Death of 9/11 firefighter hero Jim Ryan overshadowed by ‘flashier’ Flight 253 terrorism story
They didn’t find that out until early Christmas morning 2009, eight years later, when the firefighter’s lungs finally overfilled with fluids, the side-effects of pancreatic cancer inflicted on him by the toxic dust he swallowed in hundreds of hours at Ground Zero.
Ryan answered the call of duty on 9/11, then went beyond, returning to the blasted ground for months. First, he hunted survivors, then victims, then just fragments of people – his FDNY brothers among them – whose lives and bodies were shattered that day.
He didn’t realize how his own life was being shattered. Officials said the air was safe. He got cancer in 2006 that the Fire Department said came from the poison rubble. He beat it once. He couldn’t beat it a second time, as a 48-year-old father of three.
On Christmas Eve, he tried to be himself, optimistic, helping with the morning dishes in his Kings Park, L.I., home as if he were not dying. By then, though, he had been off his cancer treatments since November because they no longer worked.
“That’s just the way he is,” his wife, Magda, said Christmas night, hours after her husband lost his final struggle.
That’s the way most real heroes are, but there were no national headlines the next day mourning a hero firefighter’s death, the way there were on Sept. 12, 2001, when 343 of Ryan’s brethren met their ends.
The news yesterday was instead full of a botched airline terror attempt.