Dear Boston,
It’s all over but the shouting. One suspect is dead and
another captured. There’s a sense of closure, maybe even victory, and things
are returning to normal. Except for some of you, they're not. You just can’t seem
to shake a sense of unease, maybe depression, anxiety, or unusual bad mood. For
those of you who feel good, I share your joy. This is for the rest of you.
I’m a 9/11 survivor, so I get it. I lived 600 feet away from
the towers, watched Tower #2 fall towards me, and was in that dust cloud. I
couldn’t go home for many weeks and ten months later, while dining at an
outdoor café with friends, I dove under the table and started to cry when I
heard a thunderclap. This isn’t my story, except to say that I have some idea
what abject terror feels like.
It doesn’t really matter if you were running in the race,
watching from the sidewalk, a mile or two away or safe at home. Your city has
looked in the face of pure evil, of unspeakable, unfathomable and capricious
destruction, at the very moment of your greatest joy and triumph. You cannot
confront such a monstrous act and remain untouched.
If putting on a Freddie Krueger mask and leaping out of the
bushes could bring a city to its knees, terrorists would do it, but it’s lethal
force that’s effective. Terrorists seek to terrorize, as many people as
possible, and to reduce those people to as much of a fearful state as possible.
Bombs and guns and sometimes, planes, are their weapons of destruction, and
media coverage and body count their tools for spreading that fear. So terrorists
shoot up movie theaters and blow up government buildings and bomb public events,
and people are paralyzed with fear. That’s the goal. You can make yourself
crazy wondering about “motive” or “cause.” Don’t.
This didn’t happen to you, to your city, because the bombers
had a political agenda. Lots of people have political agendas, myself included.
It didn’t happen because they were of a particular religion. Most people think
that their religion is the true way. It didn’t even happen because people
wearing baseball caps are inherently scary. This happened, to you, to your
city, because these two brothers, like all mass murderers, were psychotic,
violent, inhuman fucktards.
Let me repeat myself: people who commit acts of terror are
not representative members of a religious, ethnic or social group. They
represent the groups of psychotic and evil.
Pain isn’t a contest, and there is no prize for the most
grief. In the future, people may ask you why you aren’t “over it.” Still others
may impose a hierarchy of grief; those who lost a loved one, a limb, were
there, or were not. Some will take the opportunity to tell you about genocide
or drone attacks or IEDs. You feel what you feel and don’t ever let anyone make
you feel guilty about it. Grief is always personal, and your own grief needs no
justification; witnessing wholesale and violent death is its own reason.
There’s enough pain to go around, and no need to fight over it.
The 2005 London bus bombings were followed with the “We’re not
afraid” campaign, and I thought it was off, way off. Fear is a normal reaction
to watching things and people blow up, to having your sense of security
shattered, both literally and figurative. You feel fear, unless your veins run
with ice water. Which is not normal. You experienced pure, unbridled terror, and what you do
with it is what’s important. What we did with it in New York, what you will do
with it in Boston, is to come through the other side.
You are all survivors, not victims, and it’s important to
remember that. When the time is right, tell your own story.
Bear witness to the day, to your own experience, but more importantly,
bear witness to life.
Tell your story on a blog or on Facebook. E-mail it to
friends and family. Organize an anthology or an oral round table. Or just print
it out and put it in an envelope. Look at it in a year or ten, or a week. But
tell it, because when you give words to your fear, you own it. Own it because
it’s part of who you are now. Own it because your feelings and experience are
unlike any other and because they’re now part of the story of you.
Keep moving forward, step-by-step, and I promise that it
does get better.
Wishing you all healing, in body and in spirit,
El
PS: My own story is below the fold, as it were. In case
anyone finds it useful to read.
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THE DAY THE TOWERS FELL:
the story of a 9/11 survivor
Betsy saw the second plane hit from her homeroom. Betsy is
my daughter and was 12 at the time. Her school was on West Street, at Chambers,
three blocks north of the World Trade Center. Her younger sister had a tummy
ache and was spending the day at the apartment of a friend, also home with the
same complaint. Their father wasn’t home that morning, but I was, alone, 600
feet from where the towers stood. This is my story.
There is no greater luxury, no more secure feeling, than
stealing a few extra minutes in bed, surrounded by sleeping cats. That’s what I
was doing when I heard the sound. Like thunder, only louder. I was confused
when I looked out the window because it was a gloriously sunny day. And then,
from the courtyard below, someone shouted: “Look up at the World Trade Center!”
So I looked.
And I saw cinders and fire, raining down from the sky, into
the tree-lined courtyard and debris falling on the flowers and walkways. And then
I saw the fiery hole in the side of one of the towers.
I pulled on clothes, put on a pot of coffee, and turned on
the radio; we didn’t have a television at the time, easier than too many rules
for the kids. The voice from the speaker said that a plane flew into the World
Trade Center, which didn’t seem right. I grabbed my coffee and went down to
talk to Angel, the doorman; doormen know everything.
And then the second plane hit.
At that moment, you, with your television, probably knew
more than I. What I did know was
that two planes, big ones, flying into the towers, could not be an accident. I knew
we were being attacked, and that it was happening in my front yard.
Europeans, who grew up during WWII, a generation or so
before my own, may have known what to do under the circumstances. I did not. I
went back to my apartment, grabbed my purse and a sweater, and called my
partner, who said he would come get me. And then I put my coffee cup on the
table, gave the cats some food, locked up and went downstairs. I did not turn
off the radio or shut down the computer, expecting to be back in a few hours, once
New York’s Bravest and New York’s Finest had things under control.
When I got back to the lobby, I saw that our courtyard was
suddenly filled with a procession of people. Black uniforms, white caps,
nametags; it seemed like the entire staff of the Marriot, located directly
between the two towers, was being evacuated into the courtyard. Chambermaids
and bus boys, waiters and waitresses, reception and reservation people were all
running through on their way to the esplanade along the river, all screaming
and crying. I had a sense of being trapped in a bad disaster movie and I wanted
my money back, then and there. Still do.
And I waited and watched. I watched for my partner to
arrive. I watched my neighbors, mostly looking more scared than I felt, leaving
the building with overnight bags, dogs, and small children. I watched people
desperately try to get a signal on their cell phones. I watched debris fall
down from the sky and smoke rise up. And I watched as people on fire plummeted
to their deaths from the high floors of the World Trade Center.
I waited and wondered if I couldn’t just go back to my sunny
apartment, then waited more on the esplanade, where Angel-the-doorman said we’d
be safer. It was a stunningly gorgeous day, warm, with bright sunshine and utterly
cloudless. From the esplanade, the apartments blocked the view of the burning
towers, and I couldn’t see what was happening, couldn’t imagine how anything
could go more wrong on such a perfect day.
And then people started running, south along the esplanade.
And someone said the sky was falling. Actually, they said that the towers were
falling, but that didn’t make sense, didn’t seem right. And the police came and
said that the sky was falling, that we had to go south.
All of the images that you’ve ever seen show the two towers
falling in a silent and stately manner. But it wasn’t like that. We heard a
sound, and in an instant, it became deafening; it felt like we were being crushed
by the noise. It wasn’t clear if another plane was landing right on top of us,
or bombs were being dropped, or if the apartment building we were standing next
was about to collapse. I suppose I was scared; my gut had turned to ice. In
retrospect, I wasn’t really frightened until later. In retrospect, I simply
couldn’t feel it until later.
So I went south with the crowd, and just past my apartment
building, in an area with open sky, I saw the towers falling in my general
direction, the sky falling, and then the world went blank.
Nothing could be seen from inside that debris cloud, except for
thick, blinding white. That cloud just kept raining down, without stop, for
what I now know was minutes but felt like hours. I wrapped my sweater around my
nose and mouth, grateful that I had it with me, thinking that I was breathing
concrete and marble and asbestos and dead people.
I kept going, south with the crowd, past the Holocaust
memorial, aware of the irony of cremated remains falling down on a place
honoring my dead, cremated relations.
Debris kept raining down as we stumbled blind, further south and into
Battery Park itself.
A man shuffled by, wearing pajama bottoms, flannel robe and
slippers, and I wondered if he had his wallet, if he would be able to get some
clothes. Everyone was covered in a layer of white dust, some more thickly than
others. I thought of Pompeii, of tables set for meals that no one would ever
eat and was glad that my coffee maker had an automatic shut-off.
The Marriot employees, the ones who had fled through the
courtyard, were huddled together in a thick knot. Their nametags told where
they were from: countries in Africa and Asia, members of the European Union,
people from Utah and Montana and Maryland, all no doubt eager for the prestigious
New York placement, all having traveled far to be a part of history.
At Castle Clinton, the fort that protected the New York
harbor since its earliest days, I stopped and I leaned up against the wall; the
fort had stood for centuries, would probably protect me for a little while
longer. That’s when I saw one of my friends from the building and when we both
saw the Staten Island Ferry; we later found out that it was the last ferry to
leave Manhattan that day.
We got on that ferry and went to Staten Island. Later, I was
able to get to Brooklyn, where I was reunited with my family, and after a few
more days, we were able to go home for long enough to pack one suitcase per person,
and to rescue the cats. It was months before we got to go home and live. When we
got home, we found a place with no subway within a mile, no supermarket, a weird
grey mud covering all the streets, and a National Guard checkpoint to enter the
neighborhood. The neighborhood bar, liquor store and dry cleaner were all doing
a booming business.
My city was hurt and three of the four members of my family
were within blocks of the falling towers, close enough to see it all happen. It’s
taken a long time to heal, longer for some of us than others. But we’re OK.
None of us were hurt, and we were fortunate enough to be helped by friends,
sometimes by strangers, along the way.
We’ve all come through it to the other side.
Here’s the thing: my family and I are survivors, not
victims. And so is my beautiful city, filled with people who are and always
have been generous, proud and brave.
