IT’S been 100 days since Andy O’Grady died at the World Trade Center, but his fiancée, Rachel Uchitel, can still feel him with her – his smell, his laugh, the encouraging voice in her ear.
They are her only consolation. They are the memories of a life that could have been. They give her the courage to soldier on as she struggles with the brittle joy of the holidays.
“Andy was a very strong person. He had a strong personality and he carried the mood of a room. He was lively and gregarious,” Uchitel told The Post. “When he died, I felt his strength transferred to me, and I want to be strong for other people.”
Three months ago, in the tragic days following the terrorist attacks, a heartbreaking photo of Uchitel, a 27-year-old Manhattanite, appeared on the front page of the New York Post.
The photo captures a young woman, tears streaming down her face, helplessly holding a photo of the love of her life, O’Grady, 32, who on that day is missing and presumed dead.
Her anguish mirrored the nation’s.
And, while Uchitel says she’s finally accepted the fact that O’Grady, a managing director at investment banking firm Sandler O’Neill, is dead, she realizes that nothing in her world will ever be the same again.
“My whole life completely changed. Nothing in it is the same,” Uchitel said. “I’ve lost the closest person to me in the whole world.
“We were each other’s closest person. We did everything together.”
THE couple met on a blind date in 1998 and were engaged last August. They were both athletic and enjoyed the outdoors.
In fact, O’Grady – a native of Harrington Park, N.J. – was a four-year, letter-winning swimmer at UCLA, and qualified for the NCAA championships. After college, he moved back East to his dream career with Sandler O’Neill.
He was also an avid golfer who hit the links nearly every weekend. For the past three years, O’Grady traveled to Ireland for golf holidays there.
On the week before he died, he shot a 75 – his best score ever.
He and Uchitel each had found a soulmate in the other, easily blending career, family and fun.
O’Grady and Uchitel had returned from a 10-day vacation in Greece on Sept. 9, and had earlier settled into an apartment on the Upper East Side together. They were to be married on May 4, 2002. They had planned to spend Christmas with Uchitel’s family in Florida.
Then came 9/11. On the morning of the attacks, Uchitel, an editor at Bloomberg News, watched in horror as the carnage unfolded on TV monitors in her office.
“I was waiting for him to come home. I thought, ‘No way anything really bad happened. He’ll be at a hospital,’ ” she recalled.
She talked to her beloved briefly after the first plane hit the north tower. O’Grady – who worked on the 104th floor of the south tower – sounded stressed.
Then came a second call.
“Rachel, it’s really chaotic here,” he told her. “You don’t understand. I just saw somebody jump out the window.”
Uchitel kept herself occupied, busily working on the Bloomberg organization’s coverage of the disaster.
“It hit me, but [the scope] didn’t completely hit me,” she said. “I stayed at work until late and I watched the towers fall. I covered it for our news.”
In fact, as the story broke, Uchitel said she wasn’t too worried for O’Grady.
“I never feared for him,” she recalled. “I thought it was an accident until I saw the second plane hit. I called him – and his phone was dead.”
LATER, desperate to find O’Grady, she went from hospital to hospital for a week, hoping for word that he had been knocked unconscious and injured.
Like thousands of others, Uchitel plastered hundreds of fliers on walls and windows throughout New York in the remote chance someone had seen him escape. Instead, she found nothing but heartache.
And in the end, all she had left were memories.
“It’s very strange. I remember every single detail about Andy: his smell, the clothes he wore, his laugh,” she said. “I still remember him as if he were right here beside me now.”
Uchitel is consistently reminded by strangers from around the world of the darkest days after the attack. Her photo was printed in hundreds of magazines, and she still receives countless letters from sympathizers.
“I even got a marriage proposal from a doctor in France,” she said.
THE holiday season is a bitter one for Uchitel. She says O’Grady’s family and friends are ever-present reminders of her shattering loss.
“With the holidays arriving, I thought everyone understood [my loss], but the reality is, everyone else’s life continues and goes on, while mine changes,” she said.
“I’m starting over, and that’s a really hard thing.”