Jupiter Yambem was a banquet manager at the Windows on the World restaurant at the top of the World Trade Center. He arrived at work at about 6 a.m. on Sept. 11, 2001 and died when the tower fell. His body was one of the first to be identified, said his widow, Nancy Yambem.

Photographs and other mementos of Nancy Yambem's life with her late husband, Jupiter Yambem, grace the home she now shares with her second husband, Jerry Feldman.

She said Jupiter will always remain a part of her life. But about two years after he died in the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center, Nancy said, she made a conscious decision to move on.

"I decided to start enjoying life again. I went out and bought a new set of golf clubs and a kayak and a new guitar - it's what Jupiter would have wanted," she said.

She also started dating, met Feldman on an Internet dating website and the two were married in 2006.

Yambem said the transition from being a Sept. 11 widow - "It's what defines so many of us" - wasn't always a smooth one. She said she was at a support group for 9/11 survivors about a year later when someone in the group asked, "Who's going to want us? We have so much baggage."

Her primary concern in the days after the tragedy, Yambem said, was the welfare of her then 5-year-old son, Santi. He was old enough to understand someone he loved had been taken away from him, she said, but not old enough to begin to comprehend why.

"In a lot of ways, Santi was robbed of his innocence that day," she said.

Today, she said, he's a "typical teenager" who enjoys playing rock and jazz guitar and is doing well in school.

Jupiter was at the World Trade Center at that hour of the day on Sept. 11 because he had recently changed his hours as a banquet manager at the Windows on the World restaurant so he could coach Santi's youth soccer team. She said the two had a special bond.

"Jupiter was always kind of outgoing, but when Santi was born, he just blossomed," she said.

Today, Nancy Yambem splits her time between substitute teaching in Beacon, where she and Jupiter lived, doing volunteer work for the Beacon Sloop Club and the Beacon Salvation Army's soup kitchen and running a bereavement support group for her church.

She said she doubted she and other Sept. 11 survivors would ever fully recover from their loss, in part because it was such a public event.

"Other people are allowed to grieve in private," she said. "With us, it's something we're reminded of all the time. I always ask myself at every anniversary if this is something I should talk about, and I think it's the right thing to do."

- Larry Hertz