Interactive documentary See how three families are coping with their losses Pentagon burn victim still in recovery process         Widow of Flight 93 hero raises three girls on her own         Terror attacks, cancer leave two boys parentless         Couple, both elevator operators, survive WTC collapse         A mother raises a son born after his father died on Sept. 11         Parents haunted by image of son at World Trade Center
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		Carmen and Arturo Griffith, both elevator operators who survived the collapse of the World Trade Center, are undergoing therapy for their injuries.
		By Robert Deutsch, USA TODAY

It helped their recovery this past year, knowing that despite the hellishness of their World Trade Center experience — a torrent of explosions and flames, an elevator in free fall and the memory of countless innocents riding to the upper stories and oblivion that morning — the Griffiths gave people hope.

"A lot of people say it's a beautiful story," Arturo says.

Yet there also is something of love lost here.

The twin towers were where Carmen, 46, and Arturo, 55, first met — she cleaning offices, he running the freight elevator. They became friends there, finally falling in love. Their first smooch was in an elevator car after she threw his wisecrack about never having "kissed a Puerto Rican woman" right back in his face in a playful challenge.

They were married a year later; that was seven years ago. It was his fourth marriage and her second. He had eight children; she had four.

And both felt reborn Sept. 12 after learning from beds in separate New York hospitals that the other was alive.

"I told (a nurse), 'Tell my wife I don't care how burned she is, that I still love her. Just tell her that,' " Arturo recalls.

Carmen remembers: "I said, 'Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, God.' I really thought, 'How am I going to make it without him?' I mean, he's my love."

They were both operating elevators in the north tower on Sept. 11. Arturo was running 50A, the big freight car going from the six-level basement to the 108th floor. When American Airlines Flight 11 struck at 8:46 a.m., Arturo and a co-worker were heading from the second-level basement to the 49th floor.

Like his wife, who had just closed the doors on a passenger elevator leaving the 78th floor, Arturo heard a sudden whistling sound and the impact. Cables were severed and Arturo's car plunged into free fall.

"The only thing I remember saying was 'Oh, God, Oh, God, I'm going to die,' " he says, recalling how he tried to protect his head as the car plummeted.

The emergency brakes caught after 15 or 16 floors. The imploding elevator door crushed Arturo's right knee and broke the tibia below it. His passenger escaped injury.

All that morning, Carmen had been carrying hundreds of passengers from the 78th-floor sky lobby to the bond-trading offices of Cantor Fitzgerald on the 101st to 105th floors and the Windows on the World restaurant above that.

"They were so packed (in the elevators) — like sardines," she says.

A full elevator had just left the 78th floor, and Carmen was about to carry up six or seven stragglers. The plane struck as the doors of her elevator closed. They could hear debris smash into the top of the car; then the elevator cracked open, and flames poured in. Carmen jammed her fingers between the closed doors, pulled them partly open and held them as passengers clambered over and under her 5-foot-6 frame to escape.

Before finally throwing herself out onto the lobby floor, she glanced back to be sure the elevator was empty. That was when fire scorched her face with second- and third-degree burns, and literally welded her hooped right earring to her neck. Her hands were badly burned.

Carmen was helped down the 78 floors to an ambulance just as her husband was carried out of the basement on a piece of plywood and a hand truck, each certain — after seeing the burning buildings from the street outside — that the other was dead.

Through the long, slow months of skin grafting, knee reconstruction and physical and mental therapy, the Griffiths have suffered emotionally and financially.

As the anniversary arrives, they are finding it difficult even to pay the rent on their tiny apartment near Yankee Stadium.

"I feel like I'm begging people to help me," Carmen says in tears.

Matters are made worse by the lingering images of friends who never made it out and hundreds of nameless riders carried high, who never came down.

Among them, Carmen says, "were young girls who were having their first babies. You see them having conversations about what they would do and 'Oh, I can't wait until my baby is here.' And it just plays over and over (in your mind)."

Beyond the destruction of people, though, was loss of the thriving universe where Arturo worked for 26 years, Carmen for 21. Neither has been able to go back to Ground Zero since Sept. 11.

"I won't even probably see it on TV," Carmen says. "I loved the World Trade Center. I really did."

Arturo says: "It's like I can close my eyes and I can tell you everything about the building. What was here. What was there. What I used to do. The friends I had. It's like a part of our life went with it."

That was the love lost.