Living: One year later
Sep 10 '02
The Bottom Line Celebrate your life and do not waste a day of it.
Today marks the end of the most difficult year of my life. There is some small comfort in knowing, or at least believing, that the worst is behind us. But what do we make of the last year, and of what is to come? I don’t know. I have no answers.
Trying to put this past year into some sort of perspective, I find that words can’t describe how I felt, and how I am still feeling. I try to tell myself that in a city and country that has borne so much sadness and tragedy in the last year, I am one of the lucky ones. Inevitably, I end up doing some morbid calculus: One friend lost on the first plane to hit the North Tower, but two saved because they were on vacation. Five extra minutes spent petting a puppy and walking my dog, equals my presence 4 blocks from the World Trade, instead of being in the complex (as I ordinarily would have been by 8:48 am). Three months of living on friends’ floors and in hotels, plus one suitcase, but I am now in a new home with more space than I had before.
One friend lost, but many more saved, like I was, by mere chance. Why did I get the chance to live when so many did not? It’s a question that lingers, unanswered, every time I think about 9-11. And I think about it every day. Progress, forward steps are measured in terms I’d never considered. PTSD is still very real, but the episodes happen a lot less frequently now - the panic attacks went from multiple times a day, to once a day, to once a week, to once a month. I had a few bad weeks when Flight 587 crashed -- visible from my office window -- and a few very bad months when my husband was stationed at Ganci air base in Kyrgyzstan, but the anxiety has been dulled and my “moments,” as like to call them, are controllable. I can look at a plane in the sky without cringing. Sirens and the sound of fighter planes give me goose bumps but I don’t cry any more. I haven’t dreamed of falling body parts (and my futile attempt to collect them) in about six months now. Even though I turn my head to look down the broad avenues of this beautiful, strong city every single day, searching in vain for the towers that were my landmark and my anchors, their palpable absence no longer makes me cry.
Yet, I am not whole. Although I don’t have any physical injuries, the pain to my psyche is still alive and very real. Missing the towers, seeing the sky so unnaturally bright, brings an ache in my body that I’ve become accustomed to. The strangest things trigger it, and then it hits me - the figurative hole in my heart is torn open again, raising vivid memories and images that I tend and guard as my own experience, but that I also want to put away, never to see again.
Like my scars, my commemoration of the one-year anniversary will be internal. I don’t want to be around a bunch of people who don’t know what I went through. At the same time, any act of remembrance, of commemoration or honor by me seems so trite, so small and insignificant, that again I feel guilty for having survived when so many did not.
My friend Ted had a wife and two children. He introduced me to the music of the Smiths and taught me how to play Mexican on cheap gin. We watched Repo Man so many times my freshman year in college that I knew the lines, which I’ve since forgotten. Ted was one of the cool kids – self possessed and confident when we were all struggling to create our identities, and I admired him for knowing himself and for being himself. We lost touch after graduation, and I had not seen him since college. Ted and I passed within a few hundred feet of each other that awful morning, yet I am overwhelmed by the difference those few hundred feet made. Tomorrow, when I am silent and remembering not only the loss of life but our country’s loss of innocence, I will look back on the few fading memories I have of my friendship with Ted, just as I will look back at where the towers should be, just as I have done every day.
Peace.
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kboo
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De-fezzed in two topics. Ask me if I care. Hey, what happened to my picture?
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