Ten years after Wendy’s death in World Trade Center 2, Faulkner said, “I’ve often thought, ‘Honey, this is one thing where I didn’t want to be right. You were such a gentle spirit, so positive. You were more concerned about sending clothing to poor people at the same time these monsters were carefully planning and rehearsing to murder you.’ ”
Wendy worked as vice president of information technology at the Chicago headquarters of the retail-insurance brokerage Aon Risk Services. On Sept. 11, she was attending a one-day meeting on the 104th floor of World Trade Center 2. “When the order came to evacuate the building, they went to the elevator,” Faulker said. “It was very full, and there was only room for one of the three women. That’s the last time that either of the two other women were seen. What happened or where she was is a total mystery, because absolutely nothing was recovered. I hope that she was killed instantly when the plane hit, but in my heart of hearts I fear that Wendy was trapped up there.”
Wendy had a profound fear of a skyscraper fire — so much so that she had been negotiating to move her Chicago office to a lower floor in the Sears Tower. “It’s almost as if she knew,” Faulkner said.
It was such a cruel irony that his religious faith was initially shaken. “How could God let this happen to one of his best servants?” he asked himself. “Why make every one of her worst nightmares come true? I will wonder about that until the day that I die.”
Then something very unexpected happened to the man who, though a believer, had always been skeptical of the expression, “I’ll pray for you.”
He recalled, “In my darkest moments, I could actually feel that people were praying for us — not just our friends but people who didn’t know us. I felt it; and it made a difference in a way that nothing else could have. Now I find my faith getting stronger.”
The couple’s daughters — Ashley, then 13, and Loren, 19, proved to be his other anchor. “We were like a three-legged milking stool,” he said. “We leaned on each other.”
The girls nicknamed him “Dommy” — part Daddy, part Mommy — and took to giving him “Dommy Day” cards. Faulker, a marketing communications consultant, decided to start his own business so he could work from home and spend more time with the girls.
As a family, they also found new purpose in continuing Wendy’s charitable work. Five days after 9/11, when they had lost hope for her survival, Faulkner and his girls were discussing what they could do to honor her. Just then they heard the ping of an incoming email message. It was from a young girl in the Philippines named Charis. “Her family had been receiving boxes of clothes and candy every month. Charis wrote that she just heard the news and she was so sad. She put in a p.s. that she was so sad she would not be getting Aunty Wendy’s packages any more. That’s when we got the brainstorm, that this is what we should do, we should continue to keep the boxes going.”
And that’s when the Wendy Faulkner Memorial Children’s Foundation was born. The nonprofit organization has done good works around the globe, from feeding tsunami victims to rescuing children from a dumpster in Malawi. Much of their donations go to an orphanage in India for the children of “untouchables.”
Charis is now 17 and her mother died a year ago. The Faulkners continue to support her and to finance her education. “I’m proud that she’s still a part of my life,” Faulkner said. “I’ve never met her, but she calls me uncle Lynn and I call her my lovely niece.”
The Faulkner family was thrown into the spotlight when Lynn and Ashley attended a campaign rally for President Bush in Lebanon in May 2004. Father and daughter had already shaken hands with the president when their neighbor asked, “Mr. President, did you know that young lady lost her mom in the World Trade Center?”
Faulkner recalled, “He came back to her and embraced her. The moment seemed very real. Even in a mass of people, it was an intimate moment.”
Faulkner quietly snapped a photo, and by the next day it had gone viral around the world. “People found the photo so compelling, because nothing was staged, or contrived,” he said. “It was an honest human thing and that’s what showed. There was no question in my mind that in that moment he wasn’t the leader of the free world; at that moment he was a dad.”
The Bush campaign obtained the family’s permission to use the photo in television ads. Ashley was interviewed by all the major news networks when the family attended the president’s inauguration in January 2005. A year later, when visiting Washington, D.C., the president gave the family a 40-minute private tour of the White House, enthusing, “Ashley, it’s great to see you again.”
Loren is now married and studying medicine at the University of Cincinnati, while Ashley is a graduate student at Bowling Green State University.
“Our daughters are pretty amazing girls,” Faulkner said, “but then, their mom was an amazing woman.”
Faulkner feels profound gratitude to the highly trained Navy SEALS who killed Osama bin Laden. “God bless the SEALS and the folks who gave bin Laden the opportunity to meet his maker because I have a feeling it didn’t turn out the way he expected it to.”
He often attends many of the funerals of local servicemen killed in Iraq or Afghanistan, because, he explained, “in some small way they were there because of what someone had done to my wife. We are all indebted to these people, but I feel an extra personal indebtedness.”
Faulkner flies the Remembrance Flag outside the Mason home where he spent so many happy years with his wife. “Wendy was very logical and linear and I tend to be the dreamer/big picture kind of guy. We were an awesome team.”
The flag depicts the Twin Towers with the simple slogan, one that Faulkner holds dear to his heart:
“Never Forget.”
Contact this reporter at (937) 225-2209 or mmccarty@DaytonDailyNews.com.
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