‘People are jumping out of the window. I have to go…’ Those were the last words Monica heard from her husband in the World Trade Center. Here she reveals her battle to build a positive legacy – and how she found love again with a firefighter

‘I have to go.’ Those would be the last words Monica Iken’s husband would say to her. Yet in the surreal few minutes after she put down the phone that September morning, she could not have known the horror contained within them.

Ten minutes earlier, Michael had phoned her from his desk on the 84th floor of the World Trade Center to tell her that a plane had hit its North Tower – across from his building – but that she needn’t worry. It was just before 9am.

When he rang back a few minutes later, it was again to reassure her that everything was fine.

‘Then he said, “People are jumping out of the window. I have to go.” And that’s the last thing he ever said to me,’ Monica, 56, recalls now.

Just moments later, standing in the apartment the couple shared in New York, she watched in terror as her TV showed another plane emerging from the cloudless blue sky towards the South Tower, where Michael was working.

‘I remember standing there, just frozen, trying to process that I was looking at this huge jumbo jet. And by the time I snapped out of it, it had hit his building,’ she says. ‘That’s the moment my nightmare began.’

That day the man she had walked down the aisle with just 11 months earlier became one of the 2,977 victims of the worst terror attack in US history. His body was never recovered. 

Monica, then 31, had gone to bed the night before a happy newlywed only to find herself transformed into a widow.

Monica with her husband Michael on their wedding day in October 2000. Extraordinarily, they had met on September 11, 1999 – two years before everything would change forever

On September 11, 2001, Michael Iken became one of 2,977 victims of the worst terror attack in US history

While time has moved on, a part of her is anchored to the events of a quarter of a century ago.

‘You learn to live with it but each year brings with it the milestones he never saw,’ she says. ‘Last year we would have celebrated our silver wedding anniversary.’

For before Michael became one of the thousands whose lives were extinguished on a day seared into history, he was simply the man Monica had expected to grow old with – a man who, from almost the moment he saw her, had been convinced they were destined to be together.

Extraordinarily, they had met on September 11, 1999 – exactly two years to the day before the tragedy. Monica had just emerged from a two-year relationship. 

‘I was looking forward to being single for a while,’ she says wryly.

But around 10pm that evening, as she and a friend headed for a night out in downtown Manhattan, they stopped at a favourite bar and restaurant because her friend was hungry.

‘There was this handsome guy dressed in black sitting by himself at the bar and as I was trying to move a stool, he starts telling me his whole life story,’ she recalls. It was the start of a conversation that, as Monica puts it, ‘never really stopped from there’.

Six years older and divorced, Michael revealed he had spotted Monica at the same bar the previous weekend. ‘He told his friend, “I’m going to marry that girl,” and he had come back a week later to find me. 

‘He’d been there for hours, just waiting,’ she recalls.

‘And the freaky thing is that we were never intending to go back to that bar that night. We only went because my friend decided she was hungry. The next time I looked at the clock it was 3am.’

And while Monica was initially ambivalent about plunging straight into another relationship, Michael was ‘all in’ from the start.

‘I was trying to see if I could date other people – obviously that did not happen. He was just determined,’ she says with a smile.

Then, one evening in October, she recalls watching Michael walk into a restaurant and something inside her shifting. ‘There was this moment where I just knew my soul had to be with his and from then on we were inseparable.’

Michael proposed just a month later and in February 2000 they moved into a rented flat in Riverdale, a serene residential neighbourhood north of Manhattan.

That October they married in an intimate beachside wedding in the Caribbean. After the ceremony, Michael changed his voicemail greeting to: ‘I am happily married. Leave me a message.’

Like any young couple, the Ikens had dreams and plans for the decades they assumed lay ahead. Michael, in particular, longed for children. 

‘He really wanted to be a father,’ says Monica.

Yet running oddly in parallel with those hopes for the future was a conviction that he would not live to see old age. ‘It was horrible. He said it all the time,’ Monica says now. Neither of them, of course, could possibly have envisaged how or when that premonition would come true.

On the morning of September 11, 2001, Michael left their apartment shortly before 6am to make the 15-mile journey from their home to his job as a bond trader.

‘He was in a good mood,’ Monica recalls. ‘He had been taking a sailing course and was collecting his certificate after work. He kissed me goodbye and we both said: “I love you.”‘

Having recently left her job as a teacher, Monica went back to sleep. ‘I had no idea it would be the last time I’d see him,’ she says.

Three hours later, she woke to the unexpected sound of the phone ringing. ‘He never called me in the morning because his work was particularly focused in the early hours,’ she says.

Around ten minutes earlier, at 8.46am, American Airlines Flight 11 had crashed into the World Trade Center’s North Tower, killing everyone on board and trapping those working above the impact zone.

‘He asked me if I was up and told me to turn on the TV,’ Monica recalls. ‘He told me a commuter plane hit the building but it wasn’t his building, it was Tower One. And I’m looking at this image on screen of a giant hole but he was cool as a cucumber and told me everything was fine. Then he said, “I gotta go. I’ll call you back.”‘

The phone rang again five minutes later, this time Michael asking his wife to call family and friends to reassure them he was fine because he didn’t have the capacity to respond to their panicked messages.

‘I ran to get the address book and when I got back to the phone, he told me people were jumping and he had to go,’ she says. ‘All I could get out of my mouth was, “OK,” before he hung up. Now I wish I’d screamed: “Get out.” I just assumed that he’d call me back.’

Instead, just moments later, Monica joined millions around the world in watching the unthinkable unfold live on television.

At 9.03am, United Airlines Flight 175 crashed into the South Tower, striking floors 77 to 85. Michael was on the 84th. Only later would Monica learn that a handful of people from the 81st floor and above had managed to escape.

While some colleagues had fled in panic when the first plane hit the North Tower, Michael, along with several co-workers, had stayed behind to try to persuade a colleague in shock to come out from beneath her desk.

Monica was told that he would most likely have died from carbon monoxide poisoning. ‘That’s the only comfort I have,’ she says. ‘That he didn’t suffer.’

Unable to get through to her husband’s phone, Monica could do nothing but watch in horror as, less than an hour later, the entire South Tower collapsed.

‘I really thought I was in another dimension,’ she says. ‘I couldn’t process what was happening.’

Yet the mind does strange things in the face of unimaginable loss: Monica spent that afternoon lying on the sofa by the door, praying for Michael to walk through it and calling his phone, leaving frantic messages, before eventually collapsing into sleep.

What happened next remains extraordinarily vivid to her. ‘I had this incredibly lucid dream. We had a garden apartment with a red door and I was in the living room on the couch and Michael came through the door.

‘I jumped up, wrapped my legs around him and he said, “Monica. It’s so beautiful here.” And it felt so real but when I woke up I knew he was gone.’

Even so, in the dire days that followed, Monica clung to a sliver of hope – one that she admits she has never completely extinguished.

‘His best friend got out. His other friends got out. There was no ID card, no wedding ring,’ she says. ‘Deep down I knew straightaway but at the back of my mind there was part of me which felt like he’s wandering the streets somewhere and that’s very difficult.’

The days and weeks that followed passed in a torment of grief. ‘I wasn’t functioning at all. I was so not well,’ she says.

‘Drinking was the only thing that calmed my nerves. I’d not only lost my husband but all our dreams and plans, the family we were going to have.’ She pauses. ‘And not only that but he didn’t just die. He was murdered – and the whole world saw it.’

With no body, there could be no funeral in the conventional sense. Instead, Monica and Michael’s family held a memorial mass. 

Meanwhile, she found herself drawn repeatedly to the place where the towers had stood. ‘I wanted to remember him in the place where he took his last breath,’ she says.

Within a week of Michael’s death, she was seized by a conviction: there must be a permanent memorial at Ground Zero. 

‘The recovery hadn’t even been done yet but the city was already talking about rebuilding,’ she says. ‘I was horrified. I had lost my soulmate. We were married 11 months, looking forward to having a family. I had nothing to live for but his memory, so if they wanted to build over dead people, I determined they would have to build right over me.’

Grief had given her a cause: within weeks of Michael’s death, Monica launched September’s Mission, a non-profit organisation devoted to building a positive and meaningful legacy out of the events surrounding 9/11.

She met politicians, building consultants and the families of other victims and, 11 months after the tragedy, was one of 5,000 people who took part in Listening To The City, an innovative town meeting held in New York in which citizens from every walk of life came together to discuss how Lower Manhattan should be rebuilt and how those who died should be memorialised.

The extraordinary event, largely forgotten in the intervening years, has now become the subject of a compelling new film, 9/11: Reclaiming Ground Zero, which tells the story of an ambitious democratic experiment that has never been repeated since: thousands of ordinary people, still living amid the raw aftermath of the attacks, being given a voice in how their city should remember its dead and chart its future.

‘It was extraordinary,’ Monica recalls. ‘Everybody was calm and listening and I wonder why we can’t do this now. It feels like we need it more than ever.’

Yet if campaigning gave Monica’s days purpose and structure, it could not mend what was happening inside her. ‘I was a wreck,’ she says. ‘For years I was basically a functioning alcoholic.’

Then, in June 2004, she met the man who would change her life again. In a Manhattan bar, Monica got talking to Bob Murphy, a 6ft firefighter who had been off work on September 11 but been called to the site in time to see the collapse of Tower 7, a separate 47-storey building just north of the main complex. 

He lost his entire company that day. ‘We were mourning, but in different ways, and that helped,’ she says.

The pair started dating and, within months, Monica discovered she was pregnant. Her eldest daughter, Madison, now 21, arrived in the autumn of 2005 followed, in 2007, by their second daughter, 19-year-old Megan.

By then she and Bob had married, Monica’s wedding ring incorporating diamonds from the ring Michael had given her six years earlier. 

It was a new chapter, although from the start, Monica was clear that building a new family did not mean erasing Michael from her life.

‘Michael wasn’t a parent in this life but I was passionate about the fact he would be a parent in the life he was in now,’ she says.

‘I talked to him, asking him to watch them and take care of them and he has. He’s forever a part of me, they’re part of me, so he’s a part of them.’

It has not always been the easiest emotional landscape to navigate. ‘I don’t think many people could handle the fact that their wife is still in love with someone else who’s not even here,’ Monica says. ‘Bob has been as accepting as anyone could be but it’s not always been easy.’

She has also shared Michael’s story with her daughters, a process which has become ever more urgent as she gets older. ‘I have this panic about what happens if I’m not here – who’s going to carry the torch? So I’m always putting things in place to make sure the legacy of him stays alive,’ she says.

Next Friday, Monica will again visit the memorial at Ground Zero to commemorate her husband. ‘I’m there all the time,’ she says. ‘That’s my happy place. I feel close to Michael there.’

She tries not to dwell on the men who robbed Michael of his future and her of the life they had planned, although she cannot forgive the terrorists for the destruction and heartbreak they unleashed. 

Yet nor does she want the defining message of the 25 years since Michael’s death to be one of hatred.

Instead, she wants it to be one of hope. ‘I could have crawled into a hole and never come out, because it felt like my whole life was over,’ she says. ‘But I came out of that and made a difference.

‘And I hope that can inspire someone in despair that things can and do get better.’

• 9/11: Reclaiming Ground Zero is available now on some digital channels and on Amazon Prime from September 11