Couple’s wedding meant to be

Andrew Halpern and Faith Fisher, who will be married Saturday in Hampden, look forward to the day their children ask them how they met.

They’ll have an interesting story to tell, a story filled with what some people might call coincidence, others fate, and still others divine intervention. Regardless of what brought them together, the couple likes to think of their union as proof that good can be found in even the most tragic of circumstances.

Here’s their story of love among the ruins.

On the morning of Sept. 11, Fisher, a 31-year-old native of Knoxville, Tenn., was set to begin her first day of clinical practice in medical surgical care as a nursing student at New York University, in Manhattan. As she emerged from the subway, she stood in stunned silence as she heard that an airplane had been flown into the World Trade Center. Then another plane struck, and the twin towers collapsed, and NYU’s Tisch Hospital was plunged into chaos.

Waves of people, covered in soot and ash, began pouring into the hospital from Lower Manhattan. Many were in shock, and many feared the worst about their friends and loved ones who had been trapped in the towers when they fell. Fisher and her classmates immediately organized a blood drive in the lobby, and soon had so many potential donors that they had to tell people to come back the next day. Later, she and six other nursing students were sent to Chelsea Piers, where the first triage center was being hastily assembled.

“It was a M.A.S.H. unit, basically, with 56 critical-care tables stocked with supplies and drugs from around the city,” recalled Fisher. “Most of the medical professionals were gathered there, treating firefighters and police and other rescue workers.”

At about 11 p.m., her exhausting shift over, Fisher found a spot on the floor of a gymnasium that had been set up as a makeshift dormitory. Lying on a mat she shared with a doctor, a firefighter and a policeman, she tried to make sense of all that had happened that day. Because she had been too busy to hear any news reports, she wondered why she hadn’t seen the injured survivors. Could it be that everyone was dead?

Andrew Halpern, a 32-year-old Hampden native, had flown to New York the evening of Sept. 10. He was in his first year of residency, in psychiatry, at Colorado Health Sciences in Denver. He had a couple of days off and decided to visit his twin sister, Robin, on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. The next morning, instead of sightseeing, Halpern grabbed the scrubs he carried with him and went to ground zero to help. Like most of the medical personnel, he was assigned to a trauma team.

“I was down there by midafternoon,” said Halpern, who attended the College of Osteopathic Medicine in Biddeford. “We waited for the first round of survivors to show up, but there were none.,”

That night, he went to Chelsea Piers and found a mat on the floor among the sprawl of medical and rescue workers. Lying there, he tried to comprehend the depths of the devastation around him and to imagine what tomorrow would bring. Eventually he managed to doze off.

“When I woke up, I looked to my left and saw this pretty girl nearby, propped up on her elbow, smiling at me,” he said. “It was Faith, and I said hello.”

The couple felt immediately at ease with one another. They spent an hour or so talking about what they had been through that day, about the strangers they had met and the extraordinary pain and suffering caused by hatred and intolerance. When Fisher said she had to get some sleep, Halpern asked for her phone number. Fisher wasn’t sure that was wise, but she did write her e-mail address on a receipt from an ATM she had used earlier in the day. Halpern wondered if he would ever see this friendly young woman again.

The next day, Halpern walked back to his sister’s place uptown and then returned to Colorado. Fisher went to ground zero on a National Guard tank to help set up a triage center. The city looked to her like a wasteland, a hellish place where time had stopped. After a few more days of work at the site, she decided she needed a little normalcy again in her life. She had been training for her first New York City marathon, so she went for her first run in several days and thought about Halpern.

The two began exchanging e-mails regularly. A couple of weeks later, the nature of their correspondence started to become more personal. It was clear that both of them wanted to build on the connection they had made during their chance meeting in the gym that night.

By mid-October, the e-mails had turned to daily phone calls. And if either of them was still willing to dismiss the role that chance played in their initial meeting, the second coincidence proved too much to ignore. Fisher learned one day of an opening in a nursing program at Colorado Health Services, Halpern’s employer. During her interview in Denver, she met Halpern again and they began a long-distance courtship.

On Christmas Day, Halpern flew to Knoxville and surprised Fisher by asking her to marry him.

“A nurse colleague of mine grabbed me by the shoulders and told me that too much had come together to make this happen,” Fisher said, “and that I would be a fool to turn away from it.”

She didn’t, of course, which is why the couple will have an interesting story to tell their kids one day.

Fisher, who starts work in July as a pediatric oncology nurse at Children’s Hospital in Denver, prefers to think of their meeting on that tragic day as part of “God’s big plan.” Halpern, who doesn’t disregard the possibility of miracles, simply refers to their encounter as “completely amazing, in every way.”

And on Saturday, at the Halpern home in Hampden, the bride will present the groom with a ring inscribed with a brief sentiment that sums it up just fine: “Meant To Be.”

Tom Weber’s column appears Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday.