"9/11 ‘Dust Lady’ Marcy Borders: depression, rehab, back from the brink – then a final bombshell"

The photo of her covered in debris went around the world. For 10 years she struggled with the trauma. Just as she was recovering, cancer dealt a fatal blow

Marcy Borders tells the story of how she became known as the Dust Lady, after she was photographed fleeing from the World Trade Center covered in ash and concrete dust.
Everything about the photograph is astonishing. It’s not just the obvious shock of seeing a woman, elegantly dressed for work, covered in white dust. It’s also her posture. She is frozen in time, like one of those mime artists who stand dead still in Lady Liberty costumes by the entrance to the Staten Island ferry. Her hands are outstretched, as though she’s offering us something, or reaching out to take it.

Most astonishing of all, there is her face. Her mouth is open, as if she’s trying to tell us something. Her eyes are lined with a heavy mascara of dust, and she is looking directly at us. But what is she thinking behind those opaque eyes? Where has she gone?

If pictures of the twin towers engulfed in fireballs encapsulated the unconscionable horror of the terror attacks of 9/11, then that frame of Marcy Borders, a 28-year-old Bank of America employee fleeing from the north tower in a blanket of pulverised debris, was one of the defining images of the human impact. With such powerful understatement, the photograph captured the pall of darkness that had just descended on its subject, entombing all of us along with her.

The image flew around the world, turning her into a 9/11 celebrity: Marcy Borders had been transformed into the “Dust Lady”.

Not that she ever let her new title go to her head, or change her life. “She didn’t let the Dust Lady thing define her,” her brother, Michael Borders, said. “She was still Marcy to everybody else – she just happened to have been involved in something tragic.”

Jimmy Davis, a good friend of Borders and the mayor of Bayonne, New Jersey, where she lived, said that the Dust Lady may have been the way she was “introduced to the world. But it wasn’t what she was looking for, and she was more amazed about it than anybody.”

What did change Borders’ life was the trauma that she soaked up on 11 September 2001 when through a clear liquid-blue sky two planes slammed into the twin towers in downtown Manhattan. She was haunted by what she had seen as she escaped that day, racked by recurring nightmares in which Osama bin Laden repeatedly attacked her home by aerial bombardment.

She also had debilitating fears about what the poisonous dust that had smothered her and entered her lungs would in the long-term do to her health. She read in the papers about Ground Zero emergency workers who fell sick from asthma or sinusitis, or even cancer, and wondered whether a similar fate awaited her.

It was as if, in her head, she still carried that pall of dust around with her – she was still the Dust Lady. “For years, her main concern was that she was going to get sick, that 9/11 would catch up with her,” said her best friend, Mechelle Taylor.

Last month, on 24 August, 9/11 did catch up with Marcy Borders. She died after a year-long fight against stomach cancer. She was 42.

Marcy Borders always found the memory of 9/11 difficult. Only once did she ever go back to New York, despite the fact that it is only a couple of short train rides away from Bayonne. Michael Borders remembers that when Marcy’s eldest child, Noelle, graduated from middle school a few years ago, Marcy decided to celebrate by hiring a chauffeur-driven limousine. They drove into the city, but once they’d crossed the tunnel into Manhattan, Marcy refused to step out of the car.

The tale of that limousine ride was one of many stories shared last week, on the 14th anniversary of 9/11. The anniversary fell just 18 days after Borders’ death. Outside her apartment in Bayonne, a New Jersey peninsula town flanked by industrial shipyards, about 100 relatives and friends gathered on the night of the anniversary for a candlelit vigil in her honour.

Behind her apartment block, two blue laser beams rose high up into the sky, tracing ghostly columns of air where the twin towers used to stand on the other side of New York bay. For a couple of hours, Borders’ closest circle milled in the street swapping anecdotes about her, each person carrying a yellow or silver balloon from which printed copies of the Dust Lady photograph dangled at the end of silk ribbons.

It was a chance to mourn and remember a loving, God-fearing, spirited woman who was always thinking of others. “Nothing was ever about her, she was always worried about her children, her faith, her community,” said Davis.

“If you wanted to have fun, to have somebody who cares for you, well then, Marcy was the person to call on,” said Dawn Rankin, Borders’ cousin, who had come all the way from Maryland. “There was nobody who didn’t care about Marcy.”

Fourteen years previously to the day, Marcy Borders arrived at the World Trade Center soon after 8am and took the lift up to the Bank of America offices on the 81st floor of the north tower. She was in early as she had only just started with the bank as a clerical assistant and was excited to be working for such a prominent company, her brother said.

At 8.46am, five al-Qaida hijackers slammed American Airlines flight 11 into the tower. It hit between the 93rd and 99th floors, just 12 stories above where Borders was sitting.

A year ago, soon after Borders was diagnosed with cancer, she related to her local paper, the Jersey Journal, what happened next. “My supervisor thought a small jet plane might have nipped us. We had no idea what was going on. I began to panic. They tried to calm me down, told me to relax, take deep breaths, but the way the building was shaking, I couldn’t sit there. You felt the building shaking, you heard the explosion, you saw chairs coming out the windows, office supplies, what I know now were people.”

Borders scrambled down the main staircase of the north tower, which by now was packed with hundreds of people trying to escape, many of them screaming. She passed many injured people, some with shards of glass and metal stuck in their flesh, others with burnt skulls. Fire officers came running up the stairs in the opposite direction, shouting: “Run, and don’t look back!”

It must have taken her about an hour to reach the bottom of the building. By the time she found her way to the exit, the south tower had been hit by the second plane and had just collapsed, at 9.59am, creating a dust cloud so large it could be detected by satellites in space. “I took chase from this cloud of dust and smoke that was following me,” Borders told the Journal. “Once it caught me it threw me on my hands and knees. Every time I inhaled my mouth filled up with it, I was choking. I was saying to myself out loud, I didn’t want to die, I didn’t want to die.”

When the cloud reached her, everything went silent and dark. She couldn’t see her hands in front of her face. She was grabbed by a man without a shirt and dragged into the lobby of a nearby building and into safety. There Stan Honda, a freelance photographer working for AFP, was also sheltering from the giant cloud of debris, snapping pictures of people as they came in.

He recalled that “this woman came in completely covered in dust. It was a strange sight. She paused for a second, and I took one photo. It was just that one frame – I really only had time for that shot, then somebody took her upstairs and she was gone.”

Somehow, Borders managed to walk to the tip of Manhattan and make her way home on a ferry. Mechelle Taylor, who was living in the same apartment building at the time, vividly remembers her getting out of a cab outside their home when she arrived back. She was still covered in dust.

“She was shaken up,” Taylor said. “She kept saying how grateful she was to be alive, but she was bad. She saw such awful things. People jumping from the building.”

When Honda’s photograph was wired around the world on 9/11 it did not identify the Dust Lady, as he hadn’t had time to ask for her name. But a few days later, a relative of Borders called the AFP office and revealed who she was. A couple of weeks after the attacks, Honda visited her in Bayonne. He was relieved to find her physically unscathed, but he didn’t have to probe deeply to see the emotional damage. “She was scared. She told me she was afraid to go back into New York, that she was frightened of tall buildings and planes.”

The impact for Borders was instant and long-lasting. “It was very, very distressing for her,” Taylor said. “For months afterwards she would say: ‘Damn! I don’t believe this happened to me. The terrorists really did this to me!’”

Taylor watched as her friend slumped into depression. “She shied away from people. She didn’t want to leave the house, she lost her appetite. On and off, she was depressed for years.” Michael, her brother, said that Borders was always very careful to hide the extent of her despair from him and from her two children, Noelle and Zay’den, now 22 and seven respectively. “She never showed us, she never exposed it to us. She came across as though she was fine,” he said.

But in an interview she gave to the New York Post in 2011 she was candid about how low she sank. “It was like my soul was knocked down with those towers. My life spiralled out of control. I didn’t do a day’s work in nearly 10 years, and I was a complete mess.”

Borders got by through those years, Taylor said, by relying on the support of friends and family, and the money that her husband, Donald Edwards, a truck driver, brought in. She wrestled with her demons. She told the Post: “Every time I saw an aircraft, I panicked. If I saw a man on a building, I was convinced he was going to shoot me.”

That’s when the nightmares about Bin Laden started. So, too, did the alcohol and drug habit. In April 2011, she hit rock bottom and checked herself into a rehab clinic. A week into her stay there, the news broke that Bin Laden had been killed. “Now I have peace of mind,” she said.

Borders emerged from rehab on 20 May 2011, and never looked back. Part of her success in recovery came from the comfort that Bin Laden was dead. Part of it was that she had found a way to move on from that awful day.

When the Jersey Journal asked last year whether she often looked at the Dust Lady photo, she replied that she tried not to. “I try to take myself from being a victim to a survivor now. I don’t want to be a victim any more.”

It’s one of the many brutal injustices of Marcy Borders’ life that, having pulled herself back from the brink, she had so little time to revel in her recovery. In August 2014, she was diagnosed with stomach cancer.

“Damn!” she exclaimed to Taylor. “This shit caught up with me. It got me.”

Taylor said that Borders’ health crisis was exacerbated by the fact that she didn’t have health insurance. “She found it difficult at first to get treatment, which made everything worse.”

Only towards the end of her illness, having sought the help of Mayor Davis’s office, was she able to secure health cover. But by then she had fallen $190,000 into debt from medical bills and she told the Journal that at one point she couldn’t afford to take up prescription pills to control her nausea from chemotherapy and chronic pain.

It is impossible to say with certainty whether or not Borders’ illness was caused by the toxins she inhaled on 9/11. Mega studies of those exposed to the Ground Zero dust cloud have produced conflicting results, some finding a higher risk of cancer, others finding none.

What can be said with certainty is that the pall of smoke and dust that entrapped Borders bore known carcinogens such as asbestos, glass fibres and silica, and that some 4,753 people who were at Ground Zero have gone on to develop various forms of cancer.

Many people close to Borders have no doubts about the cause of her death. “She had life taken from her too young, I can’t believe this wasn’t caused by 9/11,” said Davis. “I fully believe that the toxins in the air that day were the reason,” said her brother, Michael.

Then there is this comment: “I’m saying to myself: ‘Did this thing ignite cancer cells in me?’” That was Borders herself, speaking three months after the diagnosis.

Even then, she had no intention of giving up. Taylor said that her friend fought her illness right up to the day she died. “As a God-loving person, she was convinced she was going to overcome this. She didn’t want to die. She wanted to live, to beat this. She wanted to go back to church and praise the Lord and dance. She wanted to see her daughter graduate from college. She wanted to get strong again.”

At the end of the vigil on 9/11, Borders’ family called everyone together and, on the count of three, they all bellowed at the top of their voices: “We love you, Marcy.” Suddenly, a hundred balloons were tearing up into the sky, rising in parallel to the laser beams that sketched the distant skeletons of the twin towers.

Some of the balloons got caught in a tree. At the end of their ribbons, the Dust Lady fluttered in the warm wind.