Lauren Catuzzi Grandcolas was 38 years old and three months pregnant with her first child when she boarded United Airlines Flight 93 home to the Bay Area after attending her grandmother's funeral. She never made it back. On September 11, 2001, all 40 passengers and crew aboard the flight were killed after hijackers took control of the plane and it crashed into a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, the only one of the four hijacked planes that day that did not reach its intended target.
Twenty-five years later, as marked in a Houston Chronicle feature by reporter R.A. Schuetz, the Houston native's memory is carried forward through a foundation, a public garden, and a nurse practitioner named Kathleen Mechler Foley who once received a Grandcolas Scholar scholarship in her name. Grandcolas grew up in Houston before building a career in marketing and advertising, and the paper's reporting traces how her death set in motion decades of maternal healthcare funding and educational support that continue today.
Before the hijackers stormed the cockpit, Grandcolas and her fellow passengers gathered what information they could. Passengers and crew aboard Flight 93 made 37 separate phone calls between the takeover and the plane's 10:03 a.m. crash, according to the National Park Service, feeding vital intelligence about the hijackings to officials on the ground and to loved ones. Grandcolas left a 46-second voicemail for her husband, Jack, then passed her Airfone to 27-year-old fellow passenger Elizabeth Wainio so she could also reach her family before the end. The passengers and crew ultimately held a vote on whether to rush the cockpit, and did so in a final attempt to thwart the hijacking, per the Chronicle's reporting.
A Book Finished By the Women Who Loved Her
Three weeks before September 11, Grandcolas had stepped away from her marketing job to write a book she called “You Can Do It!: The Merit Badge Handbook for Grown-Up Girls,” aimed at encouraging women to pursue their own ambitions. She had completed only the first chapter, titled “Dare to Dream: The First Step,” at the time of her death, according to the Chronicle. Her sisters, Vaughn Catuzzi Lohec and Dara Catuzzi Near, worked with writer Yvette Bozzini to finish the manuscript, and publisher Chronicle Books released it on April 10, 2005, according to Wikipedia. The book went on to sell more than 100,000 copies, though it is now out of print, per the Houston Chronicle's reporting.
Her brother, Larry Catuzzi, described her to the paper as a real doer with an anxiousness to help people — a description echoed in the arc of the foundation established in her name. The Lauren Catuzzi Grandcolas Foundation later awarded more than 100 college scholarships, one of which went to Kathleen Mechler Foley, who went on to work as a women's health nurse practitioner in Houston for 13 years and eventually became a women's health nurse practitioner herself, according to the Chronicle's account. In San Francisco, another scholarship recipient, Claudia Frere-Anderson, worked at VolunteerMatch, an online database of volunteer opportunities, and told the paper the experience taught her not to put things off and to align her career with her deepest goals; she later became a mentor after tutoring a student.
Funding Maternal Care in Houston
The foundation's philanthropic focus on mothers and newborns became one of its most enduring legacies. Foundation funds helped develop the Texas Children's Pavilion for Women, and the foundation's contributions have supported the hospital's neonatal intensive care unit and the pavilion's operations for more than 20 years, per the Chronicle's reporting. The $575 million, 15-story pavilion in Houston's Texas Medical Center officially opened its labor and delivery services on March 26, 2012, delivering its first baby that same morning, according to a release from Texas Children's Hospital.
The pavilion allows women to give birth and receive postpartum care in the same building where their newborns are treated, and it provides meals, milestone beads, books, and mental-health resources for mothers, according to the Chronicle. Some babies at Texas Children's stay for weeks, months, or more than a year, the paper reports. Dr. Kristina Reber, chief of neonatology at Texas Children's Hospital, told the Chronicle the pavilion has been life-changing for mothers navigating challenging pregnancies and babies requiring intensive care. Before the Houston hospital became the foundation's focus, it had funded a state-of-the-art birthing room at Marin General Hospital in Greenbrae, California, near where Grandcolas and her husband lived at the time of the attacks, according to The Alcalde.
A Garden in Market Square Park
In downtown Houston, the foundation gave Lauren's Garden to the city, a memorial in historic Market Square Park honoring Grandcolas and everyone lost in the September 11 attacks. The garden includes a fountain, a bust of Grandcolas, and monuments to the three crash sites in New York, Washington, D.C., and Pennsylvania, per the Chronicle's reporting. Its fountain holds 3,000 pebbles representing all the attacks' victims, alongside three granite walls symbolizing the crash sites, according to Traveling with Sweeney. An inscription in the garden dedicates the space to those lost in the attacks and features Mary Oliver's poem “The Summer Day,” the Chronicle notes.
Lauren's Garden was dedicated on September 11, 2010, with former U.S. Secretary of State James A. Baker III in attendance at the ceremony, according to the paper's reporting. Six years later, on the same date in 2016, U.S. Representative Sheila Jackson Lee presented an American flag to Grandcolas's mother, Barbara Catuzzi, in Houston. The Chronicle's reporting also notes that 343 firefighters died during the September 11 attacks, underscoring the scale of loss the garden was built to commemorate.
At the Flight 93 National Memorial in Shanksville, Grandcolas is remembered among the 40 marble slabs on the Wall of Names with an inscription reading “Lauren Catuzzi Grandcolas and unborn child,” according to the National Park Service. Her husband later co-authored a 2022 memoir, “Like a River to the Sea: Heartbreak and Hope in the Wake of United 93,” chronicling his own decades-long journey through grief and healing. The Lauren Catuzzi Grandcolas Foundation ended its work this year, the Houston Chronicle reports, closing a chapter that spent a quarter century turning one woman's unfinished ambitions into scholarships, a hospital wing, and a garden where strangers still stop to read her name.
