Arm-in-Arm in an Aisle of Joy

Five days after 9/11, Mayor Rudy Giuliani escorts the sister of a fallen firefighter down the aisle.

The mayor's father taught him to do funerals. "He was enormously insistent," Rudy Giuliani recalls with a chuckle. "He'd say the family needs you to embrace them now more than at a happy occasion, like a wedding or bar mitzvah."

So no one was surprised when the mayor rushed to a Staten Island hospital last August to console the family of a 27-year-old fireman who had just died of a heart attack on the way to a fire. Giuliani soon learned the news was even worse. The fireman's mother, Gail Gorumba, had lost her husband, her father and now her son, all in the past 12 months. Yet, she was the one comforting her family.

Giuliani asked her how she could get through so much tragedy with such remarkable grace.

"Whenever terrible things happen," she said, "I focus on the good things life gives you. So now, I'm thinking about my daughter Diane's wedding in two weeks. We're going to make it even more joyful."

A few days later, Fire Commissioner Thomas Von Essen walked into the mayor's office with a request from Mrs. Gorumba. She wanted to ask for a favor, but only if the mayor was willing to grant it. "There are no men left in her family," Von Essen said, "so would you walk her daughter down the aisle?"

Giuliani didn't hesitate: "I would be honored to do it."

The wedding date was Sunday, September 16 -- as it turned out, only five days after the World Trade Center catastrophe, the worst attack on American soil in history.

That week the family asked whether the mayor was still planning to attend the wedding. "I said, 'Not only can I do it, I want to do it,' " Giuliani recalls. "The wedding helped get me through that terrible week. The idea that in the worst times of life, you have to take full advantage of the beautiful things that come along -- I think that's what living is all about."

The ceremony was in a little country church in Brooklyn's Gerritsen Beach, a determinedly middle-class neighborhood that had lost more than two dozen firefighters, policemen and others at Ground Zero. The pews were packed, and more than 200 people gathered outside waving small American flags as they waited for the mayor.

Giuliani arrived on time, and in black tie, complete with a white pocket-square and white rose boutonniere. Ordinarily, he hates getting into a tux. "But I thought, we are going to will ourselves to make this a joyous occasion," he said, "because I need it, the family needs it, and the city needs it."

As they came down the aisle arm in arm, the bride beamed under her white flowing veil, the mayor concealed his nervousness -- "I thought, don't screw this up, don't fall" -- and the crowd burst into a sustained wave of applause.

Outside, sitting in the shade of a tree, Doris Mendez, whose son Charles was among the missing firemen, told a reporter: "That's a great thing the mayor did. To give us something happy to come and see."

From Reader's Digest - July 2002

 

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