Project Rebirth

by Dr. Robin Stern

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Introduction

  A Little Bird Told Me

  The Light at the Top

  Never Forget to Do Your Part

  The Unlikely Activist

  A Life Built on Brotherhood

  Digging Out of the Darkness

  Advancing Is Perfection

  Becoming Whole Again

  Conclusion

  Acknowledgements

  Appendix A: - Centers or Organizations Devoted to Dealing with Grief, Trauma, ...

  Appendix B: - Books on Grief, Loss, and Resilience

  Appendix C: - Films on Grief, Loss, and Resilience

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  Published by Dutton, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  First printing, August 2011

  Copyright © 2011 by Robin Stern and Courtney E. Martin

  All rights reserved

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  ISBN : 978-1-101-54348-1

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  We dedicate this book to all those who cared for the survivors

  of the tragedy on September 11, 2001, including the emergency

  workers, therapists, healers, educators, doctors, nurses, spiritual

  leaders, and, of course, their families and friends.

  Their rebirth is in no small part your legacy as well.

  Introduction

  Construction workers in hard hats and steel-toed boots mill around the new shipment of steel, the steam from their coffee hanging in the early morning air around Ground Zero. A trailer door swings open and an architect walks out, rolled-up plans in one hand, iPhone in the other. He looks on as a group of workers weld giant metal skeletons together, sparks flying past ladders and giant spools of cable and tarps covering slats of wood.

  This is what it looks like to physically rebuild after devastation.

  But what does it look like to emotionally and spiritually rebuild? This was the question that preoccupied us—a journalist and a psychoanalyst—as we mined the lives of those who had been directly affected by the tragic events of September 11, 2001. We wanted to understand how ordinary people recover from grief, dust off the ashes of devastation, make sense of injustice and just plain bad luck, and emerge new, different, maybe even more whole.

  We were not aiming for pat lessons. Too much has already been written that tries to reduce what happened on that fateful day into feel-good sound bites, political propaganda, or ratings-hyping melodrama. September 11th, like every historic moment, has been shaped and shifted, prodded and poked, adopted and adapted for various purposes over the past ten years. Most often, this work has been done with good intentions, but too much of the time, the true depth of the physical, emotional, and sometimes spiritual transformations that were rooted in that day’s tragic events were lost.

  There are such layers to the story of September 11th and its survivors, such nuances, such paradox. There is heroism and cowardice, nurturance and violence, anger and love—the whole panoply of human emotions circulating around this one day of unimaginable loss. Only that greatest and most difficult teacher of all, time, could really offer us the insights that we needed to do justice to these eight stories. It has now been ten full years since we first saw that indelible image of a Boeing 757 crashing into the North Tower of the World Trade Center, unbelievable as that is.

  In those ten years, so much has happened. Technologically, culturally, and politically, we live in a truly new world—one where disasters often play out online before anyone thinks to turn on a television, as they did on September 11th. There are cottage industries and whole branches of the government devoted to fighting the kind of threat we faced on September 11th. Even our language is different—“terrorism” has become a household word, something that could slip off the tongue of any ten-year-old in this nation. We watch revolutions and natural disasters play out on Twitter and send donations via text message—all of which would have been inconceivable in the fateful fall of 2001.

  But this book is not about technological or cultural shifts, nor is it about the analysis of national security advisers or international development experts. This book is not about politics or media or even the controversy that has surrounded the revisioning of Ground Zero or the creation of the September 11th Museum. This book is about the expertise and experiences of regular people. It is about Nick, Brian, Charles, Larry, Tim, Joe, Debbie, and Tanya—eight studies in grief and resilience, loss and progress, sadness and transformation.

  These lessons, after all, are most commonly culled from extraordinary circumstances, but their roots are universal. We all lose. We all grieve. We are all compelled to recover. For most of us, this experience occurs as part of life’s natural, but inevitable, sadness—a mother passing away from breast cancer, a life partner breaking one’s heart by leaving for someone else, a friend struck by a heart attack despite seeming healthy. Though these circumstances are statistically ordinary, they are no less than deeply painful, leaving us grappling for wisdom and hope amid the sudden sense of foreign and consuming darkness.

  But the extraordinary, too, is becoming more ordinary. Sudden disasters, like the one that struck America on September 11, 2001, are increasingly common because of global terrorism and climate change. “Where were you the day Kennedy was assassinated?” has become “Where were you the day the earthquake devastated Haiti? Where were you the day Katrina decimated New Orleans? Where were you when the World Trade towers and the Pentagon were hit?” In our increasingly insecure world, we are all subject to disaster and the collective project of reconstituting our communities, not to mention our worldview, afterward.

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nbsp; We were both in New York on September 11th. Robin, who has had her own psychoanalytic practice for thirty years, was on her way to see some patients that morning (eventually, she would counsel many clients directly affected by September 11th). Courtney was still asleep in her Barnard College dorm when the first plane hit the towers.

  Robin’s first thoughts, upon finding out about the terrorist attacks, were of her two children, Scott and Melissa, and her husband, Frank. Were they safe? How could she immediately get to them? Courtney’s first thoughts were also of her family—her parents so far away in Colorado Springs, her brother even farther in San Francisco. These questions quickly migrated to the future. What did this all mean about her senior year, her future beyond college, the country’s future?

  Robin’s family and Courtney’s dreams were safe, although forever changed by that horrible day. In the years that followed, we would become writing partners, but more than that, dear friends. When Project Rebirth came about, we jumped at the chance to work together, especially with such historic and profound stories as those found in this book. Courtney brings her journalistic training to the page, and Robin brings her vast experience as a clinician to help to present the grieving process in a new way. We both strongly believe that stories are tools of transformation—Courtney’s usually live on the page and Robin’s, more often, in the safe haven of her clinical practice—and that is also why the format of this book was so appealing to us.

  In this book, we have brought both of our sensibilities and areas of expertise to bear, and we hope it makes for an approachable, layered, and inspiring read. Having the opportunity to delve into these stories, discuss them over countless lunches and coffees, laugh and cry together, and ask the subjects, ourselves, and each other so many big questions has been a gift of indescribable proportions. We hope the reverence we have for these people’s lives is reflected in the book that you are about to experience.

  As explained above, this book is not about politics. This book is about the personal. It is about the lives—logistical, emotional, unique, and inspiring—that are shattered by moments like 8:46 A.M., September 11, 2001, and then put back together during the years that followed. It is also not a book about psychology, per se. Though Robin is a psychoanalyst by training, she’s more committed to practical lessons than abstract theory. Theory isn’t supple and nuanced enough, in our view, to truly wrap itself around the breadth and depth of these stories. As sociologist Kai T. Erikson wrote of survivors whom he profiled, “People like that have been the victims of so many different forces outside their control that one hesitates to imprison them again between the cold parentheses of a theory.”

  Instead, we listened to the testimony of these survivors, letting them be the real authorities on their own grieving and healing processes. We have applied psychological insights when it seemed necessary and translated them for the layperson, more out of an instinct to share ideas than an attempt to justify what is evident: Human beings are both undeniably fragile and astoundingly resilient.

  Grief, like any other emotional process, is as unique as a fingerprint. In the pages that follow, you will get a sense of where the contemporary thinking is on grief, having moved away from old ideas. One of the things that we were so struck by as we immersed ourselves in these stories—researching, interviewing, writing, discussing, revising, and most important, listening to the voices and stories of 9/11 survivors—was that the public dialogue on loss has been severely limited. If you ask the average person what they know about grief, they will usually throw out the phrase “stages of grief.” Either knowingly or not, many of us reference the influential theory of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, in which she posited that there were five distinct stages of grief that each person must go through. But the latest research on loss proves that Kübler-Ross’s once ground-breaking theory was inadequate to describe the full range of grief reactions. The average person’s journey through grief is far less uniform—more like a roller coaster than a ski lift.

  Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, made his own lasting impression on the public psyche when it comes to loss. Freud posited his foundational theory of grieving in his 1917 essay, “Mourning and Melancholia,” in which he attempted to distinguish between healthy grieving and melancholia, a state of ongoing depression. He argued that one must do “mourning work,” responding to the “call of reality” until she can “renounce the object by declaring its death” (the object being the lost loved one). The melancholic mourner, in contrast, becomes destructively attached to a lost loved one, unable to “kill” him or her off in one’s own mind.

  As you’ll see in the coming pages, the individuals who lost loved ones in the attacks of September 11th, did not so much work through their grief—suggesting a finite amount of sadness, eventually depleted to nothing—as open up to it, acknowledge it, integrate it. No mourner chose to cease thinking about their beloved, so much as shift the nature of the relationship—from in the flesh to in the mind and heart. A mother, lost, is no longer a source of homemade soup and a good, long dinner conversation, but she still influences her son in a daily, sacred way. A fiancé, dead so young and suddenly, can no longer caress the bare shoulder of his love, but the memory of his tenderness can still make her feel loved.

  We know, then, what grief is not—direct, contained, predictable. What it is, well, that’s still being explored by some of psychology’s finest thinkers and researchers. In this book, you will see the grief process wax and wane in the lives of real, relatable people. This storied approach is critical, as the science around grief continues to tie itself up in knots about how to describe the widely variant types of sadness that affect the grieving human. Dr. Kathy Shear of Columbia University describes the emotional experience of grief as akin to the physical experience of inflammation: “We don’t think of natural grief as an illness, primarily because there’s so much baggage associated with illness. But some very prominent thinkers and researchers have, in fact, said that we should consider grief similar to inflammation, a natural healing response to injury.” In this case, of course, the injury is the loss, and one’s emotional defenses, like the immune system, rise up to process and heal the psyche.

  Joan Didion, acclaimed memoirist, took great comfort in a different metaphor for grief’s all-consuming hold on a widow’s consciousness: waves. In her engrossing account of her husband’s death and what came after, The Year of Magical Thinking, she references Dr. Michael Lindemann’s work. The chief of psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital, he defines grief as “sensations of somatic distress occurring in waves lasting from twenty minutes to an hour at a time.”

  Dr. George Bonanno, also of Columbia University, has studied grief and trauma over two decades and in a variety of contexts, many of them with parallels to September 11th. He believes that waves like the ones Lindemann describes are an accurate depiction of a state that comes and goes, rather than sticking around in some unceasing, uniform way. Additionally, he argues that there are four potential trajectories of grief: “resilience, recovery, chronic dysfunction, and delayed grief or trauma.”

  The notion of “delayed grief” is a highly contested one. Some well-respected experts in the field, Shear among the most vocal, have argued that about 10 percent of bereaved people experience complicated grief, marked by the presence of prolonged feelings of disbelief and anger, a sense of emptiness, suicidal thoughts, and estrangement from other people. In fact, according to the Canadian Medical Association Journal, the next edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders—the DSM-5, scheduled for publication in 2013—is likely to contain a new entry called “bereavement-related disorder,” which will attempt to describe and classify grief that goes on and on.

  Dr. Leeat Granek, a Toronto-based psychologist, worries that such an inclusion pathologizes grief, rather than seeing it as a normal part of the human experience: “Many of the mental illnesses in the DSM are social constructions that are based on the cultural zeitgeist at the mom
ent. We already live in a culture that is intolerant of grief and loss in general. The message is often, ‘You need to move on, you need to see someone.’” Granek is leading a bourgeoning movement advocating for the reconceptualization of grief, particularly in the North American context, where is has been misunderstood and neglected for too long. The cultural context within which grief emerges is key in understanding how we process. The brave eight who are featured in this book all mourned their losses in the United States, but each has very particular cultural scripts within that commonality.

  Understanding grief, in all its manifestations and cultural mores, is not just beneficial for our own inevitable experiences of loss, but so that we might support others through theirs. Megan O’Rourke reflected on her grief process following her own mother’s death in a series for Slate.com, which evolved into her book, The Long Goodbye . She explains, “I am not surprised to find that it is a lonely life: After all, the person who brought me into the world is gone. But it is more than that. I feel not just that I am, but that the world around me is deeply unprepared to deal with grief.”

  She goes on to detail the well-intentioned yet unsatisfying emails that she got from friends and colleagues following her mother’s death. They echoed one another, sympathetic, yet inadequate: “At least she’s no longer suffering.” O’Rourke was crushed by the lack of wise support. She is not alone. So many of us have felt abandoned during times of great suffering, left to the fumbling condolences of a world that is both uninformed about grief and also afraid of what it indicates: that we all love and lose, that we all will die. It’s imperative that we become more aware of the complex truths about grief, and in turn, more skillful in comforting one another, so that we, too, may one day receive the same substantial support in return.