Local Catholic who lost husband in 9/11 attacks reflects on upcoming films

By Rebecca Saunders
The Catholic Sun

On Sept. 11, 2001 Gary Bird went to his first meeting of the morning not knowing it would be the last of his life. His story – a normal person heading to work on what would become a day of national tragedy – is one that was told many times following the terrorist attacks that led to the death of thousands of American civilians on what is known now as 9/11.

This September marks the five-year anniversary of 9/11 and some studios are already producing films about the attack. Directors Paul Greengrass and Oliver Stone have both completed films depicting portions of the events that occurred on Sept. 11.

“I guess I feel that it’s inevitable,” Donna Killoughey-Bird, the widowed wife of Gary Bird, said of the production of films on the subject of 9/11. “The event is so enormous. It’s a part of our history… we have to face the challenge of trying to figure out why it happened so that we each, individually and collectively, can figure out how to deal with it, how to grieve about it.”

Killoughey-Bird, a parishioner at St. Timothy in Mesa, is the director of development and legal counsel for Life Teen International, a ministry for Catholic teenagers. Her husband was in a meeting when the first plane hit the World Trade Center, only seven floors below him.

Although Killoughey-Bird’s grieving process was a long one, she is doing much better than some.

“I hear about people in New York City who are still on drugs and who can’t get over this and my heart grieves for them,” she said. “I wonder where they are wounded that they can’t heal from this. I don’t know, I wish I could help them.”

Killoughey-Bird felt that “God prepared me to be able to deal with this.” She said “I love you” to Gary before he left and had no guilt to process after his death. Her greatest hope for the film is that it will help the grieving process of other victim’s family members and Americans in general.

“There’s no collective conversation about this,” Killoughey-Bird said. “People don’t know how to talk about this event and so to some extent they avoid talking about it in real depth because we don’t know what to say. We don’t know what happened and we don’t know why it happened and we’re still trying to figure out how to deal with it.”

Although she does not think the films are being produced too soon, she does hope the films “get beyond just the killing and negative and hateful aspects of it and the name-calling and the ‘you’re a Muslim so you must be bad,’ and get to trying to get in touch with ‘we’re all children of God.’

“How can we love people who are capable of doing this? I think eventually we’ll get to that conversation,” she said.

Greengrass and Stone are providing the conversation starters in upcoming months.

Greengrass’ “United 93” opened in April and depicts the events that occurred on the only hijacked plane that did not hit a U.S. landmark on 9/11.

“World Trade Center,” directed by Stone, will premiere in August. The film focuses on two firefighters that are trapped under the collapsed World Trade Center towers.

“United 93” was filmed in real-time, beginning with the passengers boarding the plane and ending with the fateful crash. Greengrass sought and ascertained permission from all the families of the victims aboard the hijacked plane to make the film. Largely unknown actors, actresses and even a real life air traffic controller, stewardess and pilot were cast based on how much they looked like the character they were meant to portray. Many of the actors even contacted the families of the victims, learning from those closest to the deceased how that person may have reacted to the situation.

“Doing the research about what the relatives felt, heard, saw and what the person was like is going to make this movie a lot more realistic,” Killoughey-Bird said. Three people have approached her with similar visions of the final moments of Gary’s life.

In one woman’s vision of the end of Gary’s life, “What she saw was so vivid… he was helping people,” Killoughey-Bird said.

“Don’t worry, it will be OK, let’s go this way, keep moving,” Gary said in the vision as he approached a stairwell or an elevator and went to open the door. He opened the door and there was a flash of light and Gary said, “Hi God, I didn’t know you were here.”

Above all Killoughey-Bird hopes the films will focus on the victims.

“These are all really special individuals, like Gary, that were not going to know what was special about their lives,” she said. Killoughey-Bird hopes the films will emphasize the importance of being ready to face God at any moment and “loving the people around you today.”

She also would like the films to spur a public dialogue about the event. “Art causes people to think and then hopefully talk with deliberation and with thoughtfulness about what they saw,” she said.

Will Killoughey-Bird see the film? She thinks so.

“I can always choose to walk out,” she said. “I’ve been blessed to deal with this pretty realistically. I had a great relationship with my husband. We always said I love you and I did when he left, so I don’t have the baggage of guilt. I was ready.”

She is also ready for Americans to work through this tragedy. 

 “I think it’s good for us as part of our collective soul searching to allow artists to expose their views of this event,” she said of the film. “We can choose to go to the movie, I can choose to go or not go. So for the artists who are usually the best at portraying something, to put something out there, I think it’s good. Then we can choose to look at it and see if we can take something from it.”