RIP Beautiful Lady

Posted by Anonymous

A Tribute to Sadie Ette

I never met Sadie Ette. I wasn't even born when the towers fell. But her story found me, and it deserves to be told, because she was not just a name on a list of the missing. She was a daughter, a sister, a cousin, and a friend. She was a Nigerian woman who carried the hopes of her family across an ocean.

Sadie was born on February 9, 1965, in Atlanta, Georgia, where her mother, Ekaette, worked as a nurse. When she was just fifteen months old, the family returned to Nigeria, to Eket in Akwa Ibom State. There, she grew up, studied law, and built a life. But America called her back. In 1991, she returned to New York, chasing a dream her younger siblings, Edu and Itauma, had only heard about in letters and phone calls.

She built a career in the heart of the world's financial capital, eventually becoming an account representative at Windows on the World, the restaurant perched on the 106th floor of the North Tower of the World Trade Center. She loved to bring friends and family up those whooshing elevators, laughing at their startled faces as they rocketed toward the sky. She traveled the world. She had an apartment in Manhattan. From the outside, she had made it.

But the most remarkable thing about Sadie Ette happened on the morning of September 11, 2001.

She was at work on the 106th floor when the first plane struck the tower below her. The building shook. Smoke began to rise. And in those terrifying first moments, when the phone lines were still alive, Sadie did what so many of us would do: she called home. A cousin remembers the call vividly. It was 8:56 a.m. Sadie was frantic, confused. She didn't know what had happened. Her cousin tried to tell her it was a plane. Then the line went dead.

Another friend remembers a different call. Sadie was screaming that she was trapped, that she couldn't get out. "I don't know what to do," she said. "I'm coughing. The heat is coming. I need water. I need water." And then the phone dropped.

There is no way to make sense of that kind of terror. There is no way to wrap language around what it means to be trapped 106 floors above the ground, on the very floor that American Airlines Flight 11 tore through. But there is something else that must be said about Sadie Ette.

In her Manhattan apartment, after she was gone, a Bible was found on her pillow. It was open to the 91st Psalm. She had apparently been reading it before she left for work that morning. The verse reads:

"With His wings He will cover you and beneath His wings you will find refuge; His truth is a shield, a full shield. You will not fear the terror of night, nor the arrow that flies by day."

She did not know, when she read those words that morning, that she would face the very terror the psalm speaks of. She could not have known that the arrow would fly by day, straight into her world. But the Bible was there, open on her pillow. It is a small detail, the kind that gets lost in the enormity of the day. But it tells us something about who Sadie Ette was. She was a woman of faith. She was a woman who sought refuge under wings she could not see.

Her family came from Nigeria to grieve. Her mother, Ekaette, stood at a wall of fliers at Pier 94 and grew agitated when she saw her daughter described as a "Nigerian national." Sadie had been born in an American hospital, she told them. At 5:40 in the morning. Fifteen months before they returned to Nigeria. It was a small act of defiance, a mother insisting that her daughter belonged to two worlds, and that both of them should claim her.

Sadie's remains were identified just two days before her memorial service. Her mother never fully recovered from the loss. She took ill and passed away in September 2007, exactly six years after her daughter, from what the family understood to be the grief of losing a child. Her father, Professor Sunday Ette, a biochemist who had built a distinguished academic career in America, followed them both in 2015. One death, on a morning no one could have predicted, sent a family into a spiral of loss that took more than a decade to complete.

I did not know Sadie Ette. I was not born when she died. But I know this: she was not a headline. She was not a statistic. She was a woman who woke up on a Tuesday morning, read her Bible, went to work on top of the world, and found herself at the center of a nightmare she never chose. She called her family in her final moments. She asked for water. She was afraid. And then she was gone.

She deserves to be remembered, not as a victim of a distant tragedy, but as a Nigerian daughter who carried her people's hopes, as an American woman who built a life in a city she loved, and as a soul who sought refuge under wings that, in the end, carried her home.

Rest in peace, Miss Sadie Ette. You are not forgotten.

Posted by Vixen

May your memory be a blessing, and may your light shine on in all who knew and loved you.

Posted by Anna