A Note to His Children
Danny Smith had forgotten something. The plan was for his wife, Mary, to drop him off at the hospital, then return home before the children left for school so it was more like a normal day. It was not a normal day. Mr. Smith was to have a heart bypass operation.
Now, in the car outside the hospital, he asked his wife for paper and pen. He was only 47, but he had been orphaned at 15 when his father, a former New York homicide detective, died of a heart attack; his mother had died of cancer. He did not want his own children to experience what he had, but Mrs. Smith had just regained her health after breast cancer, and now here he was, arteries blocked, about to have heart surgery. So he scribbled notes to his daughter, Elizabeth, 14, and his son, Michael, 12. "I will always be with you," he told them, underlining always. "Listen to Mommy," he told them. "I love you," he told them. Just in case.
But Danny Smith awoke in his hospital bed, his life, his vigor, his humor intact, with a nurse asking him to rate his pain on a scale of 1 to 10. "Thirteen and a half," he croaked, according to his wife. Off the scale, but then, he was 6- foot-5, so perhaps that was to be expected.
The Smiths met when they were students at Fordham, working at Willie's College Deli. Mary Smith saw the man she had married — the one who baked her a cake each birthday and vigorously scrubbed fresh fruit for her to prevent infection while she was ill — as larger than life, measured in feet and fervor both.
In July 2001, two months after his operation, Mr. Smith started work at Euro Brokers in the World Trade Center. In late September, Mrs. Smith gave the notes to their children.