9-11 sorrow real for Lynn family

LYNN – Donald DiTullio used to walk into his mother’s Judge Road home, offer a quick compliment about her hair, and head for the refrigerator.”Every time I hear a motorcycle on the street, I expect him to breeze in,” said the mother of the 49-year-old Peabody resident killed aboard American Airlines Flight 11 after it was hijacked and flown into the World Trade Center.Today, on the seventh anniversary of the terror attack, Marjorie DiTullio will spend the day away from home with daughters Janice Fleming and Joanna Cook and visit Puritan Lawn Cemetery where a brick inscribed with her son’s name can be found not far from her husband, Americo’s, grave.”What is missing is there is no place to go to talk to him. He used to say, ‘I’m just a phone call away.’ This time, I don’t have his number,” DiTullio said.Donald DiTullio loved his girlfriend, Janis Lasden, country and western dancing, Harley-Davidsons, his children, Jessica and James, and rest of his tight-knit family.Lasden and DiTullio were flying to California on vacation seven years ago. They spent time with DiTullio and other relatives the night before the trip and Lasden promised Marjorie DiTullio she would finish a photo collage once she returned from the trip.DiTullio was watching television shortly before 9 a.m. on that flawlessly blue Tuesday morning when the image of smoke pouring from one of New York’s most famous buildings grabbed her attention.”I knew they had an early flight and I said, ‘They’re not going that way.’ Finally, I said, ‘That could be their plane.’ I tried to verify the flight number and found it was 11,” she said.Surrounded by relatives, DiTullio rushed to Logan Airport where a hastily assembled team of emergency response workers ushered a growing crowd of frantic people into a conference room in the Airport Hilton. Inside the room, questions far outweighed answers.DiTullio and her daughters still have questions. Sometimes they catch a glimpse of a tall man in a crowd and, for a split second, wonder if it is Donald. Sometimes they wonder if the national tragedy of Sept. 11 was so enormous that people would prefer to put it behind them.”You go from day to day and do what you have to do, but it is always with you,” said Donald DiTullio’s mother.