Community Corner

10 Years Later, Columbia 9/11 Survivor 'Trying To Move On'

John Milton Wesley lost his fiancée Sarah Miller Clark 10 years ago. But he refused to lose himself.

He was at his office at the 27-story Schaefer Building at 6 St. Paul St. in downtown Baltimore on Tuesday. When it started to shake,John Milton Wesley first pictured an explosion in the basement.

As he and other office workers fled the building, his mind drifting back to 9/11.

“The difference is… all the sudden, I get into my business head,” he said. “I realize I’m in transportation. I’m in public information. I gotta get out of my daydreaming.”

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His mind snapped back into the moment.

Wesley worked to develop makeshift methods to distribute information, sending out texts and tweets in to help those worried about their families.

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It was a long, productive workday.

For most survivors, he said, there was a point after the event where you didn’t want to do anything.

“And your mind and your spirit told you you didn’t have to or you didn’t need to,” said the 62-year-old Columbia resident. “It was an excuse. The danger in succumbing to that notion though, is that you begin to lose momentum.

Losing momentum was the last thing Wesley wanted, almost 10 years after losing his creative confidante and fiancée on Sept. 11.

Sarah Miller Clark had been his friend for 27 years. They were a couple for seven. Their wedding date was set to be Dec. 22, 2001.

The memories of the day he lost her, and the years that followed, still flash through his head every day, as they did when the 5.9 earthquake rattled Maryland.

For example, when Wesley, a spokesman for the Maryland Transit Administration, travels to Washington, D.C. for a meeting, he remembers wear matching cufflinks with compasses on them, so if he needs to, he’ll know where he is.

He remembers to tell people to stay physically fit, advising, “You never know when you have to defend your street, your house, your country.”

And, of course, Wesley remembers going through the compensation process for 9/11 victims and seeing video footage of Clark, a 65-year-old teacher from Columbia, in the final moments before she died on American Airlines Flight 77. Her flight had departed from Dulles International Airport en route to Los Angeles and would soon turn around and crash into the Pentagon.

She was at the boarding gate of Dulles—“with all the hijackers standing right there,” Wesley said.

Wesley talks about others who lost loved ones on 9/11, and who have been crippled by the grief.

“And that’s a tough one, but it’s to be expected if you look at such an enormous shock to the psyche and the culture,” he said. “There were people who were so emotionally broken, that they were unable to go back to work and unable to resume their lives,” he said.

But he did.

Since his fiancée boarded that plane and never came back, Wesley pursued his creative career as an author, historian, musician and activist. In the past 10 years, he has developed ways to celebrate the accomplishments of Baltimore African Americans, help people with Alzheimers and study the economically disadvantaged--in addition to holding up his position as a public relations professional.

Hi jazz CD is called “Salvos,” and he now has more than 50 songs he has written and performed.

And just this week, when the rarest of occurrences happened on the East Coast----Wesley had to quickly reorganize his mind to go from dreaming and grieving to coping, he said.

Even after 9/11 mastermind Osama bin Laden was killed in a nighttime raid in Pakistan, Wesley about how he is doing.

“I’m getting beyond it and trying to move on.”

 


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