The Washington Times, in a special section commemorating the first anniversary of September 11, profiled three men and two women who survived the attack on the Pentagon. They agreed to update their stories for a series, After the Fire, this week marking the fifth anniversary.
Third of five parts
In the year after the September 11 attack on the Pentagon, Beatriz “Pat” Hymel found comfort in the small details she remembered about her husband.>
When she closed her eyes, she could smell his shaving lotion, see the outlines of his hands, feel his touch.
“Now I don’t remember those kisses anymore like I used to,” she says.
Five years have come and gone since Lt. Col. Robert J. Hymel, a retired Air Force pilot, died when Islamic terrorists rammed a hijacked airliner into the Pentagon, killing 184.
“With time, things change,” his widow explains, sitting at the wooden table where she and her husband used to share laughs and dinner.
She retired from her job as principal of an Arlington elementary school near the Pentagon. She fell in love again. She remarried, and is now Beatriz “Pat” Hymel Lipinski.
She may have moved on, but her eyes fill with tears at the thought of Col. Hymel and their 30 years together. Her speech slows. She gazes upward.
“He was the wind beneath my wings,” Mrs. Lipinski says. “We grew up together.”
As principal of Hoffman-Boston Elementary, she was less than a mile away when American Airlines Flight 77 plowed into the Pentagon, where Col. Hymel worked as a management analyst. At the time, she moved the children to the school basement and calmed teachers and students alike — while not knowing the fate of her husband.
His body was found a week later. He was 55.
“You come home and the walls are cold,” recalls Mrs. Lipinski, now 57. “It was very hard initially.”
She told Jake, her canine companion of more than a decade, that he couldn’t die for at least a couple of years. “I need you because I need something to come home to in my house,” she pleaded.
‘Going through motions’
Her husband’s horrible death, among the 184 sent her into a depressed stupor.
“As I look back, I realize for two years I was basically a functioning depressant,” Mrs. Lipinski says.
She attended three group-counseling sessions, but stopped going when they began to conflict with school meetings. She buried herself in long days, waking at 4:30 a.m. to exercise before battling rush-hour traffic to get to work, only to return home as late as 10:30 p.m.
“This was my therapy,” she says. “Work.”
Memories of Col. Hymel were close, mentally and physically.
She kept a box of pictures and other mementos on the floor in her bedroom. She wore a silver pin on a ribbon of stars and stripes, given to her by Pentagon officials. She donned a bracelet engraved with his name.
“I remember one time leaving a meeting,” Mrs. Lipinski whispers, tears in her eyes, “and just missing him so much that I thought, ‘If I could go to your grave and throw myself and just go with you, I would.’”
She pauses and then a will of steel interrupts a memory of despair.
“But I can’t. It’s just stupid for me to say that,” she says hurriedly.
One year after losing her husband, Mrs. Lipinski removed the pin. Still, she struggled.
“It was so abrupt,” says Sylvia Taub, a close friend who was a fellow principal in Arlington. “I think you move on, you make a new life, but you never forget. Every time it’s mentioned on TV, there’s something about terrorists and you think of them.”
Sunday — the day the Hymels went to church together — became “a very lonely day,” remembers Mrs. Lipinski. She would spend the day wandering shopping malls just to get out of the house.
“I remember that I would see people together and I would feel jealousy,” Mrs. Lipinski admits. “What really stung me was the day that I went, ‘Grr.’ I said, ‘Oh my gosh, Pat, you’re angry.’”
Love again
At that moment, Mrs. Lipinski realized she was watching life from the sidelines.
“You just keep doing your routine, regular things. But life doesn’t mean anything; you’re just going through the motions,” she says.
All signs pointed to a reality she did not want to accept: She was lonely.
“I had all these kids and my school, and I had my staff and my two granddaughters,” Mrs. Lipinski says. “There was no reason to be lonely, but there was a void there.”
At the insistence of her daughter, Natalie, she agreed to join an online dating service, Match.com, in spring 2003.
“It was just fun. It was just someone to do something with,” she says of her initial experience. “I never thought that I would find somebody and fall in love again. I never thought that it was a possibility.”
Mrs. Lipinski met with several potential matches, but none clicked. She began to worry about her inability or unwillingness to commit to a relationship, prompting her to seek the advice of a counselor.
“I said, ‘What’s wrong with me?’ I’m lonely, and here’s this nice gentleman,” she says of a would-be suitor. “As I’m sitting there talking to this counselor, I start laughing. I said, ‘I know what the problem is; I’m trying to put a square peg in a round hole.’ That just doesn’t work.”
Her patience paid off. Surfing on Match.com about two weeks later, she came across the profile of Ed Lipinski.
He is a retired Army colonel. He spent his last year of military service in 1993 working in the Pentagon. He moved to Wachovia, where he worked in mortgage banking for 10 years. He, too, had lost a spouse after 30 years of marriage: His wife, Karen, died of breast cancer in 2002.
The two met for lunch. The rest is history.
Heart knowledge
“There are just so many crazy things that we’re just like, oh my gosh, the commonalities,” says Mrs. Lipinski, wearing the radiant smile of a skeptic who unwittingly found the real thing.
They discovered that they both love visiting the beach and working outside. They both eat healthy and make fitness a priority. They share a strong Catholic faith.
And, as if by design, their former spouses are buried within 100 yards of each other at Arlington National Cemetery.
Within six months, they were engaged. Mrs. Lipinski’s daughter gave her a hard time.
“She just thought I was moving too fast. But you know in your heart,” Mrs. Lipinski says of meeting the right one.
Mrs. Lipinski asked that her daughter not be interviewed for this article, fearing it would force her to relive the pain she has tried so hard to overcome.
Col. Lipinski’s mother-in-law met his new love. Col. Hymel’s mother spoke with Col. Lipinski. Both gave their blessing.
“He would want me to move on,” Mrs. Lipinski says of Col. Hymel, not pausing for a second. “He would not want me to be unhappy — not at all.”
Col. Lipinski, giving her an engagement ring in May 2004, told his bride-to-be that he wouldn’t mind if she continued to wear Col. Hymel’s bracelet. But she was ready to take it off.
In July 2004, she retired after 35 years in education.
“When Bob died, it was sort of like I lost my passion for what I was doing,” she explains. “I kind of recognized that, and I held on for a few years. I thought maybe once I fell in love, if I found someone, that I would regain that passion. But I didn’t.”
That October, her son-in-law gave her away at the wedding. Her granddaughters were flower girls.
Now she and Col. Lipinski, 58, start each morning with a two-hour walk around the neighborhood. He works in his vegetable garden. She cooks. On Sundays, they usher together at church. Every few weeks, they visit their beach house in Nags Head, N.C., or the one on Hilton Head Island, S.C., which they plan to sell.
“I don’t regret retiring — I love it,” she says, laughing. “People told me, ‘You’ll go crazy.’ Well, I’ve got news for you, people: There are not enough hours in the day.”
Starting a new life
Nearly two years after they walked down the aisle, the couple spend a bright afternoon on their recently stained deck, teasing each other like young newlyweds.
“I told her I’m not doing this again, so it better work out,” Col. Lipinski says, tapping his wife’s knee with his palm. She smiles and plants a kiss on his cheek.
They bought land in Florida near their close friends, Mrs. Taub and her husband, Joel, where they plan to build a house by the water.
“We just click. It’s like we’ve been married to each other for a long time and yet we know we haven’t,” Mrs. Lipinski says.
Mrs. Taub says her friend has been transformed.
“Those of us who were close to her [after September 11] kept saying, ‘You’re too young, you’ve got to start a new life, you’ve got to stop looking backward,’” she recalls. “When she talked to me for the first time about Ed, I knew she had crossed that bridge — it was the first time that I had seen a spark in her again.”
But embracing the future doesn’t mean shedding the past. For the Lipinskis, honoring Bob and Karen together is part of moving on with each other.
They visit Arlington cemetery about once a month and on birthdays. She goes to Col. Hymel’s grave with a bouquet of roses, the flowers he used to bring her. Col. Lipinski puts a hand on the headstone and gives his regards to Bob before moving to his late wife’s grave to lay flowers. Mrs. Lipinski joins her husband and says hello to Karen.
On a table in the foyer, pictures of Col. and Mrs. Lipinski are flanked by shots of their departed spouses as well as of Natalie and her daughters.
“We think those two are up there in the sky and put us together,” Mrs. Lipinski says.
She laughs out loud.
“I think they said, ‘Those two deserve each other.’”
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