Project Rebirth

by Dr. Robin Stern

  But he didn’t leave New York completely behind. Somehow, he managed to reconfigure his new place with the same layout as his New York apartment—a little piece of his life with Gene that he held on to. Additionally, he hung a big portrait of Gene in the living room so he could walk by and see his smiling face every day. The sting began to soften. He explains, “I see the face of a friend I can just talk to. It doesn’t bring back heart-wrenching grief anymore.”

  San Jose was serene and quiet, although very much a city, and a mere forty-five minutes from lively San Francisco. Larry was also just twenty-five minutes from the beach, where the roaring majesty of the Pacific Ocean had a calming effect for him.

  Perhaps most surprising to Larry was the fact that he now had a roommate—one of his daughter’s friends. After getting used to living alone for the first few years after Gene’s death, he was amenable to the company, especially that of someone so respectful and unobtrusive as Davey—a Hawaiian who had two sweet dogs and made a great lunch partner. Before long, Davey’s partner moved in, and the three of them happily coexisted for a short time before the two younger men decided to return to Davey’s tropical home. Larry’s daughter helped him find a great apartment of his own, in the comforting shade of palm trees.

  Larry became an active member of his local congregation of the United Church of Christ, a large one at almost four hundred members, in 2006. The fifth-anniversary ceremony at Ground Zero had been a tremendous turning point in his life. Laying down a rose for Gene that day had taken on a new meaning: It was a type of letting go that had not been previously possible for Larry. He had come to the following realization: “I am a whole person, but I don’t want to operate in a vacuum. I think I operate better in a community, with other people.”

  He had been mindful of finding what is called an Open and Affirming church. According to the UCC Coalition for LGBT Concerns’ website, this designation stands for “congregations, campus ministries, and other bodies in the United Church of Christ which make public statements of welcome into their full life and ministry to persons of all sexual orientations, gender identities, and gender expressions.”

  Larry had been very active in various church communities throughout his life, but in San Jose, he was happy to find a place where he could develop his spirituality and not have to defend his sexual orientation. Larry explains, “I’m not out to convert anybody, but to me, the love of my creator is the most important and constant thing in my life, so I just feel that that’s the calling. I need to share this with others. If I can help one person release the hurt and help them realize they are loved and cared for, that’s enough.”

  During one of his trips back to New York City to honor Gene at Ground Zero, Larry experienced a chance happening that he believes might have been destined.

  After the annual memorial ceremony, he took the subway to the hotel, hoping to change his clothes before meeting up with friends for dinner. He decided to stop by the bar for a drink before taking the elevator up to his room.

  A few minutes later, a woman approached Larry and sat down on the stool next to him. She pointed at the ribbon he was wearing on his shirt, which was actually a victim’s family badge. “So of course,” Larry recounts, “she asked me who I had lost at the World Trade Center. And I told her.”

  “How weird!” the woman replied. “I used to work at Aon. I left in 2000. I knew so many people there.” Aon lost three hundred people in the attacks. The woman proceeded to name several of her former co-workers. Larry recognized many of them. Eugene’s name was familiar to her as well, so she asked what he looked like.

  “He was a gorgeous black man with the most beautiful smile,” Larry answered, a smile spreading across his face.

  Her jaw dropped. “I saw his poster . . . and I saw you on TV. I knew I recognized you from somewhere!” the woman exclaimed. “Thank you so much for fighting for our rights. I’m gay too, and that might be a fight I won’t have to take on because of you.”

  Larry felt as if Gene had played some role in sending this grateful woman, a reminder that his bravery in the face of loss hadn’t been just for his own personal benefit.

  Today Larry still misses New York: the vibrant Greenwich Village nightlife, the pageantry of opening night for a Broadway musical, the convenience of taking the subway everywhere. And he is keenly aware of how much he still misses Gene. He thinks about him every single day, without fail. “I’m not sure you ever finish the grief process,” Larry reflects. “My faith tells me he’s safe now and that someday I will be there too. Having that faith has gotten me through a lot of days.”

  Rabbi Michael Paley, scholar in residence at the United Jewish Appeal Federation in New York, explains that spiritual belief “allows one to have access to other worlds, allows us to see possible in the impossible.” Faith that he will be reunited with Gene is a comforting thought to Larry in difficult times.

  Although Larry religiously returns to Manhattan to honor Gene each September, he has settled into the more tranquil pace of his life in San Jose—surrounded by lots of family and friends. He continues to be an active member of his church, volunteering twice a week in the office, playing in the bell choir, and helping out with LGBT-related ministries.

  Ten years later, Larry still doesn’t feel the push to find a new romantic love, only to deepen his spiritual connection. He explains, “I believe in a creator, and my journey is to figure out what that higher power wants from me and what I can give back.”

  Gene, though gone, has continued to be a major source of energy in Larry’s life. He is still there in spirit, pushing Larry forward in his activism, giving him confidence to be more outgoing, reminding him of all the joy to be had in living.

  Larry thinks of Gene in his last moments, extending a hand to frightened co-workers, and feels compelled to bring the same level of brave altruism to his own daily life. Supported by his continued relationship with Gene and his everlasting relationship with God, he keeps on. Larry summarizes: “You have to plug yourself into the source if your life is going to shine.”

  Larry, like so many of those who lost loved ones on September 11, carries Gene with him in a truly substantive way. He’s not just a faint presence or a nostalgic memory, but an active and ongoing influence on who Larry is, what choices he makes, and how he sees the world.

  Freud believed that the end of mourning is marked by what he called “interiorization”—the total inward acceptance that a person’s death transforms that person into only a memory, only a past-tense preoccupation. French philosopher Jacques Derrida offers a different perspective: “Upon the death of the other we are given to memory, and thus to interiorization, since the other, outside us, is now nothing. And with the dark light of this nothing, we learn that the other resists the closure of our interiorizing memory.” In other words, as long as we continue to be in dialogue with those we’ve loved and lost, as long as we make choices influenced by what we think they might recommend, or try on their worldview from time to time, they remain, in a sense, “alive” for us.

  Though experts long believed that such a continued relationship might be harmful, preventing the bereaved from truly moving on, new research and evolved wisdom indicates that many of the healthiest and happiest mourners are those who figure out a way to continue to feel connected to those they’ve lost. As Larry demonstrates, the more we embrace the nuanced truth—that death doesn’t actually kill a bond, but alters it—the more gracefully we heal.

  A Life Built on Brotherhood

  Tim Brown

  Tim Brown scanned the chaos in the lobby of Tower 1, the North Tower, assessing the situation—the abandoned newsstands, the people in business suits and janitorial garb bottlenecking at the top of escalators as they headed toward the exits with naked fear on their faces. He went downstairs to the fire command post and discovered a black-and-yellow-striped sea of New York City firefighters—thirty or so in all.

  Tim quickly spotted his mentor and best friend, Terry Hatton, suited up an
d ready to head higher in the flaming tower. Even in this cacophony, Terry was hard to miss; at six foot four barefoot, and nearly six foot eight with his gear on, he was a mountain of a man, one of the most respected leaders in the most respected fire department in the country. Tim and Terry had met through work, but their friendship extended far beyond the brick walls of the firehouse. They drank together (Tim could hold his liquor far better than Terry), talked about their dreams and frustrations, and celebrated Terry’s marriage to salt-of-the-earth Beth when the happy day came. If they had been actual brothers, Terry would have been the older one.

  Tim, in fact, was a man with many brothers—three biological and many, many picked up along the way. One might describe his whole life as being built on a foundational belief in the importance of brotherhood—that old-world value of being there for the man who would, in turn, be there for you. It was an idea that gave him great comfort, an idea that guided his entire life.

  As Tim approached, Terry and he locked eyes. Finally face to face, they gave each other a knowing look and a hearty hug, made even heavier by the force of Terry’s gear. “Might be the last time I see you, brother,” Terry told Tim. “I love you, man.”

  Prior to the attacks on the World Trade Center in 2001, Tim accepted an assignment from the FDNY to serve in the New York City Office of Emergency Management (OEM), established in 1996. The OEM was located in what many called “the bunker” in 7 World Trade Center. As a supervisor of field operations, Tim’s responsibilities that day were to coordinate emergency response in the field and communicate the conditions back to the state-of-the art communications center. This could mean anything, including working with the FDNY fire chief, the Port Authority, Con Edison, and the mayor.

  From the moment the lights flashed off and on again at 8:46 a.m., Tim put down his newspaper, abandoned his breakfast, and jumped into action. After making sure that the watch command was up and running on the twenty-third floor, and grabbing his three portable radios, he went to assess the situation on the ground—“already like a war zone,” as he describes it—from three sides, a maneuver that was a holdover from his firefighter training. He went to the lobby command post in Tower 1 to assist the incident commander but was quickly redirected to the Tower 2 command post when the second plane hit. After trying to help a group of people who were trapped in a burning elevator car, Tim needed to get the paramedics into the lobby to start removing the injured.

  When Tim was returning to the Tower 2 lobby with the paramedics, they suddenly heard an unmistakable sound—the creaking of 1,172 feet of load-bearing perimeter steel columns. He explains, “There has never been anything more clear to me in my life than what that sound was. I knew instantly that the building was collapsing. The sound was deafening and it was progressive. You could actually hear each floor collapse.”

  Tim ran toward the Marriott in 3 World Trade Center for cover, but just as he went in, the lights went out and the wind picked up to what scientists now believe was 185 miles per hour. “I couldn’t see anything. I couldn’t hear anything,” Tim remembers.

  He knew he’d be killed if he went outside, where steel was crashing down onto the street, so he wrapped his arms around a nearby column in the Marriott and held on for dear life. Tim remembers, “When the buildings were falling down on top of me, I could only think of two things: I want to quit my job, because it’s not worth it, and I want to be with my brother Chris.”

  Chris Brown, meanwhile, was in Providence, Rhode Island, relieved to have his first day off from the firehouse in weeks, until he heard what was going on in New York and was flooded with thoughts of his brother Tim inside the towers. He watched the play-by-plays on television and prayed that his phone would ring and that his brother’s voice would be on the line.

  Tim’s helmet blew off. The noise was unbearable. The dust and debris hit him in the face at piercing speed. He was waiting to get crushed. It felt like years went by in those eight fateful seconds. It would turn out that when Tower 2 collapsed, it did fall on the hotel and Tower 3, except for one tiny section where Tim clung to his column and waited to die.

  Tim describes the calm that followed: “The collapse stopped. The wind stopped. The noise stopped. You couldn’t see anything. It was an eerie silence for a minute or two. Nobody was stirring. Nobody was moving. Everyone was in shock. Everyone was trying to move their parts to see if they still worked.”

  Tim managed to follow a shaft of light to find his way out of what was left of the Marriott lobby and began scaling rubble—sometimes three and four stories high. “I was in flight mode at that point,” he remembers. “I just wanted to get as far away as possible.”

  Responses like Tim’s are well documented by psychologists. Our fight-or-flight instinct, as it’s popularly known, was first noted by neurologist Walter Cannon in 1929 while observing the ways in which animals confronted threatening situations. Now we understand that both animals and humans have diverse responses to threats—everything from throwing a punch willy-nilly to freezing up so as to observe every detail of the perilous situation before making a decision about what to do next. In almost all cases, however, the physiological effects are similar: When we perceive danger, hormones are released via a signaling process in our brains that preps our bodies for fight, flight, or freeze. Our hearts beat faster, our lungs take in more oxygen, and our digestion slows down. It’s a rapid and reliable process that pushes us to take self-protective action, even before we are aware of what’s really going on.

  Tim was able to put a bit of distance between himself and the carnage, take a deep breath, and try to reason out the most important next steps. Shortly thereafter, he heard that same foreboding creak again. “I saw the top of Tower One lean over and then disappear,” he recounts somberly. “I knew Terry was in there.”

  Terry Hatton, captain of Rescue 1, died, along with 342 other firefighters who headed high into the burning towers on September 11, 2001. Tim personally knew 93 of them.

  Tim grew up in suburban Connecticut, where most of the fathers were more akin to Ward Cleaver than to Clark Kent. The insurance business was a big employer among the families in Tim’s cohesive, middle-class neighborhood, but his father was actually a research scientist for United Technologies, a defense contractor. It often felt as if his little town was insulated from the cultural shifts going on in the late sixties; women were still stay-at-home moms, sometimes frustrated mothers, and men were suited, mostly absent fathers.

  Even as a child, Tim was surrounded by a brotherhood. He was one of five kids, with only one girl in the mix. He and his brother Chris would watch the television police drama Adam-12, and then pretend they were cops staking out the perimeter and dodging danger among the broken-down cars in the backyard. Their true heroes were paramedics Johnny Gage and Roy DeSoto from another hit drama of the early seventies, Emergency! which mixed actionadventure and medical drama. They were Boy Scouts together in Troop 341.

  While he loved the camaraderie of having so many brothers, by high school he was feeling undeniably lost. He didn’t like school, particularly because he didn’t like to be told what to do. Tim’s struggle with authority was seeded in those early days of rebelling against his teachers and school administrators.

  He’d rather be playing ice hockey at Mill Pond down by the tracks across from his house or smoking cigars in the fort that he and his boys built. From the age of about twelve until seventeen, when Tim’s parents finally got divorced, the family was often in turmoil—fights, financial woes, and disappointment after disappointment. Tim longed for a different kind of life from the unhappy suburban one he had known. He longed for a vocation with more adrenaline than life insurance policies or lab research. He wanted to feel like he really mattered.

  Jay, a childhood friend, was the first one who introduced Tim to the excitement of chasing fires. They would sit in Jay’s car, talking, and listening to the squawk of the radio scanner. When the dispatcher announced that a fire had broken out, it was like Jay and
Tim had won the jackpot. They’d start up the engine and hightail it toward the site, prepared to watch the real heroes fight the flames. Before long, they became junior firemen together. Tim reflects, “That steered me away from trouble and gave me a true passion to be a fireman. I enjoyed the freedom of going into a fire and coming out triumphant.”

  Being a firefighter comes with the reward of brotherhood, but also the risk of great harm. It is a dangerous profession that requires sacrifice, as reflected in the sacred oath of those who fight fires for a living:I PROMISE CONCERN FOR OTHERS. A WILLINGNESS TO HELP ALL THOSE IN NEED. I PROMISE COURAGE—COURAGE TO FACE AND CONQUER MY FEARS. COURAGE TO SHARE AND ENDURE THE ORDEAL OF THOSE WHO NEED ME. I PROMISE STRENGTH—STRENGTH OF HEART TO BEAR WHATEVER BURDENS MIGHT BE PLACED UPON ME. STRENGTH OF BODY TO DELIVER TO SAFETY ALL THOSE PLACED WITHIN MY CARE. I PROMISE THE WISDOM TO LEAD, THE COMPASSION TO COMFORT, AND THE LOVE TO SERVE UNSELFISHLY WHENEVER I AM CALLED.

  The burden of death is the ultimate sacrifice of firefighters and their families everywhere—the great price that comes with wearing the uniform, with feeling that deep sense of purpose, with helping people. Tim explains, “They all did something for us that is bigger than we even realize now. Over time we will see what they did for us.”

  For Tim, the sacrifice is not just noble or abstract. It is personal: “It’s hard when it’s your friends that did that. I’m very proud of them. I don’t know that a lot of people realize the gravity of what happened. It’s something that will be told over time, historically, by our children’s children.”

  In the meantime, Tim and his brother Chris pitched in with the recovery effort. Together, united by a sense of duty and deep integrity, they spent the first four months following the September 11th attacks working eighteen-plus-hour days at Ground Zero and at the forward command post in the OEM. They—like Brian and Charles and so many other generous and inexhaustible souls—did what needed to be done, whether that was coordinating communication between city agencies, securing necessary gear and tools for the rescue and recovery workers, or rolling up their own sleeves and digging through the rubble.