Project Rebirth (29 page)

Counter to our quintessential American industriousness, grief cannot be crossed off a to-do list. As soon as you think you've successfully “completed” it, that you are done with mourning, the feeling sneaks up on you in the quiet hours of night or in the middle of the grocery aisle. You are undone once again. And sometimes very, very pissed off at being strapped with sadness when you thought you'd “done everything right” to rid yourself of it.

Grief also can't be conquered, wrestled to the ground by a strong, determined spirit. It's simply bigger than you, no matter how big you might fancy yourself to be. To fight grief is to throw oneself, with naive audacity, against the fattest Buddha in the world, sitting and meditating, unmoved by your desperate flailing. He won't be done until he's done, just as grief won't leave your heart until it's ready to be absorbed into your emotional bloodstream.

Or perhaps it never really leaves. When writer Meghan O'Rourke and psychologist Leeat Granek created a research survey on grief on Slate.com last spring, they were shocked to find that within just a couple of weeks nearly 8,000 people had responded. A large portion (33 percent) said that they experienced their loss more than eight years ago, suggesting that even if you adapt, it is still a huge part of your new life. Twenty-seven percent said that they never went back to feeling like themselves or “normal” after their loss.

Grief changes you. Plain and simple. It alters the way in which you understand yourself, your community, and the world around you. It creates a whole new dimension to love—that which you've felt, that which you will feel. It deepens and widens your understanding of suffering, not just as it alchemizes in your own idiosyncratic psyche and body, but as it emerges for others. Your sadness becomes the world's sadness, and also its potential for transformation. Elie Wiesel, who survived incomprehensible hardship during the Holocaust, explains it this way: “Because I remember, I despair. Because I remember, I have the duty to reject despair.”

We remember our suffering—a state that, indeed, is twinned with despair—and yet, in the act of remembering and honoring what we've experienced, we turn away from despair. Once you have known the pain of excruciating, incomprehensible loss, you can't un-know it. You know it forevermore, for yourself, but also in empathy for the rest of humanity who must revel and suffer through this universal experience of birth and death, life constantly in flux, decaying and renewing, coming and going. It is one of those great paradoxes of the human condition—when you endure suffering, you also earn the empathy that is born of surviving it and the beauty of its acute end.

Grief is not obedient and it's not finite. In this way, it's actually quite like love. We love people until we must grieve them, two sides of the same universal coin. In the throes of love, we easily forget that either death or grief will follow. This is good. Even necessary. It keeps us brave.

After all, how could Tanya have ever thrown herself so wholeheartedly into her life with Sergio if she'd known that it would one day end, abrupt as a slammed door? How could Nick have had any normalcy in his relationship with his mom if he'd known that one day, out of nowhere, she would be wrenched from his young life, leaving a gaping hole? How could Larry have ever built his entire life around the unconditional love he discovered with Gene if he had known that conditions outside of his control would one day rob him of a future with his beloved? None of us know what heartbreak we might bear, nor should we. Love is a risk you take despite all the evidence that it might one day crush you.

You can't avoid it—the loving and the losing—but the consolation is this: Your love never actually has to end. This is what these stories teach us. Accidents, disease, natural disasters, terrorists, or innocent old age might take away the man you love, your mother or mentor, your dear, sweet brother, but it can never kill your precious knowing of that person. Flesh and bone are cremated, buried, decomposed, but memories are immaterial and eternal. You have no choice about death, but you have the power to keep your sacred relationship alive.

While letting go, as Freud asserted, is an essential part of the grieving process, the healthiest mourners are those who also carry on. The courageous survivors contained within this book accept the physical deaths of their loved ones and carry their memories and their special relationships on in various, very personal ways. Freud was primarily interested in the negative aspects of being attached to the deceased, while we discovered the transcendent possibilities of staying intertwined. Far from damaging the subjects, the ongoing process of integrating their lost loved ones—their values, gifts, memories—into their future strengthens and enlivens them, even adding meaning to their lives.

Brian is still honoring his brother each and every day, not just through his continued commitment to Ground Zero, but through his unfettered commitment to his family. When he lights up a room talking about “my girls,” he's really talking about both his two daughters and Michael's. Nick is working on an online start-up for social good called TwoSeed. It's innovative platform combines the brain of business acumen with the heart of altruism, just as his mom always did in her work, friendships, and family. Tim will devote himself, until his last breath, to serving the memories of his fallen brothers—whether that's through his own website, with advocacy work, or mentoring the next generation. In this way, Terry and his other heroic friends are never truly gone from his daily life.

Interestingly enough, even Freud himself admitted that it wasn't really possible to strike dead—completely “finish” mourning—those we love the most. When his daughter Sophie Halberstadt died from influenza in 1920, he was devastated and found that he wasn't so much “working through” the pain of his child's death as learning to coexist with its profundity. In 1929, writing to his friend Ludwig Binswanger, whose son had recently died, he explained:

Many of us, like Freud, find ourselves stripped bare through the grief process. We would like to think that we can mourn in alignment with some comforting timeline that promises eventual resolution. We would like to think that our theories will keep us protected from the messiness of it all. We would like to think that we can control the process. But everyone, eventually, is humbled by the universal human experience of loving and losing. Each of us is unique in the way we manage those feelings and live on with the love.

The way in which resilience ebbs and flows in these eight stories is no more linear than grief. Though researchers have made a lot of progress since resilience was first introduced into scientific literature in the early '70s, there is still no fixed or absolute idea about what it is, exactly, and perhaps even more important for our everyday lives, how to develop it. DNA, self-confidence, communication skills, and the capacity to make realistic plans and manage strong feelings are all thought to influence how resilient we are when faced with difficult times, but most of these capacities and skills are difficult to measure.

One thing is certain—the most resilient people are those with supportive relationships. We see this over and over in the stories that have unfolded in the previous pages. It is the unconditional love of caring family and friends that buoys all of these survivors in their rockiest moments. It's also their capacity to reach out for support when they need it and to accept help that allows them to flourish. Nick speaks so often about the comfort of being surrounded by his family and close friends throughout the years. Tanya tears up when she talks about “the girls”—her support group of widows who understood her grief as no one else could. Tim finds refuge in his brother's company—a safe place to talk about his dark feelings over a light beer. We have so little control in this life, to be sure, but one thing we can do to protect ourselves is to create sturdy and loving relationships in our lives. There's no question that these bonds are the glue that keeps us from truly falling apart in times of trauma and loss.

The commitment to help others in their time of need following the events of September 11th, of course, was the source of so much inspiration and so much physical and mental suffering, as well. For those who experienced that day and its aftermath firsthand, there was the sudden and stunning death of a different kind: the death of a former self. The person who walked on the hollowed disaster of Ground Zero on September 12, 2001, was the not the same one who walked anywhere on September 10, 2001. Brian, Charles, Joe, Tim—each of them was forever altered by what they saw there. Debbie, though farther afield of the actual carnage, would never be the same after knowing that the country's consciousness had grown brittle in the face of it. She had to make her way in a world where her deepest values and her heritage were newly suspect.

There were times when it seemed that these brave survivors tried their old identities on, only to find that they no longer fit, or tried to bully a new story, a more hopeful story, out of the sadness. As they metabolized their pain, as they processed their memories, as they considered the “why” of their own survival among so many who were lost, they navigated their way into new narratives. It turns out that just as we can't hurry the grieving process along, recovery from trauma has its own unpredictable timing as well. One's soul is rebuilt, not according to a schedule, but according to a mystery. It is psyche and breath, memory and vulnerability, muscle and lung, coordinating to create a new kind of living.

Bishop Stephen T. Bouman writes about his mission with the traumatized immediately following September 11th in his book,
Grace All Around Us: Embracing God's Promise in Tragedy and Loss
: “In the weeks after I would visit each of the eighteen conferences of our synod with only one agenda: how is your soul?” Secondary trauma, like that experienced by so many on and in the days following September 11th, is, in a sense, a clarifying force for the soul. By strapping on his boots and walking straight down to Ground Zero that autumn morning, Charles strengthened his own sense of himself as a helper, a server, and a soul mate, of sorts, to those in need. Joe, likewise, rose to the challenge of the most morbid of roles following the death and destruction in his dear city, and in so doing, performed his final brave act as one of New York's finest; his soul settled down to grandchildren and rest thereafter. Brian, in his unwavering days of “filling one bucket” at a time, allowed his own soul the salve of feeling useful; when he stopped feeling useful, of course, the grief rushed in.

Brian, like so many, staved off the real sadness with the numb of constant activity—not just a phenomenon of post-traumatic stress, of course, but of the contemporary human condition. We make ourselves so busy, so plugged in, preoccupied, and selfimportant that we often forget just how vulnerable we really are. Erikson, writing of disaster and its brutal lessons, observes, “People are encouraged to think that they can control the best in nature and the worst in themselves, and they continue to think so until the momentum of some adventure carries them beyond the limits of their own intelligence or stamina.” Disaster and death trim the fat off of our lives in an instant, leaving behind only what is most precious—our health, our families, our sense of purpose.

The surprise is that there is great release in the humbling that coincides with grief and recovery. Pema Chödrön writes, “As human beings, not only do we seek resolution, but we also feel that we deserve resolution. However, not only do we not deserve resolution, we suffer from resolution. We don't deserve resolution; we deserve something better than that. We deserve our birthright, which is the middle way, an open state of mind that can relax with paradox and ambiguity.”

The texture of the stories that these eight survivors offer us is testament to this birthright. In each of their losses, and each of their unique and quite beautiful journeys to process and integrate those losses, we see the best of the human spirit. We see Delia embracing the man who would give the woman who was to be her daughterin-law, Tanya, a second chance at joy. We see Larry being buoyed by the God that others told him hated his way of loving. We see Nick acknowledging that his mother is, perhaps, more complex than he allowed, and so, in turn, is his way of honoring her. Tim's loss of so many metaphorical brothers brings him even closer to his biological brother.

These decade-long stories of restoration are rife with paradox. Though Debbie's whole life is constructed around building bridges, her own path explodes in her face; though her mission is to facilitate dialogue between cultures, her own words are lost in the media's sensational translation. Charles's commitment to promoting the health of others destroys his own. Ground Zero has become both the bane of Brian's existence and his deepest joy and honor. Joe lives with death in his past and his mind, and birth in his present and his heart.

It has been ten long years for each of these eight survivors, ten long years for all of us, truth be told. We experienced anthrax; the war in Afghanistan; Enron's bankruptcy; No Child Left Behind; the birth of Homeland Security; the Iraq War; the conclusion of the Human Genome Project; the invention of Facebook, Wikipedia, Google, and Twitter; conflicts in Darfur, the Middle East, and Liberia; Abu Ghraib; earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricanes, and heat waves; the reelection of George W. Bush; the Kyoto Protocol; Avian flu; H1N1; Harry Potter; the election of Barack Obama; Deepwater Horizon; terrorists attacks; mining disasters; spacecraft launches;
American Idol
; and solar eclipses.