I'm Survivor Rich" -- at least, until I got that phone call. A woman whose voice I didn't recognize said, "Alyssa, this is Kim. My son was in the Air Force and lived in the apartment upstairs from Alyssa's son. I don't have any address of the tenant at the time, but he would have been either Matt or Ryan. I remember when he was buried. Could you please take a moment to think about it and get back to me with the right information? I really would like to know." I called Matt's mom right away, and she remembered it clearly. Matt had gone to Arlington National Cemetery to visit his uncle. He left a few hours early from his trip. And he never made it home. "It was just a few days after 9/11," Kim told me. "They sent everyone home that morning. He never made it back to his parents' house, even though he was living in Illinois at the time." I was numb. I couldn't eat breakfast that day. When Alyssa returned from work and saw my tears, she thought I had heard from my husband. She didn't know that my husband was already dead. That was my first real knowledge of it. When it happened, I felt like there was no way I could handle losing a child. And it wasn't the first. My ex-husband was killed in a car wreck at 25 and left behind a 6-year-old and an 11-year-old. I always believed he died doing what he loved, fixing cars and going on long trips. And I learned he was having an affair. The pain of that was terrible enough. So imagine hearing that he died in an explosion. I went to visit Matt's mom a few days later, on Memorial Day 2002. She told me that she still talked to Matt every now and then, and a few months after 9/11, Matt sent her a letter saying he missed her, and he was in a better place now. That made her feel like it was all right, as long as she knew Matt was out there. She still looked for signs, for words. When I lost Matt, I was in the worst part of the grief process. With my first child, it took more than a year. With my second, we didn't think he would ever leave the hospital. He died in the hospital. With Matt, I couldn't get the words out of my head: Where was he? How did he die? How could he be gone when we weren't ready to let go? Why did this have to happen? The funeral was three months later. At the funeral, I kept thinking he was there. And I had to talk to him every day and tell him about everything. I had to tell him how I felt about his son -- or something. Alyssa didn't want to attend the funeral. She didn't want to go to Arlington, which is near where we lived in Wisconsin. So when we were still deciding whether to go, one of the funeral directors called her. He said they were having trouble finding Matt's grave because Matt had already been buried with a group. So the funeral director said if Alyssa knew where the plot was, he could pull him out. He was at a plot in Arlington that he could see from the funeral home. That was Matt. The grief process can be a bittersweet thing. I missed my boy. But I thought about him every day. And then my sister had a dream that a year after he died, I found him playing with an old friend who was a classmate of Matt's when we lived in Wisconsin. The dream seemed more like a wish. I went to Arlington in 2003 to see if I could find Matt. I didn't really expect to find anything, because I knew it would take a lot of digging. I was in the cemetery from midmorning until 10 p.m. I was lucky that day. I saw two gravestones that belonged to young people in their 20s, who were from out of state, and the cemetery workers pulled them out. One of them was Matt. I told Alyssa about it and she got her son to go with her. The next day, she said he wasn't there. She wanted him to be there. I thought about that kid a lot. And it became another piece of the puzzle. In 2002, I moved back to Madison, Wisconsin, where I grew up. We had bought a home there and made friends, so it felt like home. And the grief process was changing. I didn't look forward to every day. Some days were pretty good. Other days were like a bad dream. I was in a dark place for a long time, really really bad days, but that part of the grief was starting to fade. When I met Andy in 2003, I realized I was just in a low place for a short period. He's such an optimistic person. I needed an optimistic person. Then he introduced me to Bill, and even when I was in a really low place, he kept talking about finding my husband and letting me know I was loved and cherished. That really motivated me. I wanted him to do that for me. When you talk to Alyssa, she'll tell you that she wants to remember Matt. But we all have moments where we have to let go and accept what has happened. Even when you think you have let go, there's something that tells you, "Wait." So at that cemetery on the anniversary of his death, I wanted to remember that he was there. But my husband wanted to remember him too. We walked around the tree together and looked at his headstone. And I cried for a long time. I cried and talked to him for 30 minutes, and then I went out to the cemetery shed and took a walk around the grounds with Andy. That's where we always met. We'd sit by the stream and talk. Andy would tell me about his work and I would talk about Matt. And that was our spot for the rest of our lives. For the first time, I knew what to do. It was the summer of 2004, and we were in Arizona for an anniversary trip for Alyssa. It was pretty much the last thing we would ever do together. I went to the cemetery and told them, "I need to be in the cemetery today." So they put us in that spot. They put Andy in the back corner with a big tree, and I'm right across from him, right by the stream. I don't know why they put us there, but they did. Andy and I were sitting there, and he was telling me how he used to love me and love being around me. He was telling me that he was more focused on me than I thought, and how thankful he was to have met me. And I was feeling sad and so thankful for this guy and how he had done this for me. And I thought, This is good. This is right. He's what I need. And then I was thinking about Matt. And that was when the peace came for me. It was like a cloud of black, but it was a black cloud, because I'm so thankful that we had that relationship. But the fact that I didn't know him as a young person was what made it really hard. It wasn't easy. But I had a choice to make. I could either let it hurt me and not let it go, or I could move on. My dad died when I was young, and the way he died -- of cancer, knowing it was coming -- was awful, so I never really let go of the pain. But after a while, I realized how much better I felt. When you learn about yourself and you know yourself, you can move on and be at peace. I never got it before. I didn't know who I was before I met Matt. I always thought that life would just be for me and my family, and I'd do everything that I could to make everyone else happy and make myself happy. I had the faith, but it's just not like that. If I die, I want to know that I lived my life the right way. So my faith is that my husband is with me and we are in our golden era. We had a picture on our bedroom wall of us on our wedding day. Matt was 21 at the time and I was 19. And then I have this picture of him when he was 17. Andy doesn't have that same picture of Matt because he lost it when he was in college. He has a lot of pictures of me from when we were in high school. The wedding picture is special to me. We met and then he went to New York and ended up dying in an explosion over there. Then we met again. Alyssa Alyssa Littleton was in a group therapy session with soldiers who had been through combat when she learned that Matt had died on 9/11. I can't say the anniversary of Matt's death is easy for me, but the other days are hard. In the fall, I had such a hard time because people would talk to me about the anniversary, and I didn't want to get into that. When you've lost someone, the anniversary is hard for you, but that's not what hurts. When I went through it, I had the sense of relief that I didn't see him in the coffin and it wasn't really real, like it