Project Rebirth

by Dr. Robin Stern

  Nick finished high school in 2004 with a stellar academic record and a reputation as one of the best squash players in the country, earning him admission into Yale University, his first choice. He promised Sydney and Dylan that, though he couldn’t continue to take them out for ice cream every week, they could expect regular phone calls from their big brother.

  His third day at Yale happened to coincide with what would have been his mother’s forty-ninth birthday. Nick felt a terrible sense of déjà vu. Here he was, at a new school, among people who didn’t know him, experiencing a deep, inexplicable sadness unfit for the casual conversations typical of getting-to-know-you banter.

  Deciding when and how to tell people about his very personal connection to the events of September 11 was consistently difficult for Nick. He didn’t want to be known as “that kid who lost his mom on September 11,” yet he didn’t overlook the importance of cluing new friends into a huge part of who he was. “It’s one of the hardest parts of meeting new people,” he says. “It feels like this secret.”

  Nick hesitated telling people, in large part because he was tired of dealing with the awkwardness of the interaction. “I almost feel embarrassed for them,” he explains. “Not that I would do any better, but I don’t want to hear any more ‘I’m sorrys.’”

  This ongoing struggle was put into stark relief when Nick decided to take a small seminar at Yale called Narratives of 9/11, in which students read and discussed novels, articles, and obituaries and watched films related to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Though the professor knew that Nick had lost his mother in the attacks, none of the other students did. Nick wanted it that way. “It was so valuable to be able to talk to a group of twenty other kids, who are basically my age and don’t know my situation,” he explains. “I learned so much that I never would have been able to learn if people knew. Some of the things that were said would not have been said.”

  One day, for example, the students discussed a few selections from the New York Times’ powerful Portraits of Grief series, in which the Times published roughly two hundred words—impressionistic, rather than comprehensive—on every human being who perished in the World Trade Center attacks.

  Reading an obituary of one of the Cantor workers, a student expressed that he was sick of hearing about another rich broker. Nick realized that someone could have the same thought reading his mother’s obituary. (Her portrait, incidentally, focused on Nick’s encounter with the bird while giving his mother’s eulogy.) He held his tongue and was strangely grateful to be exposed to this kind of thinking: “Some comments really made me angry: ‘These rich traders only care about money. They’re a symbol of this capitalist structure. They had it coming.’ It was still refreshing to be able to talk about September 11th without people being careful about it.”

  It was as if, through his anonymity in the Narratives of 9/11 class, Nick was able to experience what it would have been like to relate to the event as just another American—someone with an important connection by nationality, but not a crushing connection by blood.

  This was not the only English class that Nick took. Though he majored in economics and spent his summers interning at finance firms, he still felt deeply drawn to writing. “The more I want to get into the financial industry,” Nick explains, “the more I want to take classes that have nothing to do with it. I really like to write. I wouldn’t mind working on Wall Street for however long and then starting a writing career.”

  As the years wore on, Nick was increasingly torn about the direction in which his future was moving. On the one hand, he experienced his summer internships in the financial sector as times of powerful reconnection with his mom. In the summer of 2005, he was back at Cantor, this time on the trading desk (a step up from previous years). The head of the trading desk had worked with Nick’s mom for ten years, and others on the floor knew her well. They would stop by and check in with Nick, sometimes telling him stories about her no-holds-barred approach to her work. “I knew my mom was successful, but it was so nice to hear little stories,” he explains.

  The stories, however, paled in comparison to what it would have been like to have his mother around. “It sucks. I’d love to sit down with her and talk about sales, the trades she’s done, tricks of the trade . . . it sucks,” Nick explains, adding one more time, “It sucks.”

  As much as he felt drawn to the financial sector—to be close to his mom and to continue her legacy, Nick was slowly realizing that his favorite classes weren’t in the economics department, and his moments of feeling most alive involved not numbers, but words. A poetry class during his sophomore year got him writing and remembering his mom in a different way. In the summer that followed, he wrote every single day, getting most of his ideas from his personal journal.

  Nick began wrestling with these two sides of himself. Should he go into the fast-paced, high-earning world of finance that his mother had inhabited from nine to five each day, or the more intimate world of words? As graduation approached, he admitted, “I don’t really know what I want to do, so that’s kind of terrifying.”

  While he’d done everything necessary over the past eight years to line up a job in finance—the competitive, grueling internships, the networking and academic performance, the anxiety-producing series of interviews, the Series 7 and 63 tests—he just wasn’t sure if the path he’d always seen for himself was really the one he should go down. “There’s no one there to say, ‘Take the road slightly less traveled. Take a chance for a couple of years.’”

  For Nick, the decision of what to do with his future was a question not just of what kind of work he might find most fulfilling, but ultimately of what kind of work would honor his mother most powerfully. Going into finance felt like a very direct way to keep her legacy alive: “I think I would feel extremely proud to do something that my mother never got the opportunity to do, in her name, for her. Maybe get to the top. Maybe that’s silly. I don’t know. I don’t know if that’s what my mother would have wanted at all, but for whatever reason I feel like I need to do that, to pick up where she left off. She had another eighteen years in her before she retired. I almost feel like I need to put that time in for her.”

  In 2008, Nick decided to take a job at Lehman Brothers. Every morning as he took the subway to work, a steaming cup of coffee in one hand, he would imagine that his mom could be sitting across from him, slogging through her daily commute just like him, trying to wake up, just like him. Imagining the ways in which she’d done just these things, felt just these ways, thought about just these things, felt strangely intimate—like they could still share live, not just remembered, moments.

  But as much as his first days in the “real world” of work were exciting, as much as he still felt close to his mother, he wasn’t happy. The days were long and exhausting. They took a lot out of him. He began to come to terms with the fact that he had been depressed: “I dealt with the immediate aftermath of my mother’s death pretty well, and then there were a couple of years when I felt like I should be over it,” he explains. “If I could get through my mother’s death, I thought, then nothing could depress me ever again. If I got over it, then I should just be happy. Happy forever.”

  The reality, of course, was very different from that. “I was actually kind of upset a lot of the time. I was numb,” Nick admits. “It’s almost like I can’t even remember the last two years of my life. It’s like one long, blurry day.”

  Nick was not alone. A study appearing in the April 2007 edition of Biological Psychiatry found that the rate for psychiatric disorders more than doubled for children who lost a parent in the World Trade Center terrorist attacks on September 11th. More than half of the bereaved children struggled with anxiety, and about 10 percent were diagnosed with major depression disorder.

  This is easily understandable when one considers not only the weight of grief more generally, but the weight of grief on a developing child or adolescent. Helen Fitzgerald, author of The Grieving Teen, expla
ins: “Fearing the vulnerability that comes with expression, they look for distractions rather than stay with the grief process long enough to find real relief.” Staying with that process requires a resiliency that teenagers like Nick, left depleted and disillusioned by their loss, often don’t have.

  Though Nick was able to acknowledge that he was depressed, he still wasn’t able to express his sadness. Nick still didn’t cry. “It’s more of a deep, aching sadness. It doesn’t make me want to cry tears. It makes my body ache. And then anger comes.”

  Some of the anger that Nick had been harboring for so long—a typical reaction of a grieving child toward the parent who remains, or in the case of a terrorist attack, the culprits—was dissipating. Now it was showing up in unlikely places. Nick had another dream about his mother. In this one, she suddenly returned from a business trip in Russia, where she’d been since September 11, 2001. Nick was furious with her, yelling, “Why the fuck didn’t you call me for five years? Why didn’t you say good-bye?”

  Novelist C. S. Lewis wrote, “Sorrow turns out to be not a state, but a process. It needs not a map but a history . . . there is something new to be chronicled every day.” Such was the case for Nicholas Chirls.

  At first, he thought that his midnight poems, the fragments that he wrote about his late mother, the short stories, were mere footnotes to the central narrative that he was living every day: Boy loses his mother, the center of his world, so he enters the center of her world and lives out her stolen moments. He was going to pick up where his tough-talking, wheeling-and-dealing mother left off at forty-seven years old. Amid her people, her jargon, her rates and rituals, he would find a continued intimacy. But the story took a sharp turn, as all good ones do. Nick realized that he had written this legacy in too pat a plot.

  Nick had always cared about politics and been interested in questions of ethics and justice, but his senior year at Yale had given him some of his first hands-on experiences of trying to do work that really mattered in the world. He’d participated in a program in a disadvantaged neighborhood in New Haven called Squash Haven, in which kids from low-income backgrounds had a chance to play squash, and, in the process, learn discipline and become part of a consistent community of mentors and friends. He longed to feel that sense that his energy was going toward something transformative, not just lucrative.

  After a three-week trip to Israel in 2005, he’d also started to think more about how his own experience of having global terrorism shatter his private world was connected to others’ experiences. While the families affected by September 11th had been sustained by a tremendous amount of help—financial and emotional—from all over the country, many people are left with nothing to rebuild their lives. Nick explained: “I would love to start an international foundation that would give immediate aid to victims of terrorist attacks all around the world, whether it’s in Israel or Lebanon, completely devoid of political bias.”

  And a trip to China in 2008 had really blown his mind. Nick was awed by watching how this undisputable superpower had grown and changed under such vastly different cultural circumstances from the ones he was used to. Everything he had taken for granted in his American life—from food to fun, body language to national identity—was overturned. Every moment was a learning opportunity, every conversation a cross-cultural exchange. In China, he felt so very far away from the loss and lore of his hometown, as if he’d been transported to a world so far from his own that his past experiences got lost along the way.

  Nick’s healing process had shifted his world from black-and-white to shades of gray, and then it had expanded exponentially. While there was no denying the comfort of sitting at his same desk every day, using the same language he had now grown accustomed to, language he knew his mom had once used with ease, being around the same colleagues and friends, there was also something increasingly uncomfortable about it. His profession matched his history, to be sure, but it didn’t necessarily align with his passions.

  “I would go home at the end of the day and feel as if I wasn’t creating. I felt unused,” Nick explains. When Lehman Brothers went bankrupt in 2008, Nick saw his exit. He resigned in January of 2009 and began planning an adventure. He felt a strong urge to see new horizons, both literally and within himself. He wanted to get as far from the life he’d known, the identity he’d inherited, as possible.

  You can’t get much farther than China, which is just where Nick headed and lived from August of 2009 to September of 2010. He played squash with the locals, becoming something of a celebrity. He went to business school to learn about entrepreneurship, a path he was growing more and more interested in taking. He also began writing a memoir about his mother’s life and death, and about his relationship with her.

  As Nick describes it, “It is the search for my mother, my real mother.” Losing a parent at so young an age led Nick to idealize his mother, but even more, to idealize her profession. Though he had once thought that it was his duty, as a son, to live out his mom’s legacy in the financial sector, ultimately he realized that his mom would have simply wanted him to be happy. “She would have been the first one to say, ‘Cut the crap. Do what you love,’” he realizes.

  He’s still wrestling with the question of what it is he truly loves, but one thing is clear: The not knowing is a good thing. When that bird landed ever so lightly on his head as he read his mother’s eulogy, it shook up everything he knew about life and death, the here-right-now and the hereafter. That confusion marked the beginning of a difficult and important journey for Nick, and as any great philosopher or one great mother, Catherine Ellen Chirls, would tell you, “It’s not a matter of what’s going to come of it. It’s a matter of giving yourself options.”

  Nick’s mother, though most widely known as a finance expert, also had a deep appreciation for poetry. In fact, every night before Nick went to bed as a boy, his mom would read him a poem by Dinah Mulock Craik, an English novelist and poet from the 1800s:Autumn to winter, winter into spring,

  Spring into summer, summer into fall,

  So rolls the changing year, and

  So we change;

  Motion so swift, we know not

  That we move.

  One summer, she wrote it on a piece of paper so he could read it before drifting off to sleep and hear her voice in his head when he was away at camp. After his mother died, Nick found the weathered piece of paper and framed it. “It’s probably one of my favorite possessions,” he explains. “It’s in her handwriting, and at the end, it says, ‘Sleep tight, Nicholas. I love you. Mommy.’”

  Craik’s words poignantly capture the journey that Nick—that every mourner, in fact—must take. Rather than plodding through discrete stages of grief, as Kübler-Ross suggested, or stubbornly turning away from any painful memories of the deceased, one faces each day as it comes. Some days are difficult—a dream, like Nick experienced, brings up feelings of abandonment and anger, or something seemingly innocuous sets off a flood of sadness. Some days are easier—one is able to think of one’s late friend with a calm smile rather than a piercing stomach pain, a success at school or work feels joyfully connected to the legacy of one’s lost love, or perhaps even a whole day goes by when death doesn’t pass through the busy activity of a mourning mind.

  Before long, these days have piled on top of one another and morphed into weeks, then months, then years, and, as Craik paints it, “So we change.” It is often an imperceptible movement, up and down, steadily forward, until we find ourselves living without death as our consistent, erratic companion, but our unforgettable and always available teacher.

  The Light at the Top

  Brian Lyons

  Brian Lyons carries his five-year-old daughter, Patricia, up to bed. He cherishes the small weight of her, her tiny arm draped across his broad shoulder, the way she gives herself fully over to the safety of his arms. After a long day of hauling debris amid a bunch of rough-and-tumble construction workers, the sweet smell of her breath on his neck feels rede
mptive.

  He slowly enters her room—awash in pink—and lays her limp body gently on the bed. He sits beside her for a moment, notices the Irish dancing costumes hanging in the little closet, and situates a stuffed animal close to her body in case she wakes up and feels scared. He takes a deep breath, and as he has since September 11, 2001, he feels the presence of his late brother, Michael.

  Brian was at his latest site assignment on Madison and Twenty-third Street, moving things along as always, when someone on the crew got a page that some planes had flown into the World Trade Center. As a salt-of-the-earth, levelheaded construction manager, Brian wasn’t the type to panic. He was usually dressed in a pair of sturdy work boots, jeans, and a T-shirt—he looked like the kind of man who could build a house with his own two hands and some scrap wood, as long as an ice cold Coca-Cola was promised at the end of the day. Life, according to Brian, wasn’t about drama. He explains, “As long as you work hard, enjoy simple pleasures, take care of your family, and lend a hand to decent people, you’re living right.”

  As such, on that fateful day, he simply turned to the co-worker next to him and said matter-of-factly, “They’re going to need help down there.”

  He tried calling his brother, Michael, a firefighter with Squad 41, on his cell phone. He’d spoken to him earlier that morning. No answer. He tried the firehouse. No answer. As he stood thirty-eight stories up on the parapet of the building among a sea of other workers, watching the black smoke drift up into the crisp autumn day downtown, it occurred to him that Michael might be down there, or at least on his way. His brother was a helper too. It was how they were raised.

  After a little bit of watching, Brian was anxious to do. His wife, Lori, called and urged him to get home, come hell or high water. “Swim if you have to!” she directed. He decided to head uptown to his brother’s firehouse in the Bronx to see if he was up there, or if, at the very least, some of the other guys were hanging around and knew what the plan was. But after the long trek up, blending in with the sea of people heading north with briefcases in hand, looks of quiet terror on their faces, he found a completely empty firehouse. No one was left.