Cheryl McGuinness is living proof.
She hasn't seen the high school sweetheart she married since she kissed him goodbye Sept. 11, 2001, as he left their small New Hampshire town.
On that fateful morning Mrs. McGuinness' fairy-tale life with her gorgeous top-gun pilot came to an end. Tom McGuinness was the co-pilot of American Airlines Flight 11, the first to crash into the World Trade Center.
But three years later, Mrs. McGuinness has defeated the terrorists in her own way.
In fact, the day she spoke to NewsMax about her newly released book, “Beauty Beyond the Ashes: Choosing Hope After Crisis,” McGuinness told us her son, Tommy, was away at a summer camp taking flying lessons - training to follow in his father’s footsteps by becoming a pilot.
When asked how she felt about her son’s path, she replied without hesitation: “I’m just so thankful that he didn’t let the terrorists steal his dream. Through the grace of God, he can still follow his dreams and be a pilot like his dad.”
Despite the barbaric hate al-Qaida unleashed upon her and thousands of other innocent families, she reveals in "Beauty Beyond the Ashes" how she and her family have met the challenge of tragedy.
Mrs. McGuinness details how her extraordinary faith in God’s goodness has turned that hatred into something the monsters of al-Qaida cannot comprehend.
Even more telling is the way her Christian faith, which she shared with her husband, has produced forgiveness she says would never have been possible without that faith – a forgiveness she writes was not just essential for her, but freeing.
“I constantly remind people that we do have choices in life,” she told NewsMax.
"Our security, our peace, our safety can easily be taken for granted. We all became casualties of September 11. But though there are things that can rock our confidence, we as a nation need to be able to use [what happened] to launch us to a new way of thinking and living. ... We can choose what it is that we dwell on, whether it’s our tragedies or our hope in Jesus Christ.”
The book is not at all what you might expect.
She does not delve into detail about the events of 9/11. Readers expecting a minute-by-minute replay of that day and the agony her family endured in the days following will be surprised to read that she barely paid attention to them herself.
While the rest of America was glued to the news coverage, “I didn’t watch television,” she remembers in her book. “I’d catch the news only as I overheard people talking. All I knew for sure was that my husband had been killed, and now my country was at war. Only very slowly did I come to realize that Tom was an integral part of an international event that had devastating ramifications for thousands of people in the United States and around the world.
“Many people have tried to speculate about what happened inside Tom’s plane that morning of 9/11. I never wanted to know all the gruesome details. ... I found that whenever my mind would veer off in a gruesome direction, my spirit would hit rock bottom and crash. I simply couldn’t go there. I could almost hear God saying, ‘Cheryl, don’t look that way. Look at me. This is where Tom is. I have him. He is in my arms.’”
Though Mrs. McGuinness does describe how she and her children, Tommy and Jennifer, survived in those first surreal hours, her book focuses on how she has used the 9/11 story to create as much lasting good as possible in as many lives as she can reach.
Her speech at her husband’s funeral has propelled her into a new direction, speaking around the country to groups.
“People of many different circumstances can relate to what I say, people who have been through divorces or lost children, or even the social ills like domestic violence – anything – can relate to what I’m saying because it’s a message of hope and encouragement, of how we can go on living our lives no matter what happens to us. We all will have a season in our lives when life is just more than we can handle at times. And we need to teach each other with our words and our actions.”
Her choices are starkly different from many of 9/11’s victims, some of whom have been profiled recently for the way they view the money they received, the way they’ve spent it, and the morbid sense of humor they possess. Referring to themselves as the “dead wives club” and turning to Mercedes, SUVs and Cadillacs bought sight unseen and plastic surgery, they’ve sought a different solution to their pain.
Now, with all the finger-pointing and the controversy swirling around the 9/11 Commission's hearings and the subsequent report and the searching need of many for someone to blame, McGuinness says she can relate. But you’ll find no ill will in her words.
“I have followed the 9/11 Commission,” she told NewsMax. “I have watched on TV the accounts and read the newspaper ... and I was impressed by their diligence, their thoroughness and their integrity. I think they avoided partisan politics for the most part. I think they did examine the facts and draw some conclusions, and I’m thankful for the work they did.
“At the same time it was hard to hear it and difficult to see the reactions of other families who lost loved ones and cried out in anger and bitterness: ‘Whose fault was it? Why didn’t somebody stop this before it happened?’
"I know firsthand those feelings, and I thank God that I was able to work through them. But I’ve learned that there are some questions in life that just are not going to be answered for now. And that’s hard to accept, but I am thankful ... that through God’s grace ... the terrorists can’t control my spirit or my heart. ... If you let the fear and the things that could happen, the future threats, it can really immobilize you and freeze you – and that’s not what God wants for us. But it’s so easy to let the fear grip you. They’re deadly emotions, anger and fear – especially for people that don’t have something to put their hope in.”
McGuinness writes about the struggle she went through in deciding whether to accept the 9/11 compensation money, finally going forward with applying for it only after much deliberation and prayer – and encouragement that the money was God’s way of providing for her and her family’s future.
But, she writes, He had been doing that long before Sept. 11, preparing her family for that day for many years. In fact, she believes, she and her husband were put here to use 9/11 to reach out to other people.
She doesn’t unfold the years of her and Tom’s lives leading up to that one day just to tell her family’s story.
She makes a point in numerous places along the way to make sure readers do not miss what she knows God was doing ahead of time to prepare them for 9/11. And she allows us to get to know who Tom McGuinness was inside through the simplest daily occurrences.
Recalling their first date, when Tom ordered a glass of milk instead of a Coke, Mrs. McGuinness writes: “That wasn’t considered cool! But Tom was comfortable enough with himself to order what he wanted. It seemed like such a small thing, and yet it revealed a tiny speck of Tom’s character that I really liked. He wasn’t trying to impress me or anyone else. He was just being real.”
When a “chance” meeting with a former F-4 Navy fighter pilot prompted Tom to pursue a lifelong intrigue with flying, Cheryl had no reservations.
“I had no fear about Tom flying airplanes. On the contrary, I looked forward to a life spent traveling with Tom. ... ‘Besides,’ I thought, ‘if something awful does happen, at least Tom would die doing what he loved.’”
She notes God’s providence in leading her and Tom to decide she should leave her job a year and a half before 9/11, giving her that time with him and their family before his death, and in the many other twists and turns their lives took throughout the years.
In the years since 9/11, it’s been especially important to her to channel her and her family’s energies into things that matter. At her children’s request, they participated in the Flag Run Across America. In the event, put on by other American Airlines pilots, volunteers across the country carried American flags over the route Flight 11 would have flown.
“It stopped at LAX,” remembers Mrs. McGuinness. “My children and I participated in carrying the American flag over the finish line the last eight miles of the run. They wanted to do that and I couldn’t hold them back. They had great courage and determination to honor the memory of their dad, and I think they did it beautifully.”
On July 8, 2002, a meeting was scheduled for family members who wanted to participate in the Victims’ Compensation Fund. Her daughter, Jennifer, urged her to go to Ground Zero, “but to remember that Tom was not there.”
It is impossible not to reach out in empathy while reading Mrs. McGuinness’ account of her first visit to the site, nearly a year after the tragedy.
“Steamy heat rose from the sidewalk, trapped in the breezeless canyon between high-rises. I flagged a cab and asked the driver to take me to the site of the World Trade Center. He grunted a response. ‘My husband was the copilot on the first plane that hit the towers on September 11,’ I said silently to the back of the driver’s head. ... Why would he care? He’d probably driven hundreds people to the site. Maybe he lost someone he loved that day too.”
Through this and many other difficult days, she describes the peace she’s been given, even at Ground Zero and on the first anniversary of Sept. 11.
“Another healing moment occurred when President George W. Bush spoke at the University of New Hampshire ... and we were invited to go to a reception with the President ... I felt like a kid! President Bush shook my hand, gave me a fatherly pat on the back and a kiss on the cheek, and then proceeded to give my children some presidential advice: ‘Listen to your mother.’ ... He was so gracious and genuine.”
“War is never easy and it’s never easy to make that decision, but if there was a chance that more people would die ...,” she said. “I support President Bush and the action he took to protect our freedom and other countries’ freedom.”
“One thing I know for certain," she told NewsMax, “is that before 9/11 I couldn’t have trusted God the way I trust Him today. And the trust I have in God today is so much deeper that anything that happens going forward - as awful as it may be - I have the strength to survive it.
"Many people don’t know what that means. I’ve learned to trust God for every breath I take. ... That doesn’t mean I don’t take action, but it does mean I have a very personal relationship with the One who can put me back together after a tragedy. ... The things of this earth disappear. The things that you think are stable are not always so stable. So when you choose to deeply trust Him, you’re able to be free of the bitterness and the anger that can rage inside of you when bad things happen.”
It’s a freedom she has gained not in spite of 9/11, but because of 9/11.
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