The stories of Sept. 11 lie beneath Brooklyn

NEW YORK — Isaac Feliciano, his eyes moist, gazes down at his late wife's grave and remembers her smile, her kindness, her fear of thunder, her love of their daughters.

And Feliciano, standing on the soft grass of Brooklyn's Green-Wood Cemetery, remembers the morning five years ago when he dropped his wife at a nearby subway station to board a train for work at the World Trade Center.

He's engaged now, and their two girls — so small when she died — are growing up fast. So much has changed, in his life and around the world. And yet here, time somehow stands still.

Rosa Maria Feliciano, forever 30, is not alone.

In this vast, historic cemetery, studded with the names of famous New Yorkers, lie 79 victims of Sept. 11, 2001, brought together by the randomness of both life and death.

There's David DeRubbio, the firefighter from Engine Co. 226 whose polished headstone reflects the Statue of Liberty on a clear day. Nine short steps behind his plot lies Giovanna Galletta Gambale, a Cantor Fitzgerald worker known to her friends as Gennie.

Take a short stroll, and there's the trio from Ladder Co. 118: Joey Bells, Big Head and Mo, side by side eternally on a gentle slope in the cemetery's Winterberry section. Walk 25 feet east to find Uhuru Houston, the handsome Port Authority cop with the broad smile.

They were among 2,749 victims of terror in lower Manhattan. Now, on 478 verdant acres in Brooklyn, they are gathered again, their lost futures etched in stone, each marked with the one thing they shared: Sept. 11, 2001.

Green-Wood took in 17 employees from Cantor Fitzgerald, along with 15 city firefighters. Victims from two of the hijacked planes, including one of the heroes from United Flight 93, were brought here. There are three victims from the Windows on the World restaurant, two Port Authority police officers, one air-conditioning repairman.

Their survivors arrive in a steady, sad procession between the marble and granite markers: widows and widowers, children without a parent, parents without children. This is where families and friends come to grieve — and where Rosa Feliciano's husband comes to work, and to heal.

"Coming back here helped me out a lot," says Isaac Feliciano, a cemetery foreman who took his job at Green-Wood a dozen years ago. "Any time I feel it, I just go to visit her grave."

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