Project Rebirth

by Dr. Robin Stern

  But then the headmaster said something that fractured his numbness: “Our nation is under attack.”

  The words were so definitive, so grave. Nick suddenly felt ill. He didn’t want to be here, among all of these concerned strangers, these anonymous faces who had no idea who he was, who his mother was, the danger she was in. He slipped outside, slumped onto a nearby bench, and started crying.

  If Nick had been back at Hunter College High, his old school, he would have been surrounded by friends who not only knew his mom had just taken a job in the World Trade Center, but knew what her chocolate chip cookies tasted like, knew how her voice traveled up flights of stairs with ease, knew how much he depended on her for wisdom and comfort. In Princeton, he knew almost no one, and those he had met in his one week at the Lawrenceville School certainly had no idea that his mother was potentially scared, hurt, or, the unthinkable, dead. Nick had never felt so alone.

  He launched into problem-solving mode. What floor did his mother say she worked on again? He racked his brain for the number. What did she last say to him when she left this morning? Was it “I love you”? Where was she right at this very moment? Was she scared? Had she called his dad? How could he get to her?

  As a dozen unanswerable questions raced through his brain, his squash coach wandered over and sat next to him. “Do you want to use my cell phone to try to call her?” he asked.

  Nick grabbed the cell with great relief. At least one person knew him well enough to know that this was not just a weird morning, but a personal crisis. Nick and his parents had met the squash coach before he even started at Lawrenceville. The coach knew that his mom worked in the financial industry.

  Nick dialed his mom’s number, but her voice mail immediately picked up. “No answer,” he said, looking up at his coach through his tears.

  “Let me give you a ride home.”

  When Nick got there, home had already gone from being the usual boisterous place to a place of tense limbo. Nick’s longtime housekeeper cried, devastated that her employer and friend was suddenly missing. His little brother and sister were weepy and confused. His dad was already in the car trying to get to New York.

  As the news crept in, hope slipped out. Catherine worked on the 104th floor, right above the impact of the plane. If she, by some miracle, survived the explosion that the plane created, there was little hope that she could have gotten out of the tower—the elevators and staircases had most likely been destroyed. There was no news from other Cantor Fitzgerald employees. Reportedly, hospital staff in downtown Manhattan waited for injured survivors that, largely, never showed up. It was evident rather quickly that if you were in the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, you most likely escaped uninjured or perished.

  Nick’s father returned, unable to get to Manhattan. The kids went for a swim in their backyard pool, just to do something, then sort of drifted in and out of rooms like zombies. Nick and his father tried to explain the situation in the least frightening terms possible to six-year-old Dylan and ten-year-old Sydney, but there really was no way to make it less awful. As night fell, they all settled into David and Catherine’s big bed together to try to make it through the night. Their first night without her.

  On September 22, 2001, Nick climbed the steps to the podium to deliver his mother’s eulogy. He looked out at the sea of grieving faces belonging to his mother’s friends and old colleagues, extended family and old roommates. Some people, he realized, he’d never even set eyes on before. All of these sad women and men—some of them familiar, some of them strangers—had been touched by his mother.

  He was not surprised there were so many of them. His mother had lived that kind of life—making friends wherever she went. “She loved life more than anyone I knew. She just loved living,” Nick explained. What did surprise him was how lonely he felt even in the midst of so much community. The whole concept of a funeral felt strange, like an ill-fitting suit, formal and performative. But he knew it would be important to his mom that he speak, and he wanted to continue to honor her.

  He stood before the crowd, cleared his throat, and began:My mom was remarkable. She was so enthusiastic about everything she did. She always had her own individual views and sense of reason. She was a great daughter, a fantastic sister, a wonderful wife, and most importantly, she was an amazing mother.

  Just as Nick finished this sentence, a baby sparrow, as tiny as a plum, landed on his head. The audience collectively gasped. “It landed so gently,” he remembers, “that I thought it was a piece of paper or something. It didn’t fly into my head. It very deliberately landed there. It wasn’t almost perfect. It was perfect.”

  When Nick reached up to figure out what it was, the sparrow allowed him to pick it up and hold it in his hand. He looked into its tiny black eyes for a moment and, as impossible as it sounds, felt his mom stare back. He remembers, “I could swear to God there was some sort of recognition. It looked at me and then it flew away.”

  Nick is not a religious person or someone interested in new age theories. He’s never believed in reincarnation or even some sort of thin veil between life and death. Even at the kind of moments when most people look to some sort of faith or philosophy to comfort them, to assure them that their loved one is in a better place, Nick does not. He likes facts—measurable and clear. He’s comforted most by straight talk.

  But despite Nick’s lack of belief in God or a greater force in the universe, he remains convinced that what he experienced that day was supernatural. “There is no doubt in my mind that my mom was there and that there was something incredibly spiritual about it,” Nick says. “It can’t be explained.”

  The experience of loss, like Nick’s, like anyone’s, really, is one of profound ineffability. We create stories around these experiences so that we can understand them better, but in truth, death often puts people face-to-face with the inexplicable nature of life, death, and love. Nick explored this later in his eulogy for his mom:So what will I do now without her? I’ll be fine. She has given me enough so that I will be able to get through this, and that is what determines a great mother. In a weird way, I feel she has prepared me for all of this.

  In a sense, the visitation of the sparrow was one more form of preparation. Nick’s experience that day transcended all of his comfortable habits of mind. Even Nick, whose bourgeoning worldview was thrown off kilter by this spiritual experience, recognizes it as a gift: “It was beautiful. I’m incredibly glad that it happened. I really didn’t have any faith that she was anywhere before that. Afterwards, I think I did. I think she’s somewhere.”

  Somewhere. This is the province of grieving as people struggle to imagine where it is that their loved one has gone. Bonanno, author of The Other Side of Sadness, writes, “Death pulls at the veil of mundane life and, at least temporarily, exposes us to a universe of questions, many of which have no clear answer.” Such was the case for Nick. In fact, his mom’s death led him down a long, sometimes treacherous path of questioning—questioning his country, his friends, his family, and, most affecting of all, his future.

  In the years following September 11, Nick understandably struggled. His English teacher, who had also lost his mom as a teenager, talked openly about how difficult it was to process and how much writing had served as his outlet in the midst of mourning. Nick took his advice to heart. After everyone else in the house had gone to bed, he would often start to write—letting the words flow out of him in a way that tears never seemed to. “Business and math are still my biggest interests,” Nick explains, shortly after losing his mom. “But that’s not all there is. I find great comfort in writing.”

  Comfort had become a sparse commodity after his mom’s death. Nick was accustomed to looking to his mom for comfort, but thoughts of her actually provoked pain now; every time he thought of her, it was as if he were a small child, reaching for a security blanket, only to be pricked by a splinter woven through its shabby threads.

  In December of 2001, Nick, his father, and his t
wo siblings moved back to Brooklyn Heights, surrounded, once again, by all the familiar haunts. And yet, nothing felt the same. Not only was his mom no longer there to welcome him home or ask him about his day, but his entire family composition was changing. Nick’s father, David, started dating one of Nick’s mother’s good friends, Bobbi. They would go on to marry in April of 2003.

  Nick found comfort in other places—namely, global financial services firm Cantor Fitzgerald, where he got a highly competitive internship when he was just seventeen years old.

  Cantor Fitzgerald, whose corporate headquarters were unluckily located on floors 101 through 105 of One World Trade Center, right above the impact zone, lost 658 employees in the attacks on September 11, Nick’s mom among them. That was two-thirds of their workforce at the time and substantially more than the proportion of employees lost by any of the other businesses in the World Trade Center, or even the police or fire departments.

  From the moment Nick started interviewing with Cantor, he felt like he had found his people: “Everyone there either lost someone close to them or works next to someone who lost someone close to them. Everyone was affected.”

  Being surrounded by people who had also been directly affected by September 11th was a real relief for Nick. While the thirty students who lost a parent at nearby private school, Dalton, for example, had one another to lean on, Nick didn’t have a lot of close friends who were also in mourning. At Cantor, he not only learned about every facet of financial services, but felt surrounded by people who understood his loss, and—in a sense—reunited him with his mom. In 2003, he explains, “Every day I worked there, I thought about my mom. I love it there.”

  “In five years, I don’t want to work on Wall Street,” Nick explains with that special sureness unique to teenagers. “I want to work for Cantor. I could see myself working there for the rest of my life. I would love to run Cantor Fitzgerald one day.”

  Eight-year-old Dylan pressed his nose to the glass, making a circle of fog above the buckets of rocky road and mint chocolate chip. Nick smiled as he watched his little brother deliberate over what flavor to get, as if it were a life-or-death decision. Sydney was happy to be with her brothers but, at twelve, already too mature to get giddy about ice cream. She had always been wise beyond her years, but the last two had aged her even more.

  This wasn’t just a random evening at the ice cream parlor in Brooklyn Heights. This was a tradition. During Nick’s inspiring internship period, he met legendary Cantor CEO Howard Lutnick, whose own brother was killed in the attacks and who had pledged to keep the company going in honor of all those lost. Nick heard that Lutnick had a weekly tradition of taking his two kids, his wife, and his best friend’s two kids out for a Thursday evening dinner. He decided that he would start his own tradition with his little brother and sister, who he felt needed a chance to keep their mother’s memory alive. Almost weekly, he would take Dylan and Sydney to get ice cream, and they would swap memories, stories, and questions about their mother.

  The three siblings, armed with an ice cream cone each, headed down Montague Street and toward the Brooklyn Heights Promenade. The small stretch of walkways, benches, and parks from Remsen Street to Orange Street had an unparalleled view of many of New York City’s most famous landmarks: Staten Island, Governors Island, the Statue of Liberty, Ellis Island, South Street Seaport, Fulton Fish Market, the Brooklyn Bridge, and, indeed, Lower Manhattan’s forever-altered skyline. As Nick, Dylan, and Sydney settled onto a bench, their gaze stretched across the glittering water of the East River and to the huddle of skyscrapers beyond. The two missing towers loomed like ghosts.

  “Nick, is there any chance that our daddy will need to be replaced?” Dylan asked, eyes wide with fear. Dylan was adopted, so he knew that he had, at first, had a biological mom, then his mommy, Catherine, and now a stepmom.

  “Daddy’s not going anywhere,” Nick reassured him. “And your mommy wanted to be your mom for the rest of your life. If there was any way that she could have gotten out, she would have, because she wanted to come home to you.”

  Unlike many who lost loved ones on September 11 who preferred to stay away from the media coverage and analysis regarding the attacks, Nick was deeply curious about the events that led to his mother’s death. He studied 9/11 documentary specials on television, of which there were dozens within the first few years, looking for clues as to what his mother may have been through in those fateful minutes. “I watch like a detective,” he explains. “The saddest part is that I don’t get anywhere. I don’t know anything more about what might have happened to my mom.”

  Nick examined the facts over and over again, postulating as to where his mom might have been at exactly 8:46 a.m. eastern standard time—the bathroom? Grabbing a cup of coffee? Sitting at her desk? That was when American Airlines Flight 11 collided with the North Tower, scouring off the thermal insulation on the core columns at temperatures of upward of 1,292 degrees Fahrenheit. But the facts didn’t add up to any more comprehensive understanding. Nick still felt at a loss. There was no one left to give an eyewitness account of what it was like on the 105th floor, where his mother had been. “My best guess and my best hope is that it was instant for her,” Nick says, definitive and sad.

  The alternative—that she suffered, or had some inkling of the magnitude of the violence she was about to face—is too much for him to handle: “You never want to think of your mom being scared. That’s the hardest thing for me.”

  In the early years, Nick dreamed about his mother or the events of September 11 about once a week. His nightmares were filled with terrorist attacks, missed connections with his endangered mom, airplanes, and fire. One night, he was blessed with a wholly different scenario: “I had this one dream where I just hugged my mom for a really, really long time,” he remembers. “It was a little scary, because she looked weak, kind of frail, which I think relates to me not knowing what happened to her. But it felt so nice to grab her, to put my face in her hair and just smell her. For those ten minutes, it was real.”

  Nick was surprised at how visceral his mourning really was. Though he wasn’t able to cry, he felt a physical ache. “I think about my mom and my heart literally hurts. It’s a very weird sensation,” he explains, putting his right hand on his chest. “Right here, my heart hurts.”

  He also struggled with anxiety—a sense, as he put it, that he had “perpetually forgot something, like something is always missing.”

  Nick, a self-described “technical kid,” initially thought that his acute sadness would last about a year or two. When the second anniversary came and went, he realized that mourning has a far more messy and unpredictable texture than he had once guessed. “I put a time frame on my healing. It’s been a big wake-up call, this whole process. You can’t work to heal faster. You should let it happen. You shouldn’t be forcing anything. Let your body do what it has to do, bit by bit.”

  Most of us have an inaccurate idea about the grief process. Perhaps no one is as tied to the word “grief” in the public consciousness as Dr. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, a Swiss-born psychiatrist known for creating the field of thanatology, or near-death studies. After moving to Chicago with her husband in the midsixties, Kübler-Ross was shocked to find that Americans were so conflicted about death as to appear indifferent when she observed them in the hospital setting where she was working. Determined to blow open the conversation about death and dying, Kübler-Ross started interviewing patients who faced an imminent death about the different emotions they were experiencing.

  What emerged was the Kübler-Ross model, five distinct and sequential stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. The model traveled far and wide via her 1969 book, On Death and Dying, which transformed the way we understood grief. For decades to come, Kübler-Ross’s model was the accepted wisdom, influencing psychologists, doctors, clergy, and the public at large.

  It turns out that as well intentioned as Kübler-Ross was, she was also off the mark. M
ore recent, scientifically rigorous research has proven that grief is less a sequential path through distinct stages and more a process of oscillation—up and down, up and down. In other words, we don’t move from one stage on to the next, never to return to that way of relating to our loved one’s death. Instead we experience a constant combination of emotions, sometimes feeling lighter and liberated from our grief, and sometimes heavier and more mired in our sadness. The light times make the heavy times bearable.

  The pioneer of this new model for understanding grief, Dr. George Bonanno, based his findings on longitudinal studies of people who had lost loved ones—probing their emotional and behavioral reactions over a substantial period of time. What he found was heartening as well as surprising. Our grief doesn’t metabolize as we “work” through the stages, like alcoholics recovering from an addiction; our grief dissipates over a period of time as we ride the necessary waves—as Nick so aptly put it, “bit by bit.”

  A child who loses his or her mother, of course, is in a unique grieving situation. Three thousand kids lost at least one parent in the attacks on September 11. Their average age was nine years old. Tuesday’s Children and other organizations were created to help these thousands of young mourners deal with their loss and find camaraderie in one another, but Nick was a bit older than most of the kids who participated in groups like these and was fiercely independent, besides. Instead, he found solace in a group of tight-knit friends, in his new Cantor family, and in his late-night writing sessions, where he resurrected his mom on paper to keep him company in his newly quiet house.