For many, Sept. 11 meant new calling in life

Following the horrors of the terrorist attacks, many New Yorkers have decided to transform their lives.

NEW YORK - After terrorists killed more than 3,000 people two years ago, Americans dreamed of traveling across the country to rescue survivors, New Yorkers thought of going to war, victims' relatives regretted ever wasting a precious day.

Promises to make life count echoed in the emotional days after the attack. Many, certainly, went unfulfilled as the days and months went on. Yet from the fashion designer who founded a nonprofit to the Senate aide who joined the Navy, many people did change their lives after Sept. 11.

The evening of Sept. 11, Lisa Orloff trudged home to her loft in Manhattan's Chelsea neighborhood, discouraged and exhausted after being turned away from the hospital and blood bank where she tried to volunteer. The clothing designer was desperate to help - to do something, anything - but in the chaos, she didn't know where the city needed her.

The next morning, she went to a convention hall where a volunteer command center was forming. After three weeks, Orloff was helping run the operation, organizing food and water for rescue workers, boxing up medical supplies to treat weary ground zero crews.

Eight months later, Orloff sold the inventory from her clothing line and closed her business to head the volunteer organization she founded. September Space provides a support system for people doing volunteer work.

"I love this city. I was going to do something to help, and something to make a difference," said Orloff, 38. "Once I was doing it 24 hours a day, I realized this was where I need to be."

She gave up her spacious home and moved into a studio apartment, now earning less than a third of what she made as a clothing designer, which she had always thought was her dream job.

"In light of the events that happened, "things' become so insignificant," she said. "You don't need things. You need people and you want to help them."

Many victims' relatives have shifted their lives, turning pain into energy for something new.

Some have founded victims' groups or focused on a cause, like fire codes, immigration laws or the rebuilding of the trade center. Others, such as Annelise Peterson, made personal changes.

Peterson's brother worked for bond firm Cantor Fitzgerald, on the 104th floor of the World Trade Center's north tower. Her fiance's office was on the south tower's 104th floor, at Sandler O'Neill, where he so loved his job as an investment banker that he often worked on weekends.

Peterson hated her midtown Manhattan banking job - a seemingly plum position she landed after graduating from Columbia in just three years. She had majored in economics because it was marketable, but it was not her passion.

"I didn't really think about what made me happy," Peterson said. "That was always how I'd led my life - what was the best game plan for me."

Stunned by grief after Sept. 11, Peterson returned to work to give herself reason to get out of bed each day.

One weekend in May 2002 she was assigned to write a brokers' guide on equities. She went to the office, sat down to work, and wrote her resignation letter instead.

"I was so miserable and I was like, you know what, I have one life to live, and that's what I guess this event taught me, is that you have to take those risks," Peterson said. "You just have to go with your passion, what's in your heart."

Peterson started her own public relations company. It launched in her apartment but has grown to occupy a new SoHo office, where she brings her Yorkie dog to work and doesn't have to wear a suit.

Peterson, 24, looks at life now as though she's also living for her brother, Davin Peterson, and her fiance, Fred Cox, who did not get the chance.

"I love it and I'm happy and I'm very proud of myself, and I think that they would be proud of me too," she said. "I think that's a big thing with whatever you do - you're always thinking about how they would feel."

Leanne Shay wonders the same about her brother, Robert. Growing up in Staten Island, she was fiercely protective of him, being his older sister by 19 months. They were two of eight Shay children, and they stuck together.

Robert Shay worked at Cantor Fitzgerald, a job Leanne helped him get because she had worked there. Since he died, she has battled the guilt of not being able to protect him.

She went back to school a year after the attacks, majoring in criminal justice with a goal of working in counterterrorism for the FBI, CIA or New York Police Department.

"I kind of feel like I failed him, and that's hard to carry around," she said. "I try to make up for it by going back to school and maybe one day help save somebody else's brother."

The 30-year-old single mom works full-time as a client associate at Merrill Lynch, and attends school at night and on weekends. She made the decision to change her career about six months after her brother was killed.

"I have to do something that helps other people," she remembers thinking. "I can't sit behind a computer looking at the stock market all day long."

Until she finishes school, Shay asked to work out of the company's downtown office so she could be close to the trade center site.

It was in the neighborhood that Peter Kauffmann once spent his carefree days as a student at nearby Stuyvesant High School.

The native New Yorker, now 27, returned to lower Manhattan in the days after the attacks, accompanying his boss, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton. Kauffmann, her press secretary, had been toying with the idea of going into the Navy, but during a visit to ground zero on Sept.14, he knew he had to go.

"I remember looking up - you knew where the towers were supposed to be - and looking back down and that was when I made the decision that I wanted to join the military," Kauffmann said.

"I was angry," he added. "There was a large element of "I want to go get these guys, you don't do this to my home."'

A week later, he applied, and began officer candidate school the following May. Kauffmann graduated from intelligence school this spring, and is now stationed at Fallon Naval Air Station in Nevada, working on a project developing uses for unmanned aerial vehicles.

"I'm proud of the work I did before," Kauffmann said, "but I thought this was more appropriate for me right now."

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