Retired Brazilian gardener Thiago Miranda and his son died inside the World Trade Center in Manhattan during the September 11 terrorist attacks.
The 70-year-old landscape business owner, whose full name was Thiago Joseph Miranda de Melo, had traveled from Queens to Lower Manhattan early that morning after his son, also named Thiago, invited him to breakfast inside one of the 110-story Twin Towers.
The younger Thiago was an engineering student in New York City who worked at a cafeteria in the complex to help fund his university education. Both father and son were trapped inside the building when hijacked commercial airliners struck the World Trade Center towers on the morning of September 11, 2001.
A gift left in Oregon
The full story of their fate reached former client Eduardo González Viaña, a Peruvian author and university professor residing in Salem, Oregon, several days after the attacks. Three days prior to September 11, González Viaña had discovered a bright, professional-grade motorized lawnmower sitting inexplicably in his residential garden in Salem, the capital city of Oregon.
González Viaña contacted his neighbors across the residential neighborhood, but none claimed ownership of the commercial equipment. He initially suspected the machine was part of an aggressive marketing strategy by a local vendor who would soon visit to offer a monthly payment agreement.
The mystery was resolved days later when Thiago Miranda's daughter, María Elena, called from Oregon, where she practiced medicine. She explained that the lawnmower was a personal parting gift from her father. Upon retiring from his gardening business in August 2001, Miranda had sold off his commercial equipment but reserved select tools to present to his most valued clients.
María Elena had intended to explain the present to González Viaña after returning from her trip to New York. However, her father and brother never returned from Manhattan.
Life and sayings of Thiago Miranda
Thiago Joseph Miranda de Melo was a poor and largely illiterate immigrant from Brazil who had built a successful lawn care company through years of manual labor. González Viaña, who had grown close to the gardener in Salem, affectionately called him Pepe or Pepe Carioca, referencing the classic Disney animated character and the warmth of his Brazilian acquaintances.
The two men shared a deep mutual respect. González Viaña had previously written an academic recommendation letter that helped the younger Thiago secure admission to an engineering program at a university in New York. Despite owning his own enterprise, the elder Miranda frequently insisted that González Viaña ought to mow his own lawn.
Known among his clients for offering philosophical observations, Miranda routinely drew wisdom from what he called the university of life and the garden. He often remarked that winter arrives quickly for lazy gardeners, that trust is a slow-growing plant, that other people's apples are the sweetest, that faith makes people sow rather than sight, and that leaves arrive before the storm, but the storm takes the leaves.
Upon turning 70 in August 2001, Miranda retired to begin what he described as his first real vacation, noting that plants do not take holidays. His retirement plan involved dividing each year among his three children: visiting his daughter Karina, an immigration attorney in Miami, Florida; spending time with his son Thiago in New York City; and staying with his daughter María Elena in Oregon.
The journey to New York was one of the few times Miranda had ever traveled by air. He had boarded an airplane only three or four times in his life, explaining to friends that trees do not move and leaves do not travel on airplanes.
Communications collapse in New York
On the morning of September 11, 2001, telecommunications across New York City collapsed as emergency responders and residents attempted to reach loved ones following the strikes on the World Trade Center. From his home in Salem, Oregon, González Viaña attempted to reach his friend, author Isaac Goldemberg, but found the phone line dead. He was similarly unable to locate his own children, Eduardo and Anabelí, who were studying at universities in New York City at the time.
González Viaña recalled the tragedy after listening to Michael Jackson's charity single What More Can I Give and reading Austrian author Stefan Zweig's 1942 memoir The World of Yesterday, stopping at a line noting that the world was ending. The sentence recalled the morning of September 11, 2001, when news reached Oregon that the world had begun to collapse in the opening year of the millennium.
González Viaña concluded that Thiago Miranda and his son became memories and leaves floating through the universe, destined to return only when death is defeated and spring arrives once more.
