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Article snippet: A daughter obsessively imagines the final moments of her father’s life five years later. Was he afraid? What was his last thought as the waters of New York rose around him and his wife? A granddaughter likes to picture that they died holding hands. She knows it didn’t happen that way. Other families nearby dealt with loss in other ways. A New York City sanitation worker cannot bring himself to return to the block on Staten Island where his mother lived for decades, and died there in the same storm: Hurricane Sandy. “I can’t even go down that street,” said the worker, Vincent Spagnuolo. “I pick up garbage for a living. One time, they gave me that street. I said, ‘I’ll meet you on the next block.’” The fifth anniversary of New York City’s deadliest hurricane in modern history arrives with the families of victims still struggling to find their way in the new terrain created that day, one with blank spaces where houses once stood and lives once lived. More than half of the 43 people killed in New York City were on Staten Island, and of those 24 victims, many died in or near the same neighborhood, Midland Beach, a quiet grid of bungalows swallowed by what survivors described as a tidal wave. The victims were young and old, grandparents and young fathers and, in one case, little boys not yet in school. The water rushed into homes, knocking down walls and pulling parents outside to drown. Others were electrocuted when live wires met the water in which they stood. Elsewh... Link to the full article to read more