13 Years Since September 11: If You Don't Take Time To Remember, You Forget

Todd Essig

Contributor

Thirteen is often said to be unlucky. There are all those elevator buttons jumping from “12” right to “14” to eliminate the possibility of an ill-starred choice. And fear of the number even has its own fancy sounding phobia, triskaidekaphobia. But this year, in downtown New York as well as elsewhere I am sure, thirteen is a special number because it is the 13th anniversary of the September 11 attacks. And for those of us still around who can note the day, we must consider ourselves lucky.

Time passes. Things change. The National September 11 Memorial Museum has opened. Some of the mementos and remembrances from the Family Room are now on display at the NY State Museum. Go ahead, take the virtual tour and have a good cry. At the same time some things stay the same. Too many families have been brought new to mourning at terrorisms’ hand. As I write the President is once again readying an address to the nation about how we will fight terrorism. More blood will be spilled. And memories? Well, memories both change and stay they same so if you don’t take time to remember, you forget and think you are remembering.

Like I do every year, I want to take a moment to remember by reworking and reposting my memories. I do this because memory really does need attention. Not just mine but yours too. If you’re reading this I hope you’ll do as I’ve done and tell people what you remember because human memory is “active,” “dynamic,” “creative.” This past week I’ve had several patients spontaneously just recount their 9/11 memories. I think people want to hold on to these dynamic memories that pulse through our minds unlike static bits in machines. What we do with our memories on today’s thirteenth anniversary becomes part of tomorrow’s memory. What we do today helps create how the fourteenth anniversary will feel. It helps create what 9/11 will mean to us and those who come after us. Memory also smooths the rough edges. It makes the story fit the current moment. For the lucky majority, traumatic memories get sanded down by subsequent events.

I don’t just want just to remember that 9/11 happened. I don’t want it to become history, at least nor mere history. I want to remember how it felt, what it meant. By keeping the memory alive I can keep the feel of the day both distant and immediate. I hope the same for you. Sitting in my office now at the keyboard I can easily conjure the acrid smell that took over downtown and lingered for months. At the same time, did it really happen?  Was there a time before museums,  blue share-bikes on the corner? Before we lost someone loved? September 11 threatens to feel like something that never happened, like a distant event borrowed from someone else. Remembering trauma and loss can be like that.

A solitary firefighter stands amid the rubble and smoke in New York City (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

It was a crisp, blue early Autumn morning when a plane crashed into the first tower. I was listening to WNYC, our local public radio station, before leaving the house for a 9:15 appointment. The announcer casually reported that there was some sort of fire at the World Trade Center. I now remember it as being the voice of Brian Lehrer but who knows.  Not thinking much of it, I turn the radio off and hit the subway.

After climbing the steps back up at 7th Ave. and 12th St., I saw the flaming wound on the North Tower. People were starting to gather at the corners to stare. But I had a patient waiting so I dashed east across 12th to my office.

By the time I got to 6th Avenue the stares had turned to fear. There were tears. The South tower was also spitting smoke and fire. Both were now burning. Several people were already saying “we’re under attack,” “it must be an attack, not a helicopter accident.” A famous actress known to live on the block had her arm around a friend and they were weeping. Many people were.

I continue down the block on time for my 9:15 appointment. As that first session inches towards its 10 AM conclusion, my patient and I feel things rumble and shake. Subtle, but unmistakeable. Palpable relief crosses both our faces. She says must be helicopters and planes flying to the rescue. I say something like “thank goodness, the cavalry”—sometimes hope is everywhere in psychotherapy, even when it does not really belong.

My next patient comes in a little after 10 and says a tower fell down. What?! I leave her sitting in my office while she frantically called a friend who worked at the WTC. I run to the corner fully expecting to see both towers. Instead, I see one burning tower and smoked filled sky. I come back to learn her friend ran late that morning and was OK. At 10:28 the ground rumbled and shook, again. This was not hopeful. We both knew what had happened. Psychotherapy also has to let reality have its say.

It’s now about 11:30. I had been on the phone. My wife and family are all safe. All appointments cancelled. I hear a request on the radio from the Red Cross for mental-health professional volunteers. I start trekking uptown to the Red Cross offices at 64th Street. No subways or buses. The 50 blocks should not take long.

6th Avenue has few cars, no cabs. Instead, it’s filled with dazed, sooty people slowly walking north. I see a cab driver sitting on the hood of his car near 14th Street. I tell him I’m a psychologist and am trying to get to 64th Street to volunteer at the Red Cross. He says get in. He leaves the meter off. He calls me brother and tells me he’s from Pakistan. He won’t take any money.

Several hours later I’m on Pier 94 on the west side of Manhattan. I’m one of three professionals working with several dozen Red Cross volunteers. We are assigned to what is supposed to be the secondary morgue. It’s for when the responders begin pulling bodies from the ruble. We set up walkways to a temporary morgue where the identifications are to take place. We are told what to do, how to escort family members.

My job was “mental health triage.” When relatives and friends walked from the waiting area to the morgue to identify remains, I was to go with them to help the volunteers to determine whether someone might need professional help.

Then we start to wait. We drink bottles of iced tea. We wait some more. More tea. We watch the smoke rise.Friendships were found (see the piece in the sidebar about the Boston Marathon bombing). At 5:20 we see 7 WTC collapse. Inexorably the unimaginable horror of the day dawns. There would be no remains to identify, at least not by friends and family. And not on that day.

At 9:30 p.m., the Red Cross sends us home. I start walking. I leave my Red Cross vest on. A city bus pulls up. The disheveled and exhausted driver opens the door to his nearly empty bus, asks where I’m going, and tells me to get in. He wasn’t collecting fares. He takes me to my corner. Another brother. He wasn’t from Pakistan.

Three days later I’m back in my office sitting with a young pregnant woman I had only known by name. I knew they married—it was a source of tremendous joy—but he had finished therapy before they decided to start a family. A former hipster turned budding family man and commodities trader, he was already hard at work when the planes hit. She and I cried together.

She asked if she should start therapy. I told her maybe eventually, if needed, but now she should surround herself with family and friends; she needed love and family and community, not treatment. Months later a birth announcement came in the mail. Then Xmas cards for the next few years. But then after the fifth or sixth anniversary the holiday cards stopped. I hope it was because she remarried and no longer wanted the connection.

That first week several colleagues and I created an online database to register mental and behavioral health clinicians who wanted to volunteer for disaster relief work. We called it the Trauma Response Database. During the next three months we registered more than 2,000 licensed professionals. We referred several hundred clinicians to people and organizations (e.g., schools, churches) who requested volunteers.

Ten days after the planes hit a request came from St. Paul’s for their relief station at Ground Zero. They wanted a mental health presence. I submitted my own name from the database. I was selected.

Wearing hard-hat, paper mask, and gloves I walked around Ground Zero with ministry students giving bottles of water, Red Bull, and chewing gum to first-responders working the pile. Every few minutes everyone stood respectively still while remains were removed. Life is cherished when it gets taken away.

I met Janet Bachant that night, another psychologist volunteering just like I was. She had already started NYDCC (the New York Disaster Counseling Coalition). Her vision was free mental and behavioral health services for all first-responders and their families. They helped us, no questions asked. Now it was our turn. I joined and eventually chaired the Board.

Firefighters, cops, and EMS workers are helpers. They don’t ask for help even when they need it. So, NYDCC went to them. For six years, until people started forgetting to remember and funding dried up, we reached several thousand first-responders and family members. We arranged for free, confidential treatment for PTSD, depression, anxiety, relationship problems, schools problems, and the like. We arranged treatment for individuals, couples, families. We did resilience and relationship training, helped with retirement planning. And, truth be told, we also helped ourselves. A disaster relief rule-of-thumb is that when you’re feeling helpless, the best thing to do is help someone.

And now it’s 13 years later. Taking time to remember is the only way not to forget. And we need to remember—especially now—that this happened to all of us. It happened to values we all cherish. It happened to our “indivisible” nation “with liberty and justice for all,” a nation that has become destructively divided with shrinking supplies of both liberty and justice, especially economic justice. For too many in power politics, party, and ideology have replaced patriotism. Forget about being brothers and sisters, we’re not even neighbors anymore. We’re adversaries. We need to take time to remember that 9/11 happened to all of us.

So, take some time to remember 13 years ago, how it felt and what meant and not just the event itself. And then take those memories you make and use them as fuel for some old-fashioned American religious tolerance, inclusiveness, and political honesty: with liberty and justice for all.

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