Marcy Borders was 28 years old when the entire world saw her face covered in white dust.
She was a legal assistant on the 81st floor of the North Tower of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. A stranger pulled her into a lobby just as the tower was collapsing behind her. Photographer Stan Honda took the picture at that exact moment, and that image —a woman frozen in terror, white from head to toe, with a vacant stare— spread around the world under a single name: the Dust Lady.
What no one photographed was what came next. Severe depression, post-traumatic stress, and a crack addiction that consumed her for nearly ten years, leaving her unable to work a single day. It was not until April 2011, a decade after the attack, that she managed to enter rehab.
In August 2014, doctors diagnosed her with stomach cancer. She and her family, from Bayonne, New Jersey, always believed that the dust that made her famous was the same dust that was killing her from within. She died on August 24, 2015, at the age of 42, leaving behind two children and more than 190.000 dollars in medical debt.