9/11 victims' families hold tight to stories, rituals to mark 22nd anniversary: 'You don't get any new memories'

All five television sets in Kiesha Washington-Dean’s ranch-style house in Riverhead play the same program for almost five hours each Sept. 11.

As has become an annual rite, all conversation stops in the house sometime around 12:40 p.m. That’s when the program — the 9/11 commemoration ceremony being telecast from Ground Zero — on the TVs, in the family room, bedrooms and kitchen, turn to one particular name out of the 2,983 victims being read aloud in memoriam.

“Derrick Christopher Washington.”

“The entire family gets gloomy leading up to the event," said his widow, Washington-Dean. "I don’t take any phone calls during that day. And we just try to remember him in good spirits. And we’ll say a prayer when his name comes out, and just thanking him for watching over us all these years."

Washington-Dean, now 52, also has attended and been a name reader, twice, at the annual ceremony itself.

Monday marks the 22nd anniversary of the 9/11 attacks — when terrorists plotting with the Islamic extremist group al-Qaida flew two hijacked jetliners into the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers, killing 2,753 victims there.

Nearly 1 in 5 of the dead were Long Islanders — about two-thirds from Nassau County and a third from Suffolk.

Hundreds more died when a third plane crashed into the Pentagon, outside Washington, D.C., and a fourth crashed into a field in Pennsylvania, bringing the overall toll to 2,977. Two of the 44 aboard the fourth plane, Flight 93, were Long Islanders: a passenger originally from Sag Harbor and the plane’s first officer, from Plainview.

Still feeling the impact 22 years later

In the decades since, thousands more people — first responders, laborers, workers and volunteers — have died of illnesses blamed on airborne toxins inhaled at Ground Zero during the months after the attacks. About 30% of those dead are from the Island, said John Feal, a first responder from Nesconset who lost half of his left foot after working to clear the rubble.

The geopolitical impacts of the attacks and the response to them can still be felt in the U.S. and beyond — including two American wars, in Afghanistan and Iraq, that have killed hundreds of thousands, more aggressive airport checkpoints and rules, restricted civil liberties, and a scrambling of American politics.

Feal laments that the 22nd anniversary will come and go without the attention given to a marquee year such as, say the 10th or the 20th or the 25th.

“This one will fly through on the 11th, and people will go about their business, but the fact is, those that are affected by 9/11 and those who are fighting cancer and other life-altering, debilitating illnesses, it’s Groundhog Day, right?” said Feal, who started a charity and has become an advocate for first responders.

In the 22 years since the death of Derrick Washington — a 33-year-old Verizon supervisor who was on the 110th floor of the South Tower — Washington-Dean remarried in 2005 and became a flight attendant in 2021. One of her and Washington's three sons, Christopher, died at 31 in 2020. Washington-Dean moved out of the home in Riverhead she had shared with her late husband to another in the town. Their youngest son, Malik, is now 25 and owns the old house. The middle son, Devin, now 29, moved to South Carolina, and has a 4-year-old daughter who was born in 2019. Her name is Destiny.

'You don’t get any new memories'

Dr. Kathleen Stergiopoulos, 50, of Garden City, cried Thursday as she reminisced about her brother Andrew, a 23-year-old from Great Neck who worked on the 105th floor of the North Tower at the stock and bond trading firm Cantor Fitzgerald, which lost 658 employees in the attacks.

But she’s heartened when she’s approached by a random person — sometimes by strangers — who offer a memory of her brother. Sometimes it’ll be in Great Neck, where the siblings attended North High School and Andrew played lacrosse, football and hockey. Sometimes, it’ll be in Flower Hill, at St. Francis Hospital, where she’s a cardiologist.

“They’ll tell me a story about him,” she said in tears. “It gives you a new memory, because you don’t get any new memories anymore, when someone passes away who was so bright and smart and full of promise, like a lot of people that died that day.”

Almost as much time has passed since her brother died in the attacks as he had been alive.

"In some ways it feels like just yesterday," she said. "But in other ways it feels like it’s been a long time — like, almost a lifetime."

For the 22nd anniversary, the family is planning to get together on Sept. 10 at the siblings’ parents’ home in Garden City — a brother from Naples, Florida, and another near Cold Spring Harbor will be coming over.

Although she’ll be seeing patients on the actual anniversary day, she is anticipating the usual calls, texts and other messages of remembrance, on Sept. 11, she said.

Dina Amatuccio of East Northport — whose dad, 41-year-old Joseph Amatuccio, a Port Authority manager of the World Trade Center, was last seen alive in the lobby of the South Tower — also isn’t planning to mark the morning in any formal way.

In the past, she has attended memorials in Long Beach, at the local firehouse and at a church, but never in New York City; she's avoided the city almost entirely since the attacks. 

For this anniversary, she’ll be at her job as a kindergarten teacher’s assistant.

“Just to keep my mind busy,” said Dina Amatuccio, who was 21 when her dad was killed.

After work, she’ll make a trip to the cemetery and then to a nighttime candlelight vigil at the local firehouse. To Dina, it's always the right time of the year to tell her sons, now ages 10 and 25, all about her dad. 

“I try to just tell them what an amazing grandfather he is, or would have been,” she said. “I tell my little one that I wish he would have been able to meet him.”

By Matthew Chayes

matthew.chayes@newsday.comchayesmatthew

Matthew Chayes, a Newsday reporter since 2007, covers New York City.