|
Today, the World Trade Center was attacked in a most vile, cowardly
fashion. Two hijacked planes became guided missiles and crashed into the
Twin Tower buildings less than twenty minutes apart.
Where were you on September 11, 2001?
Where were you when you first heard the devastating news, first learned
that the impossible had happened? News that would forever change the lives
of every American, perhaps every person around the world.
Terrifying doesn’t do it justice. Horrible. Scary. Words. Words are
not enough. There’s no word in the English language to do justice to the
feelings, to convey the emotion and grief, the profound loss of life and
spirit.
The Emergency Room at Beth Israel Medical Center, where I work in
the outpatient Psychiatric clinic, pulled together to handle casualties.
It’s amazing to even use that word: casualties. Not injured, not hurt,
but a word indicative of war and survival. And that is indeed what the
survivors, and the lost, were. Casualties of war.
Medical staff throughout the hospital were briefed, then dispatched
to help. Triage was set up in the small park across the street, and in
the street directly outside the ER building. Ambulances arrived covered
in chunks of concrete, coated in a chalky white residue. When the back
doors of the vehicles were opened, so much dust and smoke billowed out
it looked like they were on fire. So much hugging today. And crying. People
tried to make sense of what had happened, but how can you pull meaning
from senseless acts? How do you make sense of something not within a typical
person’s realm of experience, of understanding? This sort of thing just
doesn’t happen. Not here, not in my own back yard. The bombing of the
Murrah Federal Building in downtown Oklahoma City in 1995 was a tragedy
that moved me, often left me in tears as I watched the news in the morning
while preparing to go to work. I wept over news accounts of survivors,
or when they showed victims. My heart broke when they showed images of
those babies lost after the day care center was destroyed. But that tragedy
was somewhere else, not part of my experience. As devastating as that was,
it was not part of my life.
There was distance. It happened there, to my neighbors in the west.
Their tragedy was their tragedy and hadn’t touched home. Not my home.
But loss is loss. Grief comes from every walk of life. Distance means very
little if anything at all in the grand scheme of things. I understand now.
I’ll never think of that tragedy--or any, for that matter--the same
way again.
At the hospital, we set up rooms for the Lost, for those people searching
for loved ones, for children separated from parents and caregivers. The
air in the hallways was thick with a palpable grief from those people who
couldn’t comprehend this level of despair. The man in blue scrubs . . .
sank to his knees, covered his face with his hands and sobbed into his
fingers. Surrounded by staff offering comfort that would never be adequate.
Trembling, he stood, physically supported by those trying to help, the
knowledge that this small gesture was somehow easier than trying to imagine
what could be said. The profound loss, the confusion and despondency, was
etched on his face.
The woman dressed in white . . . her clothing plastered to her body
and covered in a chalky white dust . . . shoulders thrown back in mock
defiance, arms jutting at peculiar angles. Not injured, not physically
anyway. She wandered the halls, her gait awkward and unsteady, tottering
on too-high platform heels, grunting gibberish between cries of “Why? Why?
Why?” I turned away. Help from me would have been impossible. Stared at
these people with my mouth agape, tears welling. It will never be the same.
For them, life has been changed forever. For me.
Upstairs in the outpatient psychiatric clinic, we prepared for the arrival
of patients being discharged from the ER. Physically they were well enough
not to need a hospital bed.
But emotionally . . .
George’s eyes were red and puffy, but from crying. Not only from crying.
George had witnessed more that morning than most people can’t begin to
imagine, even after a lifetime. He was coherent but answered our questions
almost by rote. Beside him, a woman sat quietly, dressed only in a hospital
gown, her ruined clothing in a plastic shopping bag beside her feet. Shivering.
Dizzy. Couldn’t remember how to get home.
The waiting room began to fill with traumatized patients-- survivors,
families of victims and survivors, people too dazed or terrified to leave,
too scared to take public transportation. The thought of being below ground,
racing through black tunnels at sixty miles per hour left every one of
us cold.
We wrapped them in blankets, fed them sandwiches and juice. Offered psychiatric
counseling and a place to sleep. My God, it felt inadequate. I wanted to
take them in my arms and tell them everything would be all right. Wanted
to make empty promises to make myself feel better.
We set up a computer, and my co-worker Ray manned it, spending hours talking
to survivors, and people frantically searching for missing family and friends,
trying to find a name on a list that seemed endless.
And occasionally, only far too rare, a name was found, a family reunited,
offering a glimmer of hope to a community crippled by heartache.
But the realization that a name was not on the list of survivors at our
hospital meant another search, at another hospital. Having to start again
somewhere else and pray that the person they searched for would be found
alive. They wandered from one end of Manhattan to the other, through St.
Vincent’s, Beth Israel, Bellevue, The Armory, dozens of locations where
the wounded or dead had been taken. Stuyvesant High School was being used
as a morgue. It still is.
Frantic calls to family and friends were attempted, but callers received
the following message: “Due to the tornado in your area, we are unable
to complete your call.” Tornado. There’s just no word to use to describe
what happened. Even the phone companies opted to use the word tornado.
Second Avenue, mobbed daily with bumper to bumper traffic like an endless
parking lot, was eerily quiet. As I stood in the center of the street,
no traffic behind me, I faced south, the direction of the World Trade Center.
Instead of a glimpse of the Twin Towers, a black cloud of smoke hovered
about the city. Where I had once glimpsed the tops of those majestic buildings
dusting the clouds, I now only saw dark sky.
The Towers are gone. Their destruction has left a hole, a feeling
of emptiness and loss. A feeling, a knowledge, that something is missing,
not just from the NYC skyline but from our lives. Looking in the direction
where they once stood causes an ache that just cannot be mollified. A longing
for civility, for normality. For an explanation. Something is missing from
our lives. Something that can never be replaced.
|
