9/11: 20 YEARS LATER
20 years on, children of 9/11 still grieve
BY KIRSTYN BRENDLEN
Olivia Vilardi-Perez signs
her name just like her father,
Anthony.
Anthony died on 9/11,
when Vilardi-Perez was ten
years old, one of more than 600
Cantor Fitzgerald employees
working on the top fl oors of
the north tower that morning.
Years later, in college, Vilardi-
Perez decided to get his signature
tattooed.
“I gave the tattoo artist
the signature off of his will,
which was morbid enough as
it is,” she said. “And he’s like,
alright, I just need you to sign
this paperwork. So I’m signing,
and he goes ‘You understand
you sign your name just
like your father, right?’”
“It was very special, very
weird.”
It took years for Vilardi-
Perez to get comfortable talking
about her father, she said.
In the aftermath of his death,
she felt like she had to be the
“rock” of the family, trying to
stay calm and strong when her
relatives were struggling.
“My uncle was getting married
September 1, 2002,” she
said. “I was supposed to walk
down the aisle with my dad.
The day of the wedding, my
uncle was really struggling
with that. I just felt the need
to be the rock. I didn’t want
to bring my dad up to anyone
because it would make them
upset, and I’d just feel upset
when other people were crying
or experiencing pain.”
Anthony and Vilardi-Perez’s
mother were divorced,
and she lived primarily with
her mother, spending some
weekends with her father, stepmother,
and two half-siblings.
She was old enough when he
passed to remember him, but
young enough that those memories
are hazy.
“Twenty years later, sometimes,
you’re stuck wondering
if it’s a real memory, if
it’s a dream, if it’s something
you made up to feel closer to
him,” she said. “There are
a few things I know about
my dad. My dad loved video
games, which he 100 percent
has passed on to me. He loved
‘Star Wars,’ which he passed
on to my brother and I. And he
was just a jokester.”
Hearing stories about him
as an adult, she said, is special.
They’re not the kinds of stories
friends and family would have
told to her as a child, and they
reveal parts of him she doesn’t
think she would have appreciated
as a kid, including parts
of him she sees refl ected in herself.
Now a high school science
teacher, Vilardi-Perez said
she’s always been the kind of
person to put herself second to
help other people, something
her father was always doing.
When someone is having a
hard time, she’ll do anything to
make them laugh.
“To hear the love that he felt
for me, I don’t think I can explain
the gravity of that,” she
said. “It’s always nice to hear
the lovely stories, but when
things were bad for him, his
main concerns were me and his
children. It just goes to show
you how great of a person he
truly, truly was.”
The only person in her
school who had lost a parent
on 9/11, Vilardi-Perez was frustrated
by the way people treated
COURIER LIFE, S A2 EPTEMBER 10-16, 2021
her – like she was fragile.
She got involved with Tuesday’s
Children, a nonprofi t organization
founded in 2001 to
support children and families
who lost someone on 9/11. Even
now, she’s still meeting new
people through the organization,
making connections with
those who have experienced the
same grief.
Sara Wingerath-Schlanger,
senior program director at
Tuesday’s Children, is still
working to expand the mentorship
program the organization
has implemented to match
grieving family members with
someone who could help them
through their loss long-term.
The average age of children
of victims on 9/11 was eight or
nine, Wingerath-Schlanger
said, so they’ve served a wide
range of ages as those children
grew up and needed support.
“No matter how old you
were, if you were a child, you
will re-grieve,” she said. “At
different milestones, at different
developmental stages. The
big ones, like graduation and
walking down the aisle, and
the small ones like I’m walking
down the street and I smell my
dad’s cologne.”
Of the nearly 3,000 people
who died on 9/11, 266 were
Brooklyn residents. In the
two decades since the attacks,
fi rst responders and those who
worked at Ground Zero in the
weeks and months following
have continued to get sick and
pass away from health conditions
they developed on the
site.
Many children were too
young on 9/11 to remember the
parent they lost. 108 women
who lost partners that day were
pregnant, and their children
never met their fathers.
“Some kids feel like, ‘I was
so little, I don’t have memories,
or I was born after,’” Wingerath
Schlanger said. “And how
does that make them feel, and
how do they walk through this
world fi guring that out. And
those that have memories and
are able to say to themselves ‘I
can feel the void.’”
Vilardi-Perez and her
younger sister struggled with
their memories of Anthony.
“I think her and I held resentment
toward each other for
too long,” she said. “I resented
her because she lived with him.
I didn’t live with him. And she
resented me because I had the
memory.”
The physical distance between
Vilardi-Perez and her
father means that a lot of her
memories with him were in the
small moments they shared together.
“We were watching a movie,
the movie ‘Face/Off,’ and he’d
be like, ‘Don’t look, don’t look,
it’s gory!’” she said. “And he’d
put his hand over my eyes, but
leave just that little crack that if
I just wanted to look, I could. But
I don’t do gore. I never looked.”
Grieving her father isn’t
linear. Every year, the anniversary
is “an impossible grip
around your heart, around
your throat,” she said. Daily
life got easier, but milestones
– even the bad ones — are still
diffi cult.
“I went through a really
tough breakup recently, and I
just remember saying ‘My dad
would kill him. No doubt about
it, my dad would kill him,’”
she said. “He would buy me a
drink, or he would help me, or
he would guide me.”
Some of her best friends lost
fathers who were fi refi ghters,
she said, and the fi rehouse door
is always open when they need
support.
“I am extremely envious of
that,” she said. “I wish I had
something like that..”
She pours that grief and the
long journey through it into
teaching, she said. Every year
she starts out telling her students
about her father’s death
and the way she struggled
through it. She’s upfront about
her mental health and the help
she needed as she got older.
“I have students who face
horrible things, that no child
should ever have to face,” she
said. “And to have a teacher
standing in front of them, who,
I’m not going to say I’m fi ne, but
I’m doing OK — who can make
it through that, I think that’s a
really important thing.”
Anthony Perez was killed in the 9/11 attacks, leaving behind three children, including daughter Olivia Vilardi-
Perez. Perez was one of more than 600 Cantor Fitzgerald employees who died that day.
Voices 9/11 Living Memorial