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For victim's mother, a year of 'surviving'

By PAUL LEIGHTON

Staff writer

LYNN -- Marjorie Ditullio has been to Ground Zero once already. She's not anxious to go back again.

But as the mother of Don Ditullio, who died as a passenger on American Airlines Flight 11 along with his girlfriend, Janis Lasden, she feels an obligation to attend services for the Sept. 11 victims this week in New York City.

"I don't really want to go," Marjorie Ditullio said last week. "But you have to do something. That's not where they belong, but it's the last place they were."

Don Ditullio, 49, and Lasden, 46, were on the way to Palm Springs, Calif., for a vacation when their plane was hijacked and crashed into the World Trade Center. The couple had met several years earlier at a country-western dance.

Ditullio grew up in Lynn and worked as a quality control inspector. He loved to play ice hockey and ride his Harley-Davidson motorcycle, and shared his love of country-western dancing with Lasden.

Ditullio also served in the U.S. Army. At the funeral services for him and Lasden last year at Our Lady of Assumption Church in Lynnfield, two soldiers from Fort Drum presented the American flag to his mother as a bugler played taps.

Marjorie Ditullio, who lives in Lynn, turned 81 on Aug. 25. She said the last year has been one of "surviving." And as the one-year anniversary has approached, the sense of loss has somehow grown deeper.

"It hasn't gotten any easier," she said. "We're beginning to feel it more than we did then. We're still waiting for Don and Janis to come home. We keep waiting. When somebody dies, you bury them. With this, you don't really have that. So you more or less keep waiting."

Don Ditullio left two adult children, Jessica, 26, and James, 25, who both live in Fairfield, Vt. On July 30, Jessica gave birth to her second child, a girl named Abigail. Abigail's middle name is Dawn.

"For Don," Marjorie Ditullio said.