Project Rebirth (18 page)

It wasn't long before Tim realized that Rhode Island was yet another place he was retreating to, to hide from his past. The “blues”—as Tim called the feelings of depression that plagued him—continued. Tim realized he needed to make a big change. “I've been running for three years,” he admits. “My soul has been in turmoil.”

On July 12, 2004, Tim retired, determined to keep growing his roots in Rhode Island without the distraction of a demanding job and with the comfort of a small pension. He devoted his full attention to the website he cofounded with his brother in 1999, TheBravest .com, which celebrates and honors firefighters. He sipped tea and read the morning newspaper front to back, took long walks around Providence, and continued to see his counselor, trying to unpack all the pain and loss he'd been storing up over the past three years of feverish work.

Much of Tim's post-9/11 life was spent trying to figure out how to be the keeper of his firefighting brothers' legacies. Sometimes he questioned whether he did the right thing that day, but he quickly corrected his doubts with the surety of God's plan: “Of course I feel horribly guilty. I wish I could have stood there and held the towers up. But God has something else in store for me. The only way I can help people is to be alive to do it.”

After a couple of listless years in Providence, Tim moved back to New York in 2005. “It's better for my life to be here and better for my brother's [Chris's] life for me to be here,” Tim explains. “He's got some challenges right now with his kids, work, and the website. He didn't need to have a third child around. He wanted to spend time with me, but it was a burden.”

Back in New York—among the skyscrapers and smoke, the constant ambulance sirens and the familiar buzz of unending activity—Tim thought of his lost friends all the time. Their ghosts were all around—at the pub where Terry and Tim used to have a pint, in every firehouse he passed, and of course, at Ground Zero itself. Tim ached for the familiar pace of emergency-responder work. Though he knew that his healing was facilitated by slowing down, he was sick of all the downtime. He was ready to work again.

In 2006, he took a job with Solutions America, the political action committee for Rudy Giuliani, who would make a run for president in 2008. Building on Giuliani's reputation as rising to the occasion amid the devastation on September 11, Tim envisioned running a program for first responders in his name, but for a time he was simply charged with traveling around and spreading Giuliani's message. He explains, “It's very deep and very emotional to be a part of this, to be able to go throughout the country and meet these people and hear their stories about how they came to help us, and be able to share my stories with them.” Shaping the ongoing narrative of September 11th, and listening to the way it had shaped others, was another facet of Tim's healing.

In large part, he took the job because he believed it was something his lost friends would respect: “My friends were carrying the torch and now they're gone, and it's time for me to carry the torch a bit. In their honor, in their families' honor, but even more to protect people here. I believe in the mayor so strongly. I think he's a good man. I think he's a great leader.”

The voters disagreed. In January of 2008, following a debilitating defeat in the Florida primaries, Giuliani announced that he was dropping out of the race and endorsing John McCain, the former POW, whom Giuliani believed “could be trusted in times of crisis.” He went on, “Obviously, I thought I was that person. The voters made another choice.”

Tim was disappointed. This time, it wasn't so much a fallen leader that he was mourning, but his own idealism. Politics had proven to be, in Tim's words, “a dirty, dirty game.” He felt that it was his duty to carry on the legacies of his fallen brothers, and yet he struggled to find the most effective, most noble way to do so. He'd tried to stay close to their widows and children, but in some ways he was too potent a reminder of the men that they had lost. Many of them were trying to move on, which meant letting some of their past relationships languish. He'd given back at the national and state levels, but without being connected to the site where his friends had perished, it didn't quite fulfill him. It was noble, to be sure, but not a direct enough expression of his loyalty. His relationship with his own brother Chris, while still paramount, was no substitute for the loss of so many other friends and mentors, most especially Terry.

In many ways, it was as if a simpler time had passed, and there was nothing he could do to get it back. Tim longed to return to the singular focus of emergency work, the clear mission of helping people in crisis, the burly arms of a brotherhood, but his life would never be so straightforward again. It had been colored by profound loss, the complexity of grief, the disappointment that inevitably follows high hopes for resolution.

It was as if Tim's very DNA had been altered by the losses he experienced. Thrity Umrigar, an Indian novelist, writes:

Indeed, Tim felt the ten-ton burden, not just of his own sadness, but of the responsibility of carrying on his brothers' legacy, as surely as he did the ache in his back and the beating of his own heart. He had been forever and inextricably altered.

Though Tim had literally attempted to work through his grief, as Freud might have advised him, it would prove too stubborn, too unpredictable. Tim was faced, and is still facing, the nonlinear project of healing and paying homage to the emergency workers who died on September 11, not just an abstract group to him, a nameless crowd of yellow and black, but ninety-three people whose names, faces, and stories he knows personally.

Mourning of that magnitude is most certainly not executed in five distinct stages, as Kübler-Ross suggested. In fact, its nature—in many senses—is the exact opposite of Tim's training. There is no preparedness plan possible, no step-by-step system to follow, no way to keep one's heart safe from the flames of sudden loss. It just is. And nothing could be harder to process for a man who has dedicated his life to preventing what danger may come.

Joe Keenan

 

 

 

A
couple of guys put down their rakes and came running back from the field, abandoning the pile of debris they were inspecting. As they approach the wind tent, with their goggles and white Tyvek suits glimmering against the gray landscape, they look like astronauts exploring an alien planet. The image is complete when they proudly hold up a battered, ashen American flag.

“Look what we found here!” one of the guys exclaims. He asks Detective Sergeant Joseph “Joe” Keenan about taking a picture with the flag.

“Guys, we have a procedure here,” Joe reminds them. Joe, softspoken but strong, in his early fifties, sometimes feels like a teacher who has to keep reminding his students how to behave, but he's glad that the workers respect his authority.

It is another wintry morning at Fresh Kills. For more than six months now, most of the wreckage from the World Trade Center has been lying all around Joe at this former landfill, a twenty-onemile drive from Lower Manhattan. He is one of the supervisors of a recovery effort that includes more than a thousand workers, among them NYPD officers, FBI agents, and sanitation workers.

Joe's job is undeniably grim. On any given day, his team of detectives finds yet another fingernail or sliver of bone as they inspect a load of debris. These sometimes very delicate remains are saved and cataloged in hopes that they might bring comfort, however inadequate, to a grieving family member, or insight, however late, to those who are still investigating the attacks of September 11.

One of Joe's superiors at Fresh Kills, FBI Special Agent Richard Marx, would later state that every day there was like September 12 for most of the workers. There was the eagerness to lend a hand, and the outpouring of energy and generosity. But there was also a closeness to destruction and death that kept stretching for months, even after Ground Zero had been swept clean. The Fresh Kills workers began to crave the experience of finding human remains. It's gruesome but precious, and undeniably strange, but meaningful nonetheless.

Joe recalls the workers' emotional response to finding remains: “They were so happy 'cause they thought they'd done something good.” Finding remains and thereby helping a family identify and honor a loved one fulfilled the purpose of their work. If the load they worked on wasn't “hot”—as they came to call a load with remains of the catastrophe, either human or industrial—Joe's team would often leave work dejected.

The morning of September 11, 2001, Joe was at his office at 300 Gold Street, right at the end of the Manhattan Bridge on the Brooklyn side, working on a report alongside the six detectives on his team.

“I don't even remember what the meeting was about now, but at that moment it was important,” Joe says, underscoring how everything was about to change. He does remember that they were to present the report soon at One Police Plaza, the NYPD's headquarters in Lower Manhattan, near the World Trade Center.

Joe walked out of the room to make copies and came back shortly. “A plane just hit the World Trade Center,” stated one of the female detectives.
Must have been a Piper Cub, or some other small plane,
Joe thought, not too worried, stroking his strong, square chin and smoothing out his signature white mustache.
Maybe the pilot had a heart attack.

Someone else suggested they go up to the roof and take a look, since it was just a couple of flights up from their fifth-floor offices. The line of sight to the towers was perfectly clear, especially on that day, with its famously limpid sky. Joe's mild curiosity soon gave way to shock, as the group pointed and stared at the flames coming out of the North Tower.

Another detective came up with a portable radio. They learned the plane was an airliner. Still facing the Manhattan side, Joe felt someone forcefully grab his arm. It was his close friend and colleague, Lisa. The whole group turned their heads to the right to confirm the unthinkable: a second plane flying extremely low, starting to turn toward the other tower. The plane was so close that Joe could see the little oval outlines of the windows.

They all knew what was about to happen. The plane went across the Hudson River and crashed into the side of the building, its nose coming out the other side.

Joe felt like he could reach out and touch the flames. His eyes recorded the hit; his ears, the boom of the explosion; his skin, the whoosh of the heat. He looked at Lisa and said, “Oh my God. We're at war.”