Each day's awakening brings another flood of reminders and another flood of tears.
Her husband's portrait framed on the telephone stand. The hollow look in their children's eyes. The postcard her husband sent to show off his new workplace -- two gleaming towers piercing the sky above Manhattan.
Intensifying the gloom, the votive candle in front of the Virgin of Guadalupe, which had burned bright for 10 days, flickered out.
Morning after morning, it's been harder for Luz Maria Mendoza to convince herself that her husband, who hasn't made his nightly phone call from Brooklyn since Sept. 10, is still alive.
New Yorkers consider their city the capital of the world, and hundreds of foreigners from 80 nations disappeared in the cataclysm at the World Trade Center, making America's grief the world's.
The horror rippled around a planet linked more than ever not only by fiber optics and instant messaging, but also by flesh and blood.
It traveled across the Pacific to the northern Philippine city of Loaog, where 13-year-old Daryl Domingo was watching television when a frightening image flashed on the screen. He saw smoke pouring from the north tower, where his mother, Benilda, worked as a janitor.
"I knew that my mom was in there," he said. "My daddy cried. I cried. I hope she's just in a hospital."
The tragedy traveled south into Jonacatepec, a central Mexican town where Mendoza was left with her three children when her husband, 32-year-old Juan Ortega, went to find work in "el Norte."
Ortega sneaked into the US on Jan. 27, 2000, in an eight-day journey across the desert and headed to New York, where a friend lived.
He was delighted when he landed a job at the Fine & Schapiro deli to deliver US$6.95 London broil to busy executives in the World Trade Center. Tips were good, and he began to send home US$500 every two or three weeks. Every night he called his wife, to ask about the children, to ask about her.
Mendoza watched the horror live on television. Phone lines were jammed, but a friend of Ortega's called from New York. He had received a brief, frantic call from Ortega shortly after a jetliner hit one of the towers. And nothing else.
Life for the family has stopped. They wait by the phone, and they watch television hour after hour, searching among the faces of workers shown running from the collapsing towers in tapes broadcast over and over by news networks.
Mendoza insists she doesn't believe her husband is dead, rattling off possible scenarios -- amnesia, detention by immigration authorities, entrapment in an air pocket in the rubble. But her words give away her doubts as her descriptions of him shift between present and past tense.
On Friday, the US Embassy expedited visas for Mendoza and her brother-in-law, and the Morelos state government gave them plane tickets and US$1,000 for expenses. They were flying to New York this weekend -- to try to find out what happened to Ortega.
"Each day I wake up I ask God so much to make that day a marvelous one," Mendoza said. "We hope for good news, or even bad news. The doubt consumes me every day, and I need this nightmare to end, for better or worse."
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