Kansas City writer lost his beloved nephew in 9/11. His new book seeks lessons, hope

Former Star columnist Bill Tammeus’ new book tells his family’s agonizing story of the murder of his nephew Karleton D.B. Fyfe on 9/11. Beyond that, he uses a series of interludes and the book’s final chapters to explore not just how some people adopt straitjacketed thinking that can lead to violence but also what people can do to oppose such extremism. “Love, Loss and Endurance: A 9/11 Story of Resilience and Hope in an Age of Anxiety,” will be published Jan. 19 by Front Edge Publishing. This excerpt describes how Bill’s sister and her husband learned of their son’s appalling death.

So we turn to the unspeakably malicious morning on which people who claimed to be adherents of the ancient and honorable religion of Islam — a religion that they had disgustingly misshapen — murdered the son of my sister, Barbara Fyfe, and of her husband, Dr. James A. Fyfe.

Barbara was in the kitchen of her rural Durham, North Carolina, home having breakfast and watching the “Today” show on NBC, as she did on many weekday mornings. Suddenly anchorman Bryant Gumbel interrupted to report that an airplane of some kind had just crashed into one of the World Trade Center towers in New York City.

As she continued watching, the report soon came that a second plane had slammed into the other tower. Barb was, of course, interested in this news, but, as she thought — and later said — she had “no reason to worry.” Still, she called her daughter-in-law, Haven Fyfe, in Brookline, Massachusetts, to tell her to call Karleton, who worked for John Hancock as a bond analyst, and tell him to get out of the Hancock building in Boston just in case the U.S. was being attacked in all the big cities.

Haven told Barb that Karleton was on a plane, a business trip, traveling to Los Angeles and that “it’s OK.” Barb replied, “Oh, good,” believing, as she explained later, that he “was traveling west and he would be fine.”

The night before Karleton left to board Flight 11, Haven had been unable to sleep well because she was up with their toddler son Jackson several times, but she had finally fallen asleep early that morning. So KDBF, as we often called him, did not awaken her to say goodbye. Just before takeoff, Karleton called Haven to say what he hadn’t said in person.

As they talked, he said, “I need to talk to Jackson. I need to talk to him because if anything happens, I don’t want Jackson to think I was always angry with him as I was with him last night when he wouldn’t eat his dinner.” So Jackson got on the phone and heard his Daddy tell him he loved him and wasn’t mad at him and that he’d be home soon.

Then Karleton and Haven said goodbye — forever, it turned out. He was 31.

Craig Robertson, then news editor of The Sunday Post in Scotland, later described in an article what happened once Haven started to worry that Karleton’s plane might be in trouble, information that Robertson had gathered from interviewing Haven and spending a lot of time with Barb and Jim. Haven called Karleton’s cellphone, but it went right to his voicemail. Still, she called again and again, knowing he had the phone with him because he had called her on it before the flight took off. But there was no reply. When it became clear to Haven that Karleton’s plane may have been one of those hijacked, she decided to keep life as normal as possible and to take Jackson to a park, as she did most days.

“I thought,” Haven told Robertson, “that if I was away long enough then he’d call and it would be OK.” When they returned to the apartment, Jackson asked this: “Where’s Daddy?” Haven’s response: “He’s not coming home today or anymore.”

After Barb and Haven had spoken by phone briefly that morning just as the news was unfolding, Barb called her back. “Did you hear where the flights originated?” Haven asked. “Boston!” By this time Barbara already had seen several reruns of video showing Karleton’s plane fireballing into the 1,363-foot-tall north tower, so she shut off the TV: “I had already seen my son die several times,” she said later.

Sweet, gentle, ever-curious

This, of course, was not how it was supposed to end for Karleton, who had been so anxious to be born that Barb was forced into months of bed rest while pregnant with him to prevent a premature birth. As Barb once explained, “Karleton and I stayed in bed for the last six months of his baking time in order to save the pregnancy. Of course, we didn’t know that Karleton was in there. He was conceived during the dark ages when there was no technology as there is today.”

Just before KDBF was born in San Antonio, where Jim was teaching at Trinity University, Jim, a biochemist, was in Philadelphia looking into the possibility of doing a post-doctorate at Albert Einstein Medical Center. Late in the afternoon of Feb. 9, Barb and Jim talked by phone and Barb told him she was in labor. “Two hours later,” Barb recounted, “I left for the hospital with our good friend Lou Rosenberg, who would sit with me all night telling me dirty jokes, talking about politics and about how he wasn’t crazy about the moaning I was doing with the contractions.”

When KDBF finally was born at 7:13 a.m. on Feb. 10, 1970, he dove right into life, despite a bit of a club, or twisted, foot that required the use of a brace for some time. He was 7 pounds, 6 ounces at birth and 20-and-a-half inches long. A year later he was 33 pounds and 32 inches.

That pace of growth continued until he wound up 6 feet, 5 inches tall. As Barb later described it, Karleton one day in his gangly pre-pubescent years fell going up some stairs in the house and screamed:

“Mom, I’m so sick of falling!” She said to him as he lay on the steps, “Think about it. The way you are growing so fast you have new cells that were born last night that don’t even have a clue what they are to be used for this morning.” KDBF, she said, “seemed to think that was an OK explanation.”

This sweet, gentle, ever-curious boy swept through life, doing well in grade school, high school and college, being a loving if sometimes trying brother (as surely all brothers are; ask my three sisters) to his older sister Tiffany and his younger sister Erin, finding love and a family future with Haven and never failing to notice — and comment on in funny ways — life’s oddities, absurdities, sweetness and pain. From time to time, I’d get an email from Karleton that said, simply, “Hey, have I told you recently how tall and handsome I am?” Just that. Just a funny golden nugget in the middle of what felt like a routine day.

When he was in high school, he worked in a local grocery store. That’s where he met Haven, who also was employed there. She was a year younger. Two years later they began dating.

And they never parted. Until 9/11.

A scene of desolation

“Karleton,” Haven told Robertson, “was everything to me. He was my favorite person in the world to be with. He wasn’t the captain of the football team but he made me laugh. He always made me laugh.” They made their relationship permanent when they married in 1994.

After college, KDBF used his dual majors of philosophy and economics — coupled with a later MBA from Boston University — to get a job at Fidelity Investments. As usual, he made friends quickly at that big financial firm. One of those friends was Andy Trincia, a North Carolina graduate who joined Fidelity in 1996. Andy became head of the Boston Carolina Club of UNC alumni, “so I emailed him and introduced myself electronically,” Andy wrote after KDBF’s death.

“We started an email banter, and it wasn’t long before he was emailing me random images such as then-Tar Heel hoops star Vince Carter dunking — just the photo. I thought, this guy is cool. … A couple of weeks went by, and one day I’m in my cube working and hear, ‘Are you Andy? Hi, I’m Karleton Fyfe. I figured I’d just come by. Enough of the email stuff.’ We were friends instantly and over time became very close. … I always admired his integrity, loyalty and devotion. He loved Haven unequivocally and had the strongest marriage of any of my friends.”

In early January 2001, Karleton and Andy quit Fidelity on the same day, and Karleton moved his career to John Hancock. Life was good.

Haven had given birth to Jackson in February of 2000, five days before Karleton turned 30. He was a father and was so in love with that role he could hardly believe his fortune. The weekend before Karleton boarded American Flight 11 on that doomed Tuesday, he learned that Haven was pregnant again. But by the time Parker was born in May 2002, Karleton had been dead for eight months.

Driven by a radically warped version of Islam, a version that birthed its own violent political ideology, the 9/11 hijackers rewrote our extended family’s story in ways we never could have imagined, ways that caused enormous agony and disruption, ways that required long, intentional efforts to heal — efforts that, some 20 years later, still are incomplete in a process that each of us has handled differently.

Each member of our extended family has his or her own story to tell about all of this, of course, and my account in this book is not intended to be a complete story of how Karleton’s parents or his two sisters or his widow or his cousins, uncles, aunts and other family members have lived different lives because of 9/11. A few of those people didn’t want me to write this book, though many did, and that was one more difficult internal family dynamic I had to come to terms with because of 9/11. My hope is that those who didn’t want this book written will forgive me and find in it something redemptive and something that honors Karleton and something true and even useful about the dangers of radically fundamentalist religion.

I will write about some of those family dynamics, but the reason is not to make private pain public in gratuitous ways. Rather, the reason to tell my version of this story at all — a story reconstructed from personal notes, saved emails, columns and blog posts I wrote and conversations with family members — is to teach (or remind) everyone what can happen when simplistic, naive, caustic versions of religion get lived out by people who miss the generative, wholesome, loving point of religion. None of the world’s great religions is immune from this kind of distortion, so it’s up to each of us to recognize spiritual craziness when we see it and to do what we can to stop it or, at minimum, point it out. If we fail, the result may be more 9/11s, more attacks on synagogues, more white supremacists acting out their distorted ideology in murderous ways.

On the day this cruel story began for Karleton’s family, Barbara says, her daughter Tiffany called her from suburban Atlanta about 10 a.m. screaming, having just talked to Haven. Tiffany learned that Haven had just been visited by four people from Karleton’s John Hancock office and they had confirmed to Haven that Karleton was a passenger on American Flight 11. So Barb and Jim quickly made plans to go to Boston — by car, of course, given the nationwide shutdown of commercial airlines. They arrived at Karleton’s and Haven’s apartment in Brookline about 8:30 a.m. on Thursday, Sept. 13. What they found there was a heartbreaking scene of desolation.

Jackson, Barb said later, “was sobbing, pounding the table with his tiny fists, asking for his Daddy. His Mommy was telling him that Daddy would not be coming home.”

Bill Tammeus is a former columnist for The Star, where he worked for almost 36 years. Since 2004 he has written the “Faith Matters” blog (billtammeus.typepad.com). He received the 2005 Wilbur Award given annually to the best religion column in the country. “Love, Loss and Endurance” is his seventh book.

Author talk

Bill Tammeus will introduce “Love, Loss and Endurance” in a virtual Kansas City Public Library event at 6:30 p.m. Tuesday, Jan. 19. RSVP required through the library’s website. Watch at YouTube.com/kclibrary.