I hired Catherine to be an administrator in our New York Sales office in late 1995. We needed someone strong to stand up to those guys, and she was it. Her background, like mine, exceeded the requirements for the job. She was taking a break from her career to reassess and restart. I was doing the same, so I understood.
We had some things in common, but there were so many other ways we were different. She was spunk and sass and New York in-your-face deal-with-it attitude. I was a (mostly) well-behaved proper southern girl who didn’t make waves. Oh, how I envied her. I wanted to BE Catharine G. She had the best attitude in the world, she did a great job, and no one treated her like she was somehow less valuable. She wouldn’t have stood for it.
I didn’t want to stand for such treatment, but, with a few exceptions, I largely kept my mouth shut and smiled through the difficult days of working with high-ego high-dollar sales guys with more testosterone than manners. I learned so much from Catherine about dealing with difficult, hyper-aggressive colleagues. Whenever we talked, which was often, she’d regale me with the stories of her office — the New York Sales head was one of the worst when it came to high-ego, low-manners attitude — and I envied her more.
Flash to 1998. She’d left the office, then returned in a Marketing Manager position a year later. She stopped by our Washington office for some meetings and stopped in to chat. She was pregnant, noticeably so. I asked her how things were going. The short version was that she was about to embark on the adventure of single motherhood (because the father walked away). I admired her so for taking on that responsibility and we stayed in touch. She talked about the delivery, sent pictures of her baby girl, Kate, then other pictures as Kate grew. Her little girl looked so much like her mother, except for different eye colors. Otherwise, they could have been identical if they weren’t nearly 40 years apart in age.
I began to see Catherine as my role model, not just in terms of personal confidence and dealing with difficult colleagues, but also in life as I weighed the possibilities of becoming a single parent myself because I had gone through the very painful breakup of a relationship in mid-1998 and wasn’t sure I’d find a new man any time soon. She didn’t sugar coat things. There were times when single motherhood was really hard (like when she was very sick and still had to care for the baby), but she had family in the area and did her best. She loved her daughter so much and said Kate was the best thing that had ever happened to her. Oh, how I admired her.
The last time I saw Catherine was the summer of 2001. She showed me an envelope full of pictures of her daughter while we enjoyed dinner together at Vidalia. She was so happy. Her daughter was healthy and happy, she was healthy and happy. Her career was going great and, if I remember correctly, she was just starting to see a new man (the first since Kate’s father had fled the scene).
Catherine didn’t work in the World Trade Center, so I didn’t think overmuch about her on September 11, but a couple days later, I received a call that she had been there, in the Windows on the World, for a technology marketing meeting that morning.
Catherine, you will never be forgotten. You probably never knew how much I first envied, then admired, you. But I did. I admired you even more when I learned that you’d planned with your sister that she would care for your very young daughter if anything ever happened to you. You did all the right things.
God bless and keep you.
