New York -- Many remember the haunting photograph: A woman wearing business attire and pearls is covered head-to-toe in white dust, her hands held out helplessly before her, as she makes her way out of the World Trade Center's damaged North Tower on September 11, 2001.Marcy Borders survived that day, getting out before both towers of the trade center crumbled and killed 2,753 people in the deadliest terror attack on U.S. soil. But the woman in the photos, known to most as the "Dust Lady," died Tuesday, her family said. She was 42.
"My mom fought enemies in battle and I just loved her so much," Borders said in a phone interview. "She will always live through me."
Family members mourned the mother of two on Facebook.
Borders was 28, working as a legal assistant at Bank of America in the North Tower of the World Trade Center, when planes hijacked by terrorists struck. Freelance photographer Stan Honda took the famous photograph as Borders escaped the collapsing building through a cloud of dust.
"It wasn't like it was one of the best images you would want to view out in the world," she told CNN in an interview six months after the attacks. "Just looking at it just shows how much fear."
Borders battled depression and drug addiction following the attacks, the Jersey Journal reported, but she checked into rehab in 2011 and found sobriety. She had recently found work again as well -- on a local political campaign in her native New Jersey -- when she was diagnosed with cancer, according to the paper.