By Michael Amon
Newsday
NEW YORK — The roses were for Joseph Hunter, a brother and a son and a New York City firefighter who was killed on Sept. 11, 2001.
Standing on a Fire Department boat anchored near Ground Zero in New York Harbor, Tess Hunter, 69, and her son, Sean Hunter, 35, tossed the roses into the water, wiped tears from their eyes and embraced.
“Six years later, I’m still grieving,” said Tess Hunter, of South Hempstead, whose son Joseph, 31, was part of FDNY Squad 288 in Maspeth, Queens. “It’s going to take a lifetime to heal.”
The Hunters were joined yesterday by about 40 other Long Island family members of 9/11 victims who have undergone counseling at the WTC Family Center in Baldwin. Manned by members of the Fire Department’s marine unit, the 129-foot-long firefighting boat carried the families on an hour-long journey through the waters around Lower Manhattan before halting near Ground Zero for a short ceremony.
“There’s something about being on a boat that’s very soothing,” said Minna Barrett, the director of research and training at the WTC Family Center, which organized the boat trip. “We are lucky to have the Fire Department boat. If it were a just a regular boat, I don’t think it would have the same feeling.”
Debbie Carson, 39, of Massapequa Park, whose husband, James Carson, a Cantor Fitzgerald employee, was killed when she was pregnant, brought her 5-year-old son, named for his father.
“It’s good for him to see where his father worked,” Carson said, adding the boat trip “was more personal for us.”
Carson said she is slowly telling her son more about the circumstances of his father’s death. Little James sees a therapist at the Family Center twice weekly, and Carson goes three times. She said her son “is just beginning to realize what it means to not have a father.”
The WTC Family Center has provided therapy to more than 2,000 families of 9/11 victims and 4,000 first-responders, said Thomas Demaria, assistant vice president at South Nassau Communities Hospital in Oceanside, which provides funding and support to the center.
As the boat rounded the tip of lower Manhattan, children played hide-and-seek. When it neared Ground Zero, the families stood in a circle, each person given a rose or a paper heart to throw in the water. They were asked to think about their departed loved ones.
Christina Evans-Serafin, who lost her son Bobby, a firefighter, suddenly spoke up: “May they all rest in peace. They were all doing their jobs. They all went to work that morning expecting to come home.”
As the group bowed their heads, somewhere in the distance, a bugler playing “Taps” could be heard faintly. Organizers said they hadn’t arranged it.
Gabrielle Hoffman, 46, of Rockville Centre, whose husband, Stephen, was a bond trader in the north tower, said she doesn’t enjoy events near Ground Zero, but her 11-year-old daughter Madeline persuaded her to come.
“It happened when I was so little,” Madeline said. “We don’t come here much. It’s too sad.”
As the boat approached lower Manhattan, Madeline looked up to her mother: “I can’t see it. Where is it?”
“If you look through those buildings,” Hoffman said, pointing into the skyline, “it’s that space where there’s nothing.”
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