Prayer Cards Of 9/11 Leave Jon Stewart Stunned

WASHINGTON — When Jon Stewart and a group of 9/11 responders walked the halls of Congress this past week hoping to get commitments from senators to pass a permanent 9/11 bill, what they mostly got were business cards.

For Ray Pfeifer, a veteran of the New York City Fire Department with stage 4 cancer, those cards didn’t mean much. He threw them away. And he didn’t have them to show for a camera crew later when Stewart wanted to demonstrate what passes for commitment in Washington.

But Pfeifer had other cards that he pulled from his jacket on Thursday afternoon in the Hart Senate Office Building. He thought they better illustrated what commitment meant to the people who answered the call of duty on Sept. 11, 2001.

They were funeral prayer cards — laminated versions of the Mass cards that are often given out at Catholic services for the dead. 

“They’re called remembrance cards because they’re all faiths,” Pfeifer told HuffPost from his home Saturday as he rested up for what he hopes will be a final week pushing to pass a new 9/11 law. “Most of the time, you’d only get a prayer on it, but during 9/11, they put faces on it, too, because they wanted to remember.”

Pfeifer has about 50 of them. Most, he leaves in his uniform pocket as a sort of personal memorial to the hardest time in his life.

“I do carry one with me all the time, my friend, Mike Otten,” Pfeifer said. Pfeifer met Otten when he joined the same West Side Manhattan firehouse in 1987. Otten was last seen on video footage heading into the complex underneath the twin towers.

Pfeifer hadn’t been on duty that day, and got to ground zero after the towers fell. He remembers how Otten’s 11-year-old son asked him if they would ever find his dad, and how months on the pile searching for Otten and the others lost that day nearly destroyed Pfeifer. 

“I almost lost my family,” he said. “I never went home. I went to wakes, I went to the firehouse, and went back to dig. I never saw my kids, except when my wife brought them. She’s a saint.”

“I was a drunk. I’m not a drinker, but I was then,” he said. “It’s how I coped. Drink to go to sleep. Find somebody’s finger or skull, and try to bury it by drinking.”

He got through it, and he counts himself as lucky, despite his yearslong battle against cancer in his kidneys, bones and lymph nodes.

Like other 9/11 firefighters who survived — for now — Pfeifer is well-versed in gallows humor, and could chuckle when he said, “It’s like when I was a kid, I had a baseball card collection. Now I have this.”