America Stands Tall Back to home page

Doctor's wife, alone now, finds new meaning in reaching out

By JULIE KIRKWOOD

Staff writer

MARBLEHEAD -- When the commotion of funerals, arrangements and media calls after Sept. 11 stopped, the silence in Kimberly Trudel's house was overwhelming.

She had never realized, before her husband's death, how he had filled their Marblehead house, even when he was in a different room.

Dr. Frederick Rimmele, a family doctor at the Hunt Center in Danvers, was about 6 feet tall and 210 pounds. He was a witty guy, who could skewer someone with a well-timed remark, but also a kind man, who made his coworkers smile by sticking happy messages to their desks.

He died in the second airplane to hit the World Trade Center on Sept. 11.

"My husband had significant presence when he walked into the room," Kimberly says. "When he was there, you knew it."

Without him, there was silence.

There was also a closet full of his clothes, his camera bag, his books, and then his office at the Hunt Center filled with medical books and journals.

Some of those things Kimberly still hasn't moved, a year after Fred's death. Others, like the medical books, have taken Kimberly on a journey that has led her to change her career, to start a campaign to help the people of Afghanistan, and to ultimately find some meaning in her husband's death.

It began the day Kimberly stepped into her husband's office to clean out his things. She approached it pragmatically, intending to throw away a lot of the materials that didn't have sentimental value.

Yet as she leafed through the medical books and journals she realized they were too valuable to throw away. Certainly somebody could use them, she thought.

A link to Kabul

She went home and searched the Internet for a charity that might take them. A group that builds schools in Central Asia responded to her e-mail, which led to telephone calls, which led to a visit to their office in Montana.

"I explained I have these textbooks," Kimberly says. "I asked if they would bring them to the medical school in Kabul."

Of all the places in the world, Kimberly chose Afghanistan -- the country that provided training camps for Al-Qaida and the terrorists who murdered her husband.

Kimberly had been following the news, particularly the stories about repression under Taliban rule in Afghanistan and the poverty that caused people to join militant groups to support their families.

The way to fight her husband's murderers, she decided, was to fight ignorance and poverty in Afghanistan.

"Through education we promote understanding, we promote tolerance," she says. "I might be able to broaden someone's perspective, perhaps be able to provide a bit of enlightenment."

Some medical schools are so focused on women's modesty that they forbid doctors to learn obstetrics and gynecology, Kimberly learned. Women's health was suffering because of it. Maybe, she hoped, sending American textbooks to the Kabul University Medical School would help women.

Some of Fred's colleagues joined Kimberly in sending medical books to Afghanistan. In total she sent 10 boxes of books. "That has been very gratifying for me," she says.

Changing her life

The experience crystallized her vision of what she needed to do to find meaning in her husband's death.

She made the formal decision to leave her job as a vice president of software in northern Virginia and devote her life to promoting economic development, education and women's rights in the developing world.

The choice was not easy.

Kimberly had returned to work in November, but it didn't excite her the way it had before. It was a job that demanded 50 or 60 hours a week, constant travel in the United States and abroad -- including her commute to headquarters in Virginia via Logan Airport -- and an attitude that she must always be striving to make the company grow.

By February she knew it wasn't working. She couldn't muster the energy to return to her fast-paced dot.com lifestyle, and her colleagues noticed.

"I realized it would be nearly impossible to rebuild my life working full time," she says.

She called it a leave of absence, but she knew in her heart, she says, that it would be permanent. Something was agitating her, a feeling that her life needed to change, she says.

Her husband's death had awakened her to poverty and cruelty in the world. She felt she needed to pay tribute to the kindness and strength of her husband's soul, and to become a different person for having known him.

"I think it would be a travesty if my husband were killed and if I were not to change and become a better person because of it," Kimberly says.

A mission to Africa

She found a vehicle for that change in Fred's medical books. Kimberly got so involved in the medical book donation that she tried to arrange a trip to Afghanistan. The charity group delivered the books as a way of introducing Kimberly in Kabul, and she was scheduled to follow in person. The political climate in Afghanistan is too unstable, however, so the trip was postponed.

Yet Kimberly didn't want to wait to start making a difference in the world. She found an organization sending volunteers around the world, and when they offered her a trip to Ghana in western Africa, she took it.

She left late last month on the trip, not knowing what her volunteer task would be. All she knew was she needed to get a list of vaccinations and a wardrobe of cotton skirts, because women in Ghana don't wear pants or shorts.

Now that Kimberly has found a new direction, she doesn't intend to turn back. When she returns from Africa, she plans to look for full-time work in the nonprofit sector, and maybe even go back to college for public policy or nonprofit fund raising.

Young and in love

She still asks herself why Fred died, and why it had happened at that moment.

Their lives had been so wonderful. The couple, both in their 30s, had been married four years and were so deeply in love that their friends and coworkers teased them about it. That year they had started trying to have a baby.

They were feeling great about their careers, too, Kimberly says. Fred was making plans with some of his colleagues to spin off a medical practice, which his colleagues did in his honor this year after his death.

This is not Kimberly's first brush with tragedy, and she understands resiliency. Her father died at age 40 when she was 8 years old.

One of the hardest things to deal with, she says, is the way the terrorist attacks took away her sense of control.

"While we can plan things like birthday celebrations and vacations and anniversary events," she says, "in the big scheme of things there is a lot that is really out of my control."

What she wasn't expecting -- and has helped her tremendously -- was the kindness of friends and strangers in the community.

A woman from Salem, a stranger, wrote her a letter to say that she, too, lost her husband when they were young and in love. She is in her 60s now, she told Kimberly, and can assure her that life does get better.

"Many of the people who have come into my life since my husband's death have helped to weave this wonderful tapestry," Kimberly says. "They have really helped me to define my life and to help my life take shape."

Now she faces a future she never could have imagined a year ago. On the anniversary of Sept. 11, she has decided to move away from the crippling grief of the past year and embark upon a new chapter in her life.

"I do want to try to make meaning out of my husband's death," she says, "and to do something that makes me a better person."