Honoring The Memory Of Shelley Marshall
Mr. Speaker, I rise today to honor the memory of Shelley Marshall. Mrs. Marshall was a budget analyst for the Defense Intelligence Agency who was killed in the attack on the Pentagon. I rise to commend the efforts of her husband, Donn…
Mr. Speaker, I rise today to honor the memory of Shelley Marshall. Mrs. Marshall was a budget analyst for the Defense Intelligence Agency who was killed in the attack on the Pentagon.
I rise to commend the efforts of her husband, Donn Marshall, to honor her memory. Using his wife's retirement savings and money he expects to receive from the 9-11 Victims Compensation Fund, Donn established the Shelley A. Marshall Foundation. The foundation has held tea parties, one of Shelley's favorite pastimes, for senior citizens and high school students. The Marshall Foundation has also provided resources for story hours in libraries
and has held writing and art contests at high schools both in West Virginia and Virginia.
Through the foundation, Shelley Marshall will continue to touch the lives of people in need in West Virginia and around the country. I thank Donn Marshall and the couple's children, Drake and Chandler, for their commitment to helping others and for the worthwhile way they have preserved Shelley's memory.
The Washington Post wrote an article on January 22, 2004, about the Marshall Foundation, which I include for the Record.
[From the Washington Post, Jan. 22, 2004]
9/11 Money Funds a Dream
Man Plans Tribute to Wife Lost in Pentagon
(By Jacqueline L. Salmon)
Shepherdstown, W. Va.--In the tiny townhouse he rents
behind an office park, Donn Marshall unfurls an armful of
papers on the living room couch. They are plans for a house
to be built on land he has purchased nearby.
Modeled on an 18th-century Irish country house, it will
have bedrooms for Marshall's two children, Drake and
Chandler, and room for as many as six guests--everything that
Marshall and his wife, Shelley, ever dreamed of.
But it will go ahead without her. Shelly Marshall, a
Defense Intelligence Agency budget analyst, was among the 184
people who died Sept. 11, 2001, when terrorists flew an
airplane into the Pentagon.
``I think it should be almost like a monument,'' Marshall
said, as he smoothed wrinkles from the house plans. ``In a
sense, it's Shelley's money.''
The Marshall family expects to receive about $2 million
from the federal fund created to compensate the injured and
the families of the 2,976 people killed that day at the
Pentagon and the World Trade Center in New York. Although the
money will not take away the grief that has diminished only
slightly in 2\1/2\ years, Marshall said it will free him to
work full time on the charitable foundation he established in
his wife's name--his way of fighting back.
The fund, established by Congress to protect the airlines
from billion-dollar lawsuits, has reached the family of
almost every victim. Fund administrator Kenneth R. Feinberg,
a Washington lawyer, said that by last month's final
deadline, 2,924 families--98 percent--had surrendered their
right to sue the airlines in return for an average award of
just under $2 million.
But many who took the settlement wrestled with ``survivor's
guilt,'' said Larry Shaw, director of Northern Virginia
Family Service, whose counselors are working with many
families of Pentagon victims. ``They felt that they were
benefiting from the loss of someone they loved.''
Shaw said family service counselors tell families that the
settlement is part of their recovery process. ``And part of
the recovery is being able to fulfill some dreams that you
had in your life,'' he said.
Shelley Marshall was a woman of passionate and varied
interests. She put together family scrapbooks and hosted
Victorian-style tea parties with her mother-in-law, Phyllis
Marshall. She loved to spot hawks while out walking. Shortly
before her death, she had begun to collect kickknacks
decorated with dragonflies.
On Sept. 11, Shelly and Donn had commuted in separate cars
to the Pentagon from their then-home in Charles County, with
Donn carrying the children. Together, they said goodbye to
Drake and Chandler at the Pentagon day-care center. Then
Shelley headed to her office in the southwest wing of the
Pentagon, and Donn drove to his Crystal City office, where
he also worked for the Defense Intelligence Agency.
Moments after the plane buried itself in the Pentagon, Donn
drove back to the blazing structure to search frantically for
his family. The children were unharmed. He couldn't find
Shelley.
Three days later, he got the news that she was dead.
The words of a grief counselor who visited him resonated.
``Give your sorrow meaning,'' he urged Marshall. ``It was
like he flipped a switch,'' Marshall recalled.
With his wife's retirement savings, he set up the Shelley
A. Marshall Foundation. He has used the proceeds to organize
dozens of intergenerational tea parties for elderly nursing
home residents and high school students across the Washington
area, where Shelley grew up, and in West Virginia, where his
parents live.
He has also funded story hours at libraries in both places,
set up writing contests at high schools and arranged high
school art workshops to reflect the interests of his late
wife. In all, the foundation has spent about $60,000 on such
events and plans to expand nationwide as well as overseas,
where tea enthusiasts in Britain and Moscow are planning
offshoots.
``I didn't want [Osama] bind Laden to have the last word on
her life,'' Marshall, 39, said. ``She died far too young, and
I wanted her to be able to touch people.''
All together, he figures, more than 5,000 people have
participated in the foundation's activities.
``We can leave September 11 as a black day in history,''
Donn Marshall told guests at a fundraising tea party at the
Pentagon City Ritz-Carlton in November, on what would have
been Shelley's 40th birthday, ``Or we can look at it as a day
when something incredible started--and that's what we're
trying to do.''
The foundation work has drawn in family and friends.
Shelley's mother, Nancy Farr, makes hundreds of cucumber
sandwiches and shortbread for the nursing home parties. The
work, Farr said, ``is a blessing. Shelley will always be with
us in our hearts, but other people know her because of the
foundation.''
Sometimes the work fends off Marshall's loneliness.
Sometimes it doesn't. He believes that Shelley is still near.
The signs are everywhere. The way the heat in his home clicks
on when he asks her for a signal that she's present. A door
that blows shut to remind him to take the children's coats to
their school on a cold day. A dragonfly balloon from his
son's birthday party that drifts into the bedroom and stops
by his bed.
The signs comfort him--a little. ``I know she's okay and
that's huge,'' he said. ``Now I just have to deal with not
seeing her for a long time.''
Shelley used to make a pot of tea each night for Donn, and
he has taught himself to make tea the way she did. She had
collected dozens of different kinds from her favorite tea
shops--fragrant Oolongs, delicate ``white'' teas and black
teas such as light-bodied Darjeeling and full-flavored
Assams--and could recite their characteristics.
Last January, Marshall quit his job and moved his family to
West Virginia to be closer to his parents in Martinsburg and
Shelley's in Herndon. He said the compensation fund should
support his family and put the children through college
while he works full time on the foundation.
His next step is having their house built on 18 acres of
woods and meadow that he bought just outside Shepherdstown, a
cozy town of 1,500.
``I'm going to get people to come up for the weekend,'' he
said. ``We'll have two to three different people at the
dinner table, hopefully, on the weekends--my artist friends,
politicians. I want a lot of people coming in and interesting
the kids with their ideas--I think they should have an
extraordinary life after what happened to them.''
When Marshall came out to see the land for the first time,
he heard a scream above him and looked up to see a hawk. It
circled over his head.
``I said, `Okay, this is the place.'''