“She was the last person in the world who should have been there.” This is what Terry Rockefeller says of her younger sister, Laura, who was managing a conference about information technology on the 106th floor of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001.

Laura usually worked in theater but had not made it big and had to bring in money to pay her rent. That’s how she happened to be in the wrong place and the wrong time on that day of terror. It fell to Terry to tell their parents about Laura’s death, a task that still makes her voice choke and brings tears to her eyes.

In time, Terry came to understand that war is like that. It always traps  some innocent people and brings terrible harm to them. This realization helps motivate her work for peace as a memorial to Laura. She feels confident that her sister is happy knowing of Terry’s dedication to this cause.

Terry also feels supported by the extraordinary compassion she experienced in response to her sister’s death. She will never forget the wall near the World Trade Center, with pictures of the victims, and the hundreds of teddy bears from Oklahoma City lined up on the sidewalk. She also recalls taxi drivers taking her there and not charging anything for the ride.

This resident of Arlington, Massachusetts, the wife of an historian and mother of two children, does not stand alone in her peaceful response to the terrible violence of that day. She has joined with others in forming an organization called “September Eleventh Families for Peaceful Tomorrows.” The name comes from a statement of Martin Luther King, who said: “Wars are poor chisels for carving out peaceful tomorrows.”

This advocacy organization hopes to “spare additional families the suffering we have experienced – – as well as to break the cycle of violence and retaliation engendered by war.” Members feel that war is an inappropriate and ultimately ineffective response to the attacks that killed their family members.

It was this spirit that moved Terry Rockefeller to visit Iraq shortly before the recent war. Together with three other women, she stopped at schools, hospitals, and universities in both Baghdad and Basra. The women also talked to people in their homes.

Explaining her motivation further, Terry says: “We went there really to just make a very public gesture of citizens meeting with other civilians and trying to express our commonality and our concern for their well being.” Almost everywhere, they were greeted with food and they sang songs written one of the American women.

Some of the encounters they had were grim, however. The hardest place was a bomb shelter that had been hit by two missiles in 1991. The first made a large hole through the four-foot thick concrete roof. The second entered through the same hole and killed the women and children huddled there. Their skeletal remains are still embedded in the walls.

The surviving husbands were still furious. One of them said to Terry Rockefeller: “You lost a sister; I lost my wife, my mother, and all my children.”

The women were also taken to a family in Basra where the father had just been killed by a bomb. This man, Jamal, was a truck driver for an oil refinery. Admitted to the room where his widow was grieving, the American women shared condolences: “She wept for us; we wept for her,” recalls Terry.

After showing slides of her Iraqi visit, Terry Rockefeller shares what she calls her “big idea.” She and a divinity school alumnus named Andrew dream of meeting with family members of the airplane hijackers. They would like to ask the “hard questions” about the motivation of those men and explore with their relatives why those attacks took place.

Terry is a filmmaker with an impressive list of credits that include the public television science series NOVA and the civil rights history “Eyes on the Prize.” She aims to have the opportunity some day to record the meetings that she and Andrew imagine having with those related to the hijackers.

Whether or not that ever happens, Terry is determined to carry forward her quest for peace in alliance with others who suffered great losses. She wants not merely to oppose war, she says, but to build peace.

Richard Griffin