8:10 a.m. - 09/11/02
::give... the darkness... back its soul::
You have to understand: I don't. I don't know what you're going through. I'm able to catch all the previewed requiems and say to myself, "I will not watch that." And maybe it means something that way, too; maybe it means something that I feel the need to avoid the pictorials, the crying, the strain it takes for us to find our strength. I feel a bit like an impostor; it's beyond "this nationalistic, propaganda-based, war-toting, Christian-right, first-world-predestination mindset does not represent *me.*" It's beyond "someone explain to the leader of the free world how he's not allowed to act on his belief systems anymore. That he *must* act as a representative for those systematically below him, and that, as the leader of a country based on freedom, he can't restrict it to his own. Someone tell him to stop being baffled when Nelson Mandela has the heart to condemn his actions, when people speak up against our separation from the godless communists (one nation under god...). Someone go back in 'time' and teach him how to feel the way I feel." It's beyond.
It leaves me as the only person able to speak for how I feel, which maybe isn't so horrible, though sometimes I wish I could read more things that felt exactly right and less that felt so wrong. (I'm sure there's a better example for the second one, but I only read so many diaries, and lately, perceptions doesn't strike the chord. So to speak.)
A year ago. Yes, it is one year ago today, and as early as it is, most of us will be sick of reading, hearing, talking about it by the end. Still, it does do something to me to type 9/11 as the date. It does do something to have the tragedy transferred to numbers. Somehow something that small being that big makes it accessible. And I'll admit, I don't access it for long; I pull myself away. Maybe it isn't that I don't understand, but that I'm not yet ready to. It hasn't been one year for me.
One year. I know how painful that can be.
A year ago today was brilliant. I woke up there, I laughed and joked with Sara, with Stacy, and Steph, and all the others. I ate breakfast in the room with the big windows that looked out onto the green lake. Little ducks appearing in the muck, not looking pleased; trees hung over the scene, still caught with mist. I finished breakfast, and I probably complained a little that I didn't want to go upstairs because as eager as I was to leave the dining room, I never wanted to go back up, and when we got there, I had to take my meds, and yes, I had to go to group.
And group was good. I'm sure it was. I don't remember being a wreck afterward, so I probably watched other people be wrecks, in the must-stay-calm, withdrawn way of the newcomer I was. (Yes, Tracy was there, but then, I was still just one-week-older than that dear, and I held onto my newness with the desperation of a toy.)
Jenny was supposed to leave the next day. She'd been there for a veritable eternity, and finally, finally was supposed to leave. And then Stacy was left the group to take a phone call, and she pulled Jenny out of the room, and Jenny came back frustrated to the point of tears. Something had happened at the World Trade Center. Something stupid with some planes. And the airlines were all screwed up, and maybe, maybe, she wasn't going to get home on time.
And after six months, when you've been there as long as you need to and you're ready to find a different home, maybe not being able to leave is as hard as having to. We felt for her. We laughed a little at her horrid luck, at how personally she was taking Whatever-Happened-In-New-York, but we felt for her.
I guess, then, group sort of tapered into snack as it often did- no clear-cut sort of end. And someone must have come, Leann maybe- as she was the type to storm in and say "turn on the television" and I remember her being very upset by it- and we were watching it on television. People were saying "terrorism"- planes intentionally flown into buildings, the type of wreckage we saw from Turkey, from far-far away, but here? In the city where my sister sleeps?
And we started to feed each other's anxiety. Because we knew we had to feel this, too. It was important. It was horrible. I finally managed to find real fear over my sister and her boyfriend (who works in the financial district), over the phones being jammed with calls, keeping me unable to get through. I heard from my mom that Sarah and Steve were both ok (though even now, I think that's purely physically); I went and ate my snack. I remember Stacy was in regulated-trauma mode, while Steph was just ok. I laughed at how ok she was, and she laughed back. These kinds of things just didn't get to her, she said.
I felt it. I don't know. It wasn't meant as callous, and I don't want to be that callous now. I know how many lives were lost, and I can multiply that by the grief I've felt the past eight months. Though really, grief gets to a certain level and doesn't go beyond. I can understand what so many people are going through- having lost people, the way I've lost. Being torn from themselves, terrified for their safety. Yes, I've been there, too. But not with this. I watched the footage and said, "This is the worst thing to happen since Columbine." And someone said to me, "Mary, this is *worse* than Columbine," which silenced me, but didn't register. If grief levels off, maybe fear did, too. Everything I'd scraped to keep together, every bit of self and sanity, disintegrated after April 20th. It took me years to start to understand why it had such impact, but it did. And nothing's worse than that. Higher casualties, yes, more smoke, more devastation. But me. I was in the only place I've ever felt safe doing work so hard it didn't allow for outside feeling. I was in a place of pure self-centeredness, trying to take what the world, small and big, with all its tragedy, had taken from me. I didn't have any fear or any grief. I had a sort of nervous excitement, something to get worked-up over was high-commodity- maybe still is. And even when there was talk of our safe haven being so safe that a talk between officials would take place nearby, even when the likely threat of that registered, I didn't feel the fear. I didn't watch hours upon hours of newscasts on it, the way I did in '98. When the news was on, I watched it intently, but with an uncharacteristic distance from the action. Eventually, someone would say, "Nothing's happened in three hours. Can we watch cartoons?"
The channel'd flip.
I had a different experience. For me, the attacks, the wreckage, the tragedy, had been ongoing for years; it was the safety that was new. I know it must be hard for those whose safety was infringed, but mine was only magnified. I was watching the type of news that would have left me without bones a month before, and I was still ok. My safety was unflinching, and I'd never had that before.
The next day, they had a Christian prayer service at the main hospital. I didn't go. Instead I made a comment in Dwight's hearing about how I wished we could do something else, something like the sage cleansing ritual we'd done with him, and he immediately offered to meet us on the ropes course, in the trees. Sara, Brittany, me, I think. Dwight. I let the smoke wash over me, so sweet, so right, and I told him I was grateful. That moment out in the air. It allowed me to honor what I don't yet understand. And it allowed me to honor my way of feeling it, my way of grieving it, my way that had nothing to do with hands held in a circle, heads bowed, our father who art* in heaven, and so forth.
That's the thing about smoke. It comes in the attacks and the candles we light to grieve them. It stands to see both sides.
It's cleansing.
c
*I typed aren't accidentally. that's not the type of slip I want to keep. I'm working...
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