Sole Sisters by Jennifer Lin

Author:Jennifer Lin [Lin, Jennifer; Warner, Susan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-7407-8697-6
Publisher: Andrews McMeel Publishing
Published: 2011-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

It’s now or never, thought Sandy Felt at the end of the summer of 2001. She was running five or six miles regularly. Her forty-fifth birthday was around the corner. She told her husband that if ever she was going to run a marathon, now was the time.

“If you want to do it and you dream it, you can do it,” Ed Felt replied. “I’ll be there at the end, scraping you off the ground if I have to.”

Days later, Ed took off for a business trip on the West Coast, boarding United Flight 93 from Newark, New Jersey, to San Francisco.

It was September 11, 2001.

When hijackers took over the plane, Ed was able to get to the lavatory and call 911 on his cell phone before the plane crashed into a black pit in western Pennsylvania.

Left alone to raise two teenage daughters, Sandy was angry. She spent sleepless nights in Ed’s basement gym, pounding the treadmill or swinging at the red leather punching bag. At just five feet and a hundred pounds, Sandy walloped away at the bag. For inspiration, she imagined the center of the bag was the face of the plane’s lead hijacker, Ziad Samir Jarrah, who had never met her, or Ed, or their daughters.

For Sandy, who was always very private, grief has been solitary. She has friends and family, but she was extremely close to her husband. They became friends on the third day of freshman orientation at Colgate University and two years later began dating. That was it. They were together for the next twenty-five years.

“Running has been my way to grieve,” says Sandy. “It’s that constant friend that I have with me on bad days. I can put my sneakers on, and as hard as it is to get going I know that once I finish the run, I’m going to feel better. Even if I’m just lying to myself.”

In the months after Ed died, Sandy continued to run, alone, on trails near her home in Matawan, New Jersey. “It was how I kept my sanity,” she says.

But with so much running, her weight had dropped to just eighty pounds. Sandy had to force herself to eat so she could keep going.

In April 2002, Sandy went to a hotel in Princeton, New Jersey, to hear the cockpit voice recordings of Flight 93’s final moments with others who had lost family on the plane. While she was there, Sandy met Elsa Strong, whose sister, Linda Gronlund, was a flight attendant on the plane. Elsa was organizing a group of family members to run in the upcoming New York Marathon to honor those who died. Sandy signed on.

“Something deep within me said: ‘I think we can do it.’ It’s part of my healing process, but it is also a tribute to Ed’s faith in me,” says Sandy.

Ed, a computer scientist, never ran a marathon, but he regularly ran four or five miles. On Sundays, before church, he often took a twenty-two-mile bike ride. In the summer, he swam twenty laps at the neighborhood swim club.

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