Kai Hernandez, who lost her husband Glenn Thompson in the Sept. 11, 2001, World Trade Center attacks, told Newsmax that the morning began "like any other."
"It was a beautiful, clear day, and Glenn took our little boy down to meet the school bus on his way to catch the subway to work," Hernandez said on "Wake Up America" on Wednesday.
Shortly after, she recalled, came the call that changed everything.
"I was getting ready for work myself when the phone rang," Hernandez said. "This was in the days before cellphones, so I ran from the bathroom where I was about to get into the shower to answer the phone. It was my husband, and he was calling to tell me that he loved me and to say goodbye with his last breath. The noise in the background of the phone call, it was like listening in to hell, and I was on the phone with him until he was gone."
In the aftermath of her loss, Hernandez said that she established the Glenn Thompson Memorial 9/11 Sponsorship in 2007 to help save lives and give "hope and closure in his memory."
"My husband's great love was the outdoors, and he loved to help," she said. "He was a firefighter before he was a bond trader with Cantor Fitzgerald, and he would always be the one who would organize a search party if a child was lost on the beach. So, in his memory, and also in honor of all of the canine and human rescue teams at ground zero who searched tirelessly, first for survivors and then for remains, I established an annual sponsorship on the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks."
"Every year, I sponsor at least one, and sometimes more, search-and-rescue dogs," Hernandez continued. "There have been, over the past 20 years, more than 30 search-and-rescue dogs sponsored across the entire United States."
Asked what her day will look like as the nation pauses to remember the attacks on Thursday, Hernandez said that she will "light a candle" and "listen to the names" of the victims being read before remembering her husband through his favorite things.
"Every year on the anniversary, I listen to the reading of all of the names of every single person who was killed that day in the most atrocious and lethal terrorist attack the world has ever seen," Hernandez said. "It was mass murder on live TV, and it was an attack on our country. It was not just my family personally who experienced the murder of a loved one, but America as a whole was attacked, and we owe it to each and every victim to listen to the names being read."
"After that, I go to Glenn's favorite beach, and I drink a Budweiser longneck in his memory because that was his drink," she added. "And the rest of the day, I spend outdoors as much as possible doing things that he would have loved and things that are uplifting because that's how he lived."
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Nicole Weatherholtz ✉
Nicole Weatherholtz, a Newsmax general assignment reporter covers news, politics, and culture. She is a National Newspaper Association award-winning journalist.
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