDNY.”

Joe gets up to approach the cap and points to it with a crooked smile. Without taking his eyes off it, he explains that on the third or fourth day — he no longer remembers which — they were told that they had located his father’s truck. Inside were this cap and his uniform. He believes his father’s personal rosary was there as well. He moves his fingers in the air, as if turning invisible beads.

“It was madness, because those buildings had furniture, chairs, tables, but you couldn’t find a single piece of it. Everything had evaporated. It was simply dust and steel... What I remember most is the smell of death, which persisted day after day.” It took eight months to find and identify his father through DNA testing.

During those months, every day was the same. New York was reduced to the route between Ground Zero and the cemetery where the funerals were held. He buried seven of the firefighters under his command. In total, 343 firefighters died there.Now, with the perspective of the years, he thinks about it more. Not because of what he lived through, but because of what he missed.

“I went months without going home, and I had two small children: one four years old and the other two and a half. And I think about everything my wife had to go through, having to raise them alone for months. And I missed many things, because even on holidays I went down there to search for my father’s remains. Even today, I don’t think people think enough about what the families went through while we were down there. Luckily, we’re still together and we have a good family.” Before finishing the sentence, he claps his hands. His gaze, which had drifted away for a moment, returns to the office where we are talking. Now he smiles warmly.“My mother told me that after 9/11 she wanted to keep the family together.”

A good part of what Joseph and Connor know about their grandfather and that day comes from memories borrowed from others. “My eldest son, Joseph, who works in social media, spends his time searching for and documenting stories about his grandfather. He finds people who knew him at some point, listens to their stories and publishes them,” he explains.

Generational change

Joe, however, was taken by surprise when his eldest son told him he wanted to become a firefighter.“I never pushed them toward it. And I don’t think the reason was the attacks or their grandfather’s role, either. He never put it that way. It was more that he was unhappy with his job and had seen me working as a firefighter, the camaraderie at the station. They have seen how much I love the job, despite what happened that day.”Now that his children are beginning to wear the same uniform in which their grandfather died, Joe sees the risks of the profession in a different light.“I never thought about it for myself. But now I think about it more. There is always the possibility that I could lose them.”

Joe is not the only member of the force who is retiring. He closes his eyes as he tries to make a mental calculation of how many firefighters and emergency technicians who were there at the time must still be on the force.“There aren’t many left. Maybe a couple of hundred.” He has no doubt that the memory of that episode will continue after there is no one left who lived through it. “What I don’t know is whether the younger generations really understand what we lived through down there. I think it’s difficult to see the human side if you weren’t there. I truly believe that. I would like to think that they do see it, and I hope that my children, because they are carrying on their grandfather’s legacy, understand the importance of it all.”

At the time of our interview, there are still two weeks to go before the 25th anniversary commemoration. Neither his mother nor his brothers and sisters will go. As every year, he will go with his two sons, his 20-year-old daughter, and his wife. “Everyone has their own way. I like it because it was the last place my father was alive.” Then he goes to his old fire station, on West 10th Street, to meet with the families of the other firefighters. “And I finish the day at my mother’s house. She’s an Italian mother, so she always has food waiting for us and we stay there talking.”

He also knows that a day will come when everyone who attends the memorial will only have known the two large water fountains that occupy the site where the Twin Towers once stood. Ground Zero, for them, will be the shade of the trees there and the faint metallic smell of bronze that lingers on their fingers from the railings guarding the engraved names of those who died there.

“I would like them to continue remembering it and reading the names. Over time, most people will no longer know who those names belonged to, except for the families, because memory passes from generation to generation. And I know that, in the case of my family, my children, now that they are New York firefighters, will probably be so for twenty or twenty-five years.”