‘I don’t need a grave site to remember Anne’: Sister recalls Galway woman who died on 9/11

Anne McHugh loved socialising and meeting people. She played hard but worked hard too, enjoying her job as a financial broker in the South Tower of the World Trade Center in New York.

Her sister Maura, three years her junior, recalls working one summer in her sister’s company. It was a real “Wolf of Wall Street” world, with Anne and her male colleagues slagging each other off on the trading floor. Anne could more than handle herself.

“This place was full of guys, very high-stress, very high-paced, and she thrived in it. She was brilliant. All the fellows loved her. And because she didn’t take any crap from any of them and she gave as good as she could get, they had huge respect for her,” says Maura.

Saturday marks the 20th anniversary of Anne's death. The 35-year-old native of Tuam, Co Galway, died on September 11th, 2001 when the South Tower collapsed at 9.59am on that Tuesday morning, 56 minutes after United Airlines Flight 175 was flown by al-Qaeda terrorists into the 110-floor building. It was the second tower hit but the first to collapse.

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Anne had long red hair, light blue eyes and a smile that lit up her face, says Maura. She worked for a finance company called Euro Brokers on the 84th floor. She was one of 61 employees of the company who died that day, a fifth of its New York office. Her death came two months before she was due to marry Irish-American Patrick Day.

On the day of the attack, Maura was living in Dublin when her mother called her about “an accident” at the World Trade Center. She turned on her television.

“That’s when I saw it,” says Maura, a writer now living in Co Galway.

Mobile phone coverage

Getting in touch with Anne proved impossible. Mobile phone coverage in lower Manhattan that morning was lost. There was "a lot of to and fro" between the McHughs in Ireland and their many relatives in New York to see if they could contact Anne.

“No one managed to reach her,” says Maura.

“Over time you find you might meet someone who had seen her on the day.”

Maura’s voice trails off. She prefers not to speak further about that day. Reports at the time said Anne was seen on the 40th floor as she tried to escape. Her remains were never recovered.

The town of Tuam, where Anne’s parents, Pádraig and Margaret, ran a pub, erected a memorial to Anne, two standing stones to commemorate the Twin Towers. On Saturday, Tuam Municipal District will hold a commemoration at the park to mark the 20th anniversary.

“There were no remains so there is no grave site, so this is basically where we go,” says Maura.

“Everyone has their own way of dealing with things. I remember Anne. I don’t need a grave site to remember Anne.”

Remarkably, Anne had survived an earlier attack on the Twin Towers: the 1993 bombing in the basement of the North Tower where she was working at the time. She had asthma and had to walk down 100 floors in darkness with smoke coming up. That attack, which killed six people, did not stop her returning to the buildings.

“Anne was kind of a fearless person. She just didn’t dwell on it,” said Maura.

She stresses her sister wished to be known as “Anne McHugh” – her preferred name – despite memorials listing her as Anne Marie. The 9/11 memorial at Ground Zero lists her as “Ann M McHugh”.

“Her birth name was Anne Marie McHugh and it’s on monuments now – I actually feel like I am being gaslit by the world. She just hated being called Anne Marie,” she says.

Graphic detail

Twenty years on, Maura says her family’s personal tragedy is tied up in a very public event for others, recalled in graphic detail every year. The coverage usually starts around August every year with videos and images appearing in the media, and then there are the documentaries, she says.

People remark on the anniversary without knowing her connection to the event. When she tells them she lost her sister that day, it is no longer an “abstract idea” for them , she says; it shocks most people “because suddenly reality collides with the images in their heads”.

“It feels like 20 years. Anyone who has experienced loss, over time it changes the nature of the loss. The difficulty for our family is that Anne’s death is bound up in this political event and as a result, you don’t get the ability to move in a natural way forward in a healing process,” she says.

“Over the years what I have reconciled myself to is that I will never get away from this; this is going to be with me in a very constant form for the rest of my life.”

The fall of Afghanistan to the Taliban, who harboured al-Qaeda, the perpetrators of the attacks, made the last period particularly difficult and has brought constant reminders since July, says Maura.

“I found the political fallout really hard to watch because in such an event you want something positive to change, and here we are 20 years later and the Taliban are back in,” she says.

The memories of Anne she cherishes are personal to her: their fun Friday nights out in Manhattan and Anne being “annoyingly generous” by sneaking off to pay the bill.

“You just become more used to it,” she says of the loss of her “much-loved” sister.

“You just learn to accept it and to live with it. She is much missed.”