Grieving in Solitude
9/11 is something that I experienced very much alone and have kept very much to myself. Two decades later, I still don’t talk about it much and when I do, I share little. I don’t know why. Maybe it’s because I was so alone when it happened and because my grief was deep, but it was also relative—it’s something I understood from the moment I watched from my living room window as a plane banked hard to the left, swooped around, and vanished into the second tower. I watched everything unfold – not on the tv, but standing alone in my apartment – listening to commentators on the news getting it wrong as I saw for myself what was happening. I thought about, but could not bring myself to, lift my camera with its telephoto lens to documents what I witnessed.
Over the next few minutes, I frantically called everyone I knew who worked in the vicinity of the World Trade Center to make sure they were okay or to tell them to stay home. Whoever I didn’t reach within the next ten minutes, I would not know for days if they had survived. And then the phone lines were completely overwhelmed, and you couldn’t reach anyone. And I was alone again. There was no getting in or out of the city. I was alone for days.
And that was how I spent the next few days. Mostly alone, trying to find out who was dead and who was alive. Every day, the Daily News would release a supplement with pictures of fallen first responders. Very quickly, I learned of the loss of Chief John Moran, my law school classmate – a big, funny guy who was in the Fordham Follies with me. It took a lot longer to find out that my friend Sergio had been lost—he appeared many days later in a supplement. He was the first cop I had a case with in the Bronx and he had just recently joined the fire department when his call came.
Over the next several months, I mourned, mostly alone. Having left the DA’s office several months earlier, I didn’t have my fellow ADAs to seek comfort from as they, too, mourned and waited. I was working in Westchester where yes, people were also shocked, but not in the same way. Not in the same way those of us in law enforcement were. Not in the same way those of us from Manhattan were. Westchester felt like it was a million miles away from My Manhattan. My home.
Everyone who worked in law enforcement in New York, as I had done, knew people who died on 9/11. By extension, we knew people who lost friends, family, fiancés, partners….So I have always felt like I needed to be very specific about what I did and did not lose that day, because yes I lost people I cared about and yes, I was grieving for my friends and for my city, but all loss is not equal, nor is all trauma. We did not all experience 9/11 watching from a window a couple of miles away. I lost a friend and a law school acquaintance, but to others, they was father, brother, son, husband, fiancé….I have friends who experienced 9/11 from inside or just next to the towers. Whose officemates were killed and who survived only by virtue of running late that day. As far as Manhattanites go, I got off lucky. I knew it then and I know it now. So, I grieved alone. And I tried to be there for others who were grieving more. Sometimes I could and sometimes I couldn’t.
Looking back on it, 9/11 probably marked the end of my relationship with my then boyfriend. He grew up on Staten Island and many of his friends had gone on to become police officers and fire fighters. I don’t know anyone else who lost as many close friends as he did, attending funeral after funeral for weeks and weeks. His ended up married to the fiancé of one of his close friends who died that day—a not entirely uncommon story. I could not fully comprehend his grief, but she could.
My way of coping with 9/11 is possibly marked more by what I have avoided than by what I have done. I used to go to that part of lower Manhattan all the time. Since 9/11, I’ve been back once, a week after the attacks, when the air was still so thick you could barely see ahead of you for a quarter block. Then, there was still a chance that people would be found alive. My boyfriend and I stood a couple of blocks away from the site, but as close as we could get, breathing that terrible air and just hoping. I haven’t been back since. I’ve never been to the 9/11 Memorial or museum. I’ve never seen The Oculus.
When friends from outside of the country always wanted to go visit the 9/11 Memorial and Museum, I used to take offense to it, like it was some kind of tourist trap, and they were trivializing what happened. Someone asked me, “Didn’t you go to the Holocaust Museum in Washington DC? Did you feel like that was a tourist trap?” No. Of course not. Last night, when speaking to my friend who worked near the site of the attacks, she explained that such memorials are to give people who didn’t live through atrocities a sense of what happened; an ability to try to share in the experience. Those of us who lived through it don’t need that reminder. I thought I was the only coward who couldn’t bring myself to go to the site of the World Trade Center, but talking to her, reading people’s Facebook posts, I see New Yorker after New Yorker who lived through that day saying they just can’t. That’s me, I just can’t.
I understand that inside the museum is an extensive display dedicated to my friend, Sergio, that was put together and narrated by his fiancé, Tanya. Someday, I’d like to maybe share that with my children and tell them about my funny friend who wrote up my first criminal case with me. I hope it doesn’t take another twenty years for me to muster up the courage.
