Dying 9/11 worker responds to news of Bin Laden's Death

from the Times Live Blog, May 2, 2011

When Daniel Arrigo, a former construction worker, read the news on a blog Sunday night, he was lying in bed, as he does most of the time, tethered to an oxygen tank.
"I saw 'Osama bin Laden' killed, and I was like, 'What is this, a joke? ' " Mr. Arrigo, 55, who lives in Long Beach, Long Island, said Monday. "I looked again. I put my glasses on. I read whatever information they had available, then I woke up my wife because she's exhausted from not only taking care of the kids but taking care of me."
Mr. Arrigo worked 15-hour shifts, seven days a week, mainly flagging trucks while breathing in soot and debris at the World Trade Center site for the first four or five months after the attacks. He had two strokes in 2003, and by 2008 was suffering from severe lung disease, which his doctors at Mount Sinai Medical Center attribute to his exposure at ground zero. He is now dependent on respirators and eight medications a day, and hoping for a lung transplant.
He and his wife, Bridget, were so riveted by the capture that they stayed up most of the night, watching the president's announcement and television accounts of the operation that killed the man who Mr. Arrigo said had turned the last nine and a half years of his life into a living hell. Because of his progressive illness, Mr. Arrigo, his wife and their three children had been evicted from their house; their two cars had been repossessed, and they had been forced to apply for welfare and food stamps, until he finally received workers' compensation and disability insurance.
Mr. Arrigo said he was glad that he had lived long enough to see Bin Laden captured, but that it did not make up for the torment of having gone from a healthy 45-year-old to being dependent on his wife and feeling like he was 80 in the span of 10 years.
"I'm glad he died before me, but it doesn't make my life any better knowing that he's dead," Mr. Arrigo said. "I'm an American, and I'm a proud American, and I'm a proud veteran, but the fact that they killed him doesn't make me all of a sudden able to jump up out of my bed and go dance with my wife in the living room. I'm still in the same shape and getting worse and time goes on."
As a union laborer with Local 79, he had been able to provide his family with the American dream -- a beautiful house with a pool out back, nice cars. He coached T-ball and played football with his son. Despite the stench of death at ground zero, he was proud to be working there. But now, Mr. Arrigo said, he sometimes wonders whether it would have been better to have died than to live as he does now. "It breaks my heart to see what it's doing to my family and to my children and to my wife," he said.
He felt those same wrenching, contradictory emotions as he saw the crowds on television Sunday night, celebrating Bin Laden's death. "With all the people at ground zero and the people at the White House, for that brief moment everybody became and American again, and everybody remembered," he said. "But what about the nine years that everybody's been suffering? You don't hear about that. People forgot about us. The politicians forgot about us. The law firms made whatever deals they could make."
When he worked at ground zero, Mr. Arrigo said, "Unfortunately, I thought I was superman, so you didn't worry about it. You just went and did what you were doing. But I've certainly learned that I'm not."
At this point, he said, he would rather focus on the small pleasures of having his wife and three children, Daniel, 16, Caitlin, 14, and Shannon, 12, around him.
In the calm light of Monday morning, he said: "You know what? For a guy like me it doesn't really change what I'm going through. Obama took out Osama. Well, you know, that's great. He's my president. I voted for him. Right now he's the most popular guy in the United States. But what is that doing for me? Is that making me safer? Is it making me feel better while I'm laying in bed, while I'm puking off the side of the bed into a garbage pail, or I can't catch my breath, or I don't make it into the bathroom on time. These are things that I live every day of my life.
"The fact that Osama is dead, that's a great thing, but it doesn't change my life at all." - ANEMONA HARTOCOLLIS