Carmen Jones

6 Pages 1534 Words

How A Widow Grieves


At 28, Nicole Reda is learning that letting go of the pain over losing Greg means letting go of him. So she's adopted a few of his habits




Nicole Reda's house is spotless. She has two young children and no hired help, but there isn't a Tonka truck in sight. The one sign of clutter is basket after basket of warm, crisply folded laundry. You can see your reflection in her living-room floor.
Nicole used to be the messy half of her marriage. Her husband Greg was the family maid, quietly picking up other people's stuff. He wiped the bathroom mirror with Windex after his morning shower and gently insisted that he and Nicole rotate which chairs they sat in so no single cushion sagged from overuse. He actually enjoyed changing diapers. Ever since the Tuesday when Greg, 33, did not return from his 95th-floor office at 1 World Trade Center, Nicole has been the one sweeping and scrubbing. "I think that by cleaning and leaving his clothes in the closet and keeping things just the way he had them, it's like some part of him is still here even if the time is passing," she says.
The meat loaves and pasta from the neighbors arrive on Nicole's doorstep just once a week now. A month ago, she spent--and slept through--her first night without either her brother or her mother camped out on the futon in the computer room. Nicole stopped praying that the rescuers would turn up a wisp of Greg's DNA; on Sept. 22 she buried him without a body or a casket.
Nicole is just 28, but she had already spent nearly half those years with Greg. Both born and raised in Brooklyn, they met the first week of her freshman year at Pace University. They watched Ghost on their first date. Defying the marriage-and-kids-can-wait trend, they bought a starter house on Long Island almost three years ago. Nicole quit her job as a speech therapist to stay home with the children. Greg's hour-and-a-half commute to the insurance brokerage firm Marsh ...