Jen McNamara, Jack McNamara and John McNamara (FDNY), Blue Point
Jack McNamara is 3 years old. He loves his mom, Jen; he loves when she pays attention to him, when she plays catch with him. Also? He loves Spider-Man. Loves Spider-Man. He tears into a new Spider-Man toothbrush like it’s a piece of Halloween candy. Jack runs around his big house in Blue Point terrorizing the pets—two black cats and a three-legged miniature pinscher—with the energy and attention span of a squirrel. He has a thick shock of flame-red hair, fat, full cheeks, skin as smooth and white as heavy cream, with freckles like sprinkles of cinnamon. The spitting image of his dad, John, the fireman. Oh, it comes from his mom’s side, too—Jen’s orange mane and rosy hue are reflected in Jack’s features clear as day—but Jack has John’s nose, his squint, his smile.
Jen was four months pregnant with Jack when John was first struck with the crippling pain that would lead to his initial cancer diagnosis. He was sitting in his New York City fire department firehouse, Engine 234-123 in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, eating chicken salad. This was in late June 2006.
“He was in such excruciating pain that he actually had to leave the firehouse, which is not something he ever did,” says Jen, today. “He was not the kind of guy who tapped out.”
Jack was 2 years old when John died.
John was a broad, hulking guy; “Johnny Big-Arms” they called him around the firehouse. This was back before the cancer whittled him to dry bone, to nothing—back in 2001, for instance, like on Sept. 11, when John went in to work the World Trade Center. He made it from Crown Heights to downtown Manhattan soon after the two towers fell, and just prior to Building 7 coming down.
“I lost a lot of friends that day,” says Jen, a litigation attorney with deep ties to the fire department even beyond her marriage to John. “That day, an entire ladder company I was very friendly with was gone.”
But not John—not yet anyway. John spent about 500 hours at Ground Zero, working at what responders referred to as “The Pile”—the twisted, devastated mass of carnage and debris left behind. Firefighters were assigned 30-day shifts; John did his own and picked up a second for another firefighter, a guy who had been at the site when the towers came down, who was psychologically unable to do such a tour.
On The Pile, John’s job was to dig through the mess. With machines, with his hands. Sometimes he found pieces of people. Jen remembers him coming home one night after digging, and telling her he found a piece of a person’s buttocks. Just a slab of flesh and muscle. Whenever that happened, says Jen, it was a victory.
“He knew he was bringing closure to families,” says Jen, “bringing some piece of something home.”
John was a typical Irish guy, says Jen, typical firefighter. He never showed emotion. He also never thought about what he might be inhaling.
“We were told the air was safe,” says Jen. “The federal government said it was safe, and if you can’t rely on your government to tell you the truth… Clearly I was wrong, because clearly it wasn’t safe.”
It was nearly five years between 9/11 and the chicken salad incident in the Crown Heights firehouse. John came home, went to the doctor, the doctor sent him for a sonogram. Almost immediately afterward, the doctor called John and demanded that he and Jen come in at 4 o’clock that afternoon.
Jen knew the news was not going to be good.
“I remember saying to myself, ‘Oh my God, he has cancer,’” she says. “‘Oh my God, he has cancer. How do I do this?’”
When the biopsy came back, Jen’s suspicions proved correct: “It was in the colon,” she says. “It had infiltrated the liver; it was near the stomach.”
Stage 4. Within days, John was in chemotherapy.
At first they were reeling. Sure, John had experienced some residual ailments due to his time at Ground Zero—he had gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD), he was on Nexium; this was back in 2003 or so. Back then, lots of guys were having problems of their own.
“We knew a lot of people who had respiratory issues,” says Jen. “A lot of John’s friends had been kicked off the job because they had breathing issues and respiratory issues and diminished lung capacity.”
And that was bad. But that was nothing like this.
“Part of being a firefighter is taking risks with your health,” says Jen. “When I married [John], I think I saw myself sitting at a burn center, not at Sloan Kettering.”
It was within the first six months of the initial diagnosis, as they tried to track down the cause of the cancer, that it dawned on them.
“We were going though family history,” says Jen. “[John’s doctors] did a genetic test on him, to see if he was genetically predisposed to colon cancer, and he was not. So if you’re not genetically predisposed to it, then the only other way you’re going to get it is through environmental factors.”
Environmental factors, of course, meaning The Pile.
John trawled the halls of Sloan finding other firefighters, cops, other responders who had been at Ground Zero and who were now battling cancer.
“It seemed that after John had gotten diagnosed, a lot of [9/11 responders] started getting diagnosed,” says Jen. “Within a year, we were completely amazed to find out how many people not only had cancer, but had these crazy advanced stages of cancer. One friend of John’s, Richie Manetta—whose wake I went to right after John died; he died within a month of John—he had some form of cancer that was in so many different places they didn’t even know where it came from. They couldn’t even trace the origin of it. And it was so aggressive that it just took him right away. Another guy, Bobby Ford, he died of pancreatic cancer. He was the first wake I went to after John’s wake. There was another guy who died before John, Sean McCarthy, out of Bellmore, who had melanoma. He was in his 30s. Who the hell gets melanoma and dies in their 30s? It just doesn’t happen. It’s not normal. And there was one after another after another after another.”
John’s first surgery came when Jack was three weeks old. Jen was still recovering from a C-section. John died on Aug. 9, 2009. Since then, she has taken on John’s cause: the James Zadroga 9/11 Health and Compensation Act of 2010 (or the Zadroga Bill), named after a detective who died from health problems after working The Pile. The bill would pay some $7.4 billion in aid to people made ill by toxic dust from the World Trade Center wreckage. It has become a political football that has been hurled, dropped and turned over so many times now that it’s hard to tell where it stands (many believe the bill will next be voted on before the end of September 2010).
“To know that something that important to him was finally achieved and accomplished would be huge,” says Jen. “To know that people out there would be taken care of, to know that, long-term, people are going to be monitored and hopefully get diagnosed sooner, it’s huge. I might not be sitting here talking to you if my husband had been diagnosed sooner.”
Indeed, Johnny Big-Arms might still be around, rushing into burning buildings; Jack might still have a dad.
“In my mind he never declined,” says Jen, looking back at the final months she spent with her husband. “In my mind, he was always… He was thinner but he was never dying. We were always filled with hope. We never believed that the end would come for us.”