For five years after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, Myrta Gschaar was, in her words, a mess.

She couldn’t have a conversation without crying. She couldn’t sleep. She was plagued by anxiety attacks. She was physically ill.

Meet Mrs. Gschaar — a native New Yorker transplanted to Maumee — today, and she will lay her cards on the table without a tear. She has a script in her head, and she doesn’t stray from it:

“Hi. I’m Myrta Gschaar. I am the widow of Robert Gschaar, and yes he went to work on Tuesday. It was a beautiful day. He was on the 92nd floor, and he worked in Tower 2. We spoke briefly, and Tower 2 collapsed.”

“See?” she says proudly. “I got rid of all the questions so everybody already knows what happened, and now I can talk about the love I have and my great memories of him without having to go through all that bad stuff.”

Not only can Mrs. Gschaar, 62, talk about the killing of her husband and nearly 3,000 others in the 2001 attacks, she has another surprise up her sleeve.

The woman who once was consumed by anger and hatred and why me’s has made peace with the terrorists.

SPECIAL SECTION:9/11: America looks back, forges ahead

“I was in an international prayer group one day in New York, and we were praying for America,” she recalled. “There were hundreds of people, and right there and then I realized that the only way I was going to continue with my life was to forgive the people — just like when Jesus was dying on the cross, and he said, ‘Forgive them Father, for they do not know what they are doing.’

“I forgave them, and I pray for them every single day, and ever since then I was able to move on with my life because I don’t carry that hatred, that burden,” she said. “There was a burden. I gave it up.”

A 9/11 widow she will always be, but Mrs. Gschaar is transformed by an act of mass murder that is still affecting the nation 10 years later:

The ensuing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the illness that has plagued those who breathed the toxins around the crumbled World Trade Center, the children and spouses and parents and friends who lost loved ones in the attacks.

Her husband of 12 years was the “only” victim of the attacks she lost that day, she points out. No friends, no children.

“I sat with a woman in a bus on my way to Ground Zero one year and she lost her husband and two adult children, so how do we compare our loss? You can’t,” she said. “There isn’t a scale in the world to even compare that loss. So I don’t sit around feeling sorry for myself. What I do is I mourn everyone.”

Her journey of healing has been a long and complex one — a journey that began, as so many do, with a love story.

A happy couple

A divorced mother of four daughters, she met Mr. Gschaar at a holiday party of insurance company employees in 1986. She worked for an insurance broker; he worked for an insurance company. They clicked.

A week or so later, he invited her to have coffee after work. It lasted until 11 p.m. They were married Oct. 4, 1989.

“We got along very well,” she said. “He was intellectual. I love intellectual people.”

Mr. Gschaar was a student of American history and war strategy — topics the couple frequently discussed.

Just two days before his death, they were out to dinner. Mr. Gschaar, who had started a new job with Aon Corp. in the World Trade Center on Aug. 1, told his wife he wasn’t very comfortable working in that building, knowing it was a prime target of terrorists.

Mrs. Gschaar said the conversation did not alarm her. It was the kind of thing they talked about.

“Because Rob was so in tune to the historical part of our world, he was right on the money,” she said.

“It only made me more proud of him to know that everything he taught me throughout the years that I knew him was all factual and to take to heart,” she said. “He was all about the facts, and when he called me [on Sept. 11] he knew, he didn’t tell me, but he knew that it was a terrorist attack.”

A tragic day

On that sunny Tuesday morning, her husband made his usual 90-minute commute from their home in Spring Valley, N.Y., to Manhattan. She went to her office in Nyack, where a co-worker asked if she’d heard what happened at the trade center. She hadn’t.

She was able to speak briefly by phone with her husband. A plane had hit the north tower. People were jumping out windows. It was bad, he said. He would call her later. He never did.

Survivors of Aon Corp. say Mr. Gschaar, although new in the office, was helping guide people to the stairwells, returning several times to keep people moving. He was last seen somewhere between the 40th and 50th floors when the tower collapsed. He was 55.

In Toledo, Mrs. Gschaar’s oldest daughter, Mayra Leitner, loaded up her family and drove to New York to be with her mother. “She was almost gone herself,” Mrs. Leitner recalled. “There was nothing. There was no talking for a very long time. She was just kind of bed-bound.”

Mrs. Leitner, now 44, and other family members did all the things that needed to be done — from retrieving Mr. Gschaar’s car from the park-and-ride lot to collecting whiskers from his razor to provide as a DNA sample. For two months, they called hospitals in desperation.

Like many loved ones of the victims, Mrs. Leitner said they feared Mr. Gschaar was injured with memory loss. They pictured him wandering the streets aimlessly. Because police never knocked on the door to say, “We’re sorry. Robert Gschaar was killed in the World Trade Center,” they continued to hope.

She stayed with her mother for two months, finally leaving to tend to her own children back in Toledo.

“When my sister and I finally went home, she was standing there with a friend. We had dropped her off with a friend,” Mrs. Leitner said. “We just cried because we knew she was not ready to be left alone.”

A search for solace

For her part, Mrs. Gschaar laments the five years she spent filled with anger, hatred, and distrust. Therapy helped her to heal. God did too.

A Roman Catholic by birth, Mrs. Gschaar said she continued attending Sunday Mass after her husband was killed, but it didn’t fill the void she felt in her heart. For months, she church-hopped in Nyack, searching for one that would.

When her daughters told her about the nondenominational church they had found in Toledo, she was curious but cautious.

“I came here a few times visiting and before I knew it. I found that love that I saw in them, that light, and I wanted it too,” Mrs. Gschaar said. “Here I am, now, 10 years later. I have never been happier.”

While still living in New York, she found a calling in working with the deaf. She studied American sign language, and, after retiring from her job in 2007, she moved to Maumee and resumed sign-language classes at Owens Community College. There, an instructor told her about Good Shepherd of the Deaf Lutheran Church in Toledo.

“My idea was to come here, have the support of my family, and find a church to interpret at and work with the deaf,” she said. “Little did I know that there was a deaf church here. Now tell me God didn’t send me over here.”

Mrs. Gschaar is now an active member of Good Shepherd, where she helped start a deaf choir.

“It’s a small church with a big, big, big heart,” she said.

A transformation

Her daughter doesn’t hesitate when asked how her mother was able to recover from such a tremendous loss.

“I think the biggest thing was the Lord,” Mrs. Leitner said. “If you don’t have that, you just keep building so much hate, which causes you to relive it everyday rather than being able to release it and let it go.”

Her mother, she said, has made a “phenomenal” transformation, helped too by the phone call that finally did come nearly five years after the terrorist attacks.

“It was always like she was waiting for him to come home,” Mrs. Leitner said. “When she let everything go and she just forgave, she just broke free. She became a completely different person. I think that’s the amazing part.”

Mrs. Gschaar, who is in New York this weekend for the 10th anniversary, has donated her husband’s wallet to the National September 11 Memorial and Museum at the World Trade Center.

His wallet was the first bit of tangible evidence that Mr. Gschaar truly was gone.

About six months after police contacted her about his wallet, the medical examiner called her to say her husband’s partial remains had been positively identified.

On Sept. 9, 2006 — two days before the fifth anniversary of the attacks — Robert Joseph Gschaar was buried in Oak Hill Cemetery in his wife’s hometown of Nyack.

His tombstone is simple but powerful. It has a picture of Myrta and Robert — she will be buried there one day — an etching of the twin towers, the date of their marriage over wedding bands, his name, birth date, that telling date of death, and a verse from Luke: “Jesus said, Father forgive them for they do not know what they are doing.”

Contact Jennifer Feehan at: jfeehan@theblade.com or 419-724-6129.

COVERAGE:

Sept. 11, 2001: America looks back, forges ahead

Timeline: What transpired 10 years ago

Their Names: 2,977 victims killed in terror attacks

WORLD TRADE CENTER:

Signs of a city remade emerge at Ground Zero

Woman reflects on close call

Toledo firefighters joined NYC recovery efforts

9/11 memorials springing up in area

Questions abound on health problems from WTC dust

Lower Manhattan rises from the ashes

PENTAGON:

Pentagon site offers lessons for the living

Servicemen, families come to grips with tragedy of war

FLIGHT 93: SHANKSVILLE, PA.

Man recalls recover effort amid trees

Oral histories collected from Shanksville site

Witness, trooper, coroner look back on tragedy

New national memorial honors victims

REFLECTIONS:

Share your 9/11 story: Where were you when you heard?

Local F-16 pilot recounts orders to shoot down planes

9/11 inspires woman to become funeral director

At 13, attacks delivered jolt of lasting reality

Local artists carry emotional scars of 9/11

Pat Tillman's legacy lives on in those whose lives he touched

Day lives on in movies, music, even comedy

Schedule of media coverage this week

SOCIETY 10 YEARS LATER:

Attacks define Bush presidency, keep influencing Obama's

Painful, public role of being victim's family member

Some businesses still feel effects of 9/11 attacks

Acts of terror altered sports landscape

Teachers find 9/11 lessons still evolving

Sense of fear lingers in Oklahoma City

SECURITY:

U.S. safer but not safe enough

Americans adapt to tighter security

Post-9/11 terror laws net 35,000 worldwide

'Lone wolf' seen as biggest threat

Powerful NYC police commissioner reinvented

Why didn't al-Qaeda strike again?

RELIGION:

Interfaith prayer service held in Toledo to remember victims

Followers of Islam subjected to unfair treatment

Area Muslims strive to counter 'Islamophobia'

Lack of clergy-led prayer at event decried

What has become of hijackers' remains?

First Published September 11, 2011, 4:00 a.m.