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Ana Fosteris: Commuting to Dress Up

 

Even though she was up at 4 a.m. every day to make the two-hour commute on the Long Island Rail Road from Coram to 2 World Trade Center, Ana Fosteris kept resisting the very idea of finding a job closer to home. She loved her life as an insurance broker at Aon on the 103rd floor, she loved shopping downtown, and "she liked dressing up and being around people who dressed up," said Michael Fosteris, her husband of 31 years. "She couldn't put up with the dress code on Long Island; it's so casual."

Theirs was a transcontinental love story: they met and married in Romania, and immigrated to New York shortly after. The weekend before Sept. 11, the two were listening to Verdi's "Macbeth" and Mrs. Fosteris, who was 58, happened to mention that the "Ah, la paterno mano" aria "would be the song she would like to have played for her at her funeral," her husband said. "It came out of nowhere."

Oct. 30, Mr. Fosteris was accompanied by friends as he drove back from the memorial service at ground zero. He said, "We played the aria in the car."

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From "Profiles in Grief" of The New York Times