A Fireball, a Prayer to Die, Then a Hard Battle to Live

A Fireball, a Prayer to Die, Then a Hard Battle to Live

By LESLIE EATON The New York Times

Lauren Manning, a Cantor Fitzgerald employee critically burned during the Sept. 11 attacks, vowed that day to fight to live, for her husband and son\'s sake.

This is the story of a woman who decided to live. No one knows yet if she will.

Her name is Lauren Manning, and on the morning of Sept. 11 she had just walked into the north tower of the World Trade Center when the first plane hit. She was engulfed in a fireball.

\"I heard a whistling sound and I was on fire,\" she told her husband, Greg, when he found her at St. Vincent\'s Manhattan Hospital that morning. \"I prayed to die. Then I decided to live, for Tyler and for you.\" Tyler is their 11-month-old son.

The terrible calculus of the catastrophe at the trade center seems to have divided the people there into two neat categories: the thousands who escaped with their lives (and their nightmares) and the thousands who did not. But there is a small third group, the gravely injured, for whom the road from ground zero will be very long, if they get to walk it at all.

Mrs. Manning is a member of that group. She was transferred to the burn unit at New York Presbyterian Hospital. She was among 17 victims of the attack, all of whom had burns over 14 percent to 90 percent of their bodies; she was among the most seriously injured. Five of the others have died. Three have been released. Others have been taken off the critical list. And seven, including Mrs. Manning, remain in a deep, drug- induced sleep while doctors tend to their wounds.

Her doctors would not talk, even in the broadest terms, about the treatment that she and the other patients were receiving. But the hospital confirmed that generally, a patient\'s chance of survival is roughly equivalent to the percentage of the body that is not burned. Age also plays a role; Mrs. Manning is 40 and extremely fit.

Infection is a constant threat, and patients who survive face multiple skin grafts and months, even years, of physical therapy.

Some of those who are close to Mrs. Manning are reluctant to talk about her, because she has always been a very private person. \"I suspect she knew far more about me than I knew about her,\" said an old friend, Harvey E. Rand. But he decided to talk about her, a woman he described as \"a ray of sunshine,\" because, he said, \"maybe more people will pray for her.\"

Her husband, Gregory P. Manning, said he wished his wife could speak for herself. But he wants to pay tribute to her strength and courage, and to bear witness to the enormity of the injury that was done to her. \"She deserves it,\" he said simply.

And whether she wants it or not, Lauren Manning has become a symbol of hope for Cantor Fitzgerald, the bond-trading firm where she works. The firm lost 700 employees in the trade center disaster. Others were severely hurt, including one in the burn unit with Mrs. Manning who died over the weekend.

\"There are 700 families who would give anything in the world for their loved one to be where Lauren is,\" said Howard W. Lutnick, the president of Cantor Fitzgerald, whose brother died in the collapse of the twin towers.

\"She\'s got to pull through, because she\'s got 700 families\' worth of love,\" he said. \"It\'s not fair, but she\'s part of their hope.\"

He is also eager to have Mrs. Manning back on the job as director of market-data sales. (Cantor puts out the bond market equivalent of a stock market ticker.) \"She is the quintessential sales person,\" Mr. Lutnick said. \"Driven, determined, energetic, self-starting, organized.\" And, he added, very beautiful.

Even in college, Mrs. Manning knew that she wanted to go into business, said Deirdre N. O\'Connell, who went to Fordham University with her and roomed with her for several years in Hoboken, N.J. \"Lauren was always very focused, that was just her,\" Ms. O\'Connell said. \"Very determined, really determined.\"

She also worked hard at being a good friend. She was the first person Ms. O\'Connell called with news of her engagement. She got an internship for Mr. Rand\'s son this summer, when jobs on Wall Street were hard to find.

And when a colleague on the 105th floor, Gary Lambert, needed help with his love life, she was there. \"She certainly used to give me, from a female perspective, very good advice,\" he said. \"I\'m a single man, she\'s a married lady.\"

She and Mr. Manning have only been married a year and a half. They met on the job in 1996, and started dating the next year. They got engaged in August 1999, the night before Mr. Manning had surgery to remove a benign brain tumor. \"She took care of me for the next two months,\" he said.

Now it is his turn to take care of her, as best he can.

He thinks she had some inkling of how seriously she was injured and how hard her recovery will be when he found her at St. Vincent\'s, she told him she needed to go to a burn unit.

\"She was really helpless, but she was still trying to take charge,\" he said. \"I was so impressed with her, so desperate to do everything I could to make sure she pulled through.\"

She was able to tell him some of what had happened to her. She had been running a little late for work she was usually at her desk by 8:30 a.m. in part because she had been waving goodbye to her son.

She usually took a cab down to the West Street entrance of the trade center, where they both worked. Mr. Manning is not sure where she was in the building, but he thinks she had just entered the lobby when the fireball hit. A good Samaritan got her on an ambulance.

Mr. Manning, who took the morning shift with the baby, was still at home when the plane hit the north tower. He got a call from a man on the ambulance saying his wife had been burned, but the call was cut off before he could ask where she was going. At 10 a.m., he got a call from the hospital.

Since then, he has been spending his afternoons and evenings at the burn unit he spent the first night wrapped in a sheet on the floor of the beige waiting room. Wearing surgical gown, mask and gloves, he reads poetry to her or plays music on a CD player, everything from Bach to Dwight Yoakam. And he has been sending friends long e-mail messages full of love and pain, grief and hope, messages he signs, \"Love Greg and Lauren.\"

He has been to a memorial service for Mrs. Manning\'s colleagues at Cantor, many of whom were his friends, and to one for the 60 missing people from Euro Brokers, where he is a senior vice president. He has also visited ground zero with a friend, to say kaddish. Last Friday, he went to the office for the first time, at the company\'s temporary quarters near the tip of Manhattan.

And he is trying not to become too excited. Because, after a tough week, Mrs. Manning has opened her eyes. She remains deeply sedated, but on Monday, she smiled at him.

\"I pray for Lauren to be happy again,\" he said. \"I don\'t know what form that will take. But I do believe good things will happen to her and she will deserve every one of them.\"