Manorville Resident Emphasizes Importance Of Remembrance When Reflecting On Brother's Death

For 20 years, “Never Forget” has been the slogan associated with the September 11 terrorist attacks. It could seem almost unnecessary to repeat that mantra, because a tragedy of that scale is, by its very nature, unforgettable.

And, yet, people are people, so they do forget. And with the passage of time, the remembering falls largely to those who don’t have the luxury of moving on.

This is an unfortunate truth that Manorville resident Christine Scharf has discovered over the years since her brother, John Scharf, died on the 105th floor of the South Tower two decades ago, leaving behind his four siblings, parents, 6-year-old daughter and fiancée.

So when Ms. Scharf talks about her brother’s death and reflects on the 20th anniversary of the attacks, the conversation turns to the 9/11 Memorial and Museum in Manhattan, and her belief that it’s a place everyone should take the time to visit.

Ms. Scharf and her family will be there on the 20th anniversary of the attacks, where they will meet up with their niece Momo Scharf, who is now 26 years old. Momo was one of a few family members of the 2,996 people who died in the attacks, chosen through a lottery system, to stand at the podium during the remembrance ceremony and speak her father’s name.

Ms. Scharf said she and her siblings, Joseph and Jason, do not attend the ceremony every year but try to make an effort to go on the milestone anniversaries. They will be missing both their brother David, who died in December, and father, Eugene, who died in 2013. Their mother, Marie Scharf, died in 2011.

It is, of course, an emotional day for the family, but Ms. Scharf said she’s grateful the ceremony has continued every year, and was particularly happy it was not canceled last year because of COVID.

“People do tend to forget,” she said.

Visiting the museum is something she thinks everyone should do at least once, and said she believes parents of children who were born after the attacks should make it a priority to take their children there. “They need to be educated on the magnitude of what happened that day,” she said.

Ms. Scharf speaks highly of the museum and memorial and the way it honors the victims and first responders in a visceral way that does not shy away from the hard truths of what happened that day, but at the same time gives family members a sense of comfort. She spoke in particular about the video kiosks near the wall of victims’ names, where visitors can pull up the name of a loved one and watch a short video about them.

“It keeps your loved one’s memory alive,” she said. “It’s amazing. It’s a tough place to be, but at the same time it brings you closer to your loved one.”

For Ms. Scharf, the passage of two decades has felt much shorter.

She said her brother, who would have been 49 this year, would have been proud of his daughter. Momo attended Stony Brook University with help from the 9/11 scholarship fund, and graduated in 2018 before earning her master’s degree from Midwestern University in 2019. She is now a Doctor of Medicine in dentistry, currently living in Illinois.

John Scharf met her mother, a Japanese woman named Aya, when he was stationed in Japan during his five years in the Marine Corps.

Momo has gone from an elementary-aged child to a practicing dentist in the time since her father’s death, but Ms. Scharf said it still feels like yesterday that she received word of her brother’s passing.

On September 11, 2001, John, 29 at the time, was in the building for only the second time, contracted by the Ohio-based company Liebert Global Services to fix a computer interface for the Aon Corporation. The Manhattan branch of the company was based on the upper floors of the South Tower.

Mr. Scharf, a 1992 Eastport High School graduate with a degree in electrical engineering who served in the Persian Gulf War, was returning to the building that day to fix a computer issue that required a part he was missing on his initial visit. He was working on the 105th floor of the South Tower when the second hijacked airliner, United Airlines Flight 175, slammed into the building at 9:03 a.m., between the 78th and 82nd floors.

Mr. Scharf was trapped on the upper levels of the tower when it collapsed at 9:59 a.m., less than an hour after impact. Ms. Scharf said that, on the 10th anniversary of the attacks, she was speaking with a friend and made the realization that her friend’s brother-in-law had also been on the 105th floor that day. It was a discovery that brought them some measure of comfort, Ms. Scharf said.

Finding small measures of peace and comfort in perhaps unexpected ways or places is an ongoing part of the grieving process, a fact Ms. Scharf and her family live with every year.

She will be making the journey to the memorial this year with fewer family members than she did last time. Mr. Scharf is buried at Calverton National Cemetery alongside his father and mother. Ms. Scharf and her family have endured a lot of loss over the years, but she said she was anticipating experiencing the same kind of bittersweet feeling she had last time she visited the memorial.

“It’s weird how a place where you lost your loved one is so peaceful,” she said. “The north and south pools, I don’t even think I can find the words to describe how peaceful it is. There’s the white noise of the city, but you can hear the waterfalls inside of the pools. It was perfectly done.”