september
Posted: September 16, 2011 Filed under: Uncategorized 2 Comments »I usually write something on September 11th. Sometimes I get grouchy about the coverage and all the non-New Yorkers co-opting it. Sometimes I get maudlin and disturbed, thinking how close Wes was and how awful it would have been to lose him to the subway tunnels under the Towers. This year I just… froze. We were away on Sunday, at a B&B and then Storm King Art Center for Wes’ birthday. I felt quiet and separate. The B&B had the ceremony on, muted, as we ate breakfast. I felt almost angry to see it there, being lightly discussed by the old people. But then we were outside, in nice weather, surrounded by art. And it seemed to me that we really should spend every September 11th surrounded by acts of creation rather than destruction. I am sure someone else has thought this, written it. It sounds cliched. But I really felt it deeply this year.
Ten years is a long time. The year the Towers fell was the year I started going to Quaker Meeting, the five year anniversary of my mother’s death. I was engaged. My boss retired and I somehow became the person with the most seniority in my department even though I was also the youngest at 26. A few months after September 11th, I was made Chair because the one we had lived in Battery Park City and had too much to deal with at home. Our wedding planning seemed strange and frivolous, and we shrunk our flower budget, decided on no dancing, made fewer calls to the wedding planner. I cried every day. I had a crazy PTSD newspaper-hoarding reaction, buying papers I would never normally read and devouring them all. I could only think about the disaster. I couldn’t be alone with students for several days; unlike my co-workers who found solace in working, I looked at the tiny kiddos and just felt horror that the world they lived in was one where such a thing could happen. I headed to my therapist each week bawling, collapsing in her chair and delivering a litany of what I had absorbed, jumping at the sound of sirens. My time on the subway was spent imagining death scenarios, bombs. I had an asthma attack a few months later that I feel certain was related to air quality.
Wes still has to fill out the WTC Health survey each year. He was covered in ash.
It doesn’t feel far away, when I think about what it was like to live here that month. It does feel cosmically strange, though, when I look at my students, the oldest of whom are ten years old. They were born after, for the most part. Nearly all of the students I teach were not born yet. I can’t begin to conceptualize how to share any of it with them, let alone my own child. How hideous to ever have to try to explain.
I know I will start with this book:
image from amazon
Thank you for writing & posting. I had difficulty articulating and even formulating my thoughts about it this year. It feels strange to be so far away from New York for so many years, yet that particular day sits with me down to the tiniest details. I also get annoyed with non-New Yorkers expressing their grief about it, feeling like “but you have no IDEA. It did not happen to YOU.” Feeling so possessive about grief and sadness. I know this is petty, but whatever. For this reason I have completely avoided the media coverage. I always remember waiting and waiting – first in Asia’s apt. then I believe in yours, for all of you who were in Manhattan that day to be accounted for – how you trickled back one by one, you, Wes, Deirdre, Janet. What hell it was to not know where anyone was. Thankful that every one of you came home.
I sort of ignored the coverage and anniversary. It was all too scary when it happened, and I still can’t really face it in large amounts. It was my first year here, and I think if truth be told it still affects me daily. Like you I feel sort of protective, I guess, of the pain/terror that we NYers experienced, but then I think there are different levels of pain. I mean, if you lost a partner, you might think that those NYers who did not had no business “possessing” 9/11. It feels complicated and confusing, the grief around that day. My boys have begun asking about it. We were at the firefighter museum in Manhattan and unknowingly walked in a room about 9/11. They asked a lot of questions, but we did not get into the fact that a plane flown for the purpose of collision caused the “big fire.” That would be too awful to bring into their realm of possibility as 5 year olds.