Project Rebirth

by Dr. Robin Stern

  Tim found new purpose doing the heavy lifting at Ground Zero, but he also found meaning in doing the little things that he believes Terry would have done had he lived. “People don’t remember that someone has to take the garbage out, cut the lawn, hang the mirror, move the furniture, and give a hug,” Tim explains. He has vowed to step in where his friends left off, to be a helping hand and an emotional support to his friends’ grieving widows, mothers, and fathers as much as he can.

  Tim listens to the sound of his paint roller against the naked wall—up and down, up and down, in a soothing rhythm—as he paints the walls of baby Terri’s bedroom pansy pink. Just ten days after the attacks, Beth found out that she was pregnant with her husband Terry’s child—their first and only. Tears roll down Tim’s cheeks, even though it feels good to help out. It’s a relief to focus on the mundane—not the loss of ninety-three personal friends, but the installation of a light fixture soft enough that it won’t hurt a baby’s newborn eyes. In the face of such vast and profound loss, Tim craves the simple and the mindless, the sound of that paint roller, the space to let tears come without self-consciousness.

  Those quiet moments of grief are soon crowded out by big moves that Tim feels he must make in order to play his part in the nation’s recovery. When Secretary Tommy Thompson of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services calls in July of 2002 and asks for Tim’s help coordinating the response to anthrax, he is convinced that it is the next step in his predetermined path. He explains, “My fate, although I didn’t realize it, is to go to Washington and work on a different scale. We can share our experiences with the whole country, instead of just New York City. We can make things better.”

  Before long, Tim’s work is collapsed into the Department of Homeland Security, which was formed in 2003 from a restructuring of preexisting federal agencies—the biggest government reorganization in American history. Its mission is to protect America from future terrorist attacks, as well as respond when natural disasters strike. It is now the third largest Cabinet department, with more than two hundred thousand employees and a $50 billion average annual budget.

  When Tim signed on, DHS was still in its early stages, grappling to figure out the most effective structures and systems to prevent and prepare for future attacks and emergencies. Tim dove into his work—relieved at the distraction of twelve-hour days, seven days a week. Underneath the demands of work, however, he felt a sadness more profound than any he had ever known. He was plagued by a sense of unceasing loneliness.

  His brother Chris left his own family behind to move down to Washington, D.C., hoping to give his mourning brother some companionship, at least temporarily. Tim remembers those days fondly: “We worked together, had dinner together, had a cigar together, then we’d go to sleep, get up, and do it all again. I will love my brother forever for that.”

  But eventually Chris would have to go back to Providence to be near his children, who had needs of their own. Without the salve of brotherhood, Tim’s loneliness calcified. His sense that he was not, as he’d hoped, in the right place, doing the right thing, began to gnaw at him daily. He remembered the crystal-clear thought that had echoed in his brain as he clung to that column as the world crashed down around him: “By being separate from him I broke the promise that I made to myself—that if I lived, I would be near my brother for the rest of my life.”

  On the evening of February 20, 2003, fate stepped in once again. Chris called Tim at about midnight and told him to turn on the television. Tim saw the first breaking news reports about a deadly night-club fire in West Warwick, Rhode Island. It appeared to be very bad.

  Twenty hours later, Tim was there, working with emergency personnel and city and state health officials, at the request of Secretary Thompson. Twenty-four hours after that, Tim had stepped into a role advising Governor Donald L. Carcieri, whose team had been in office for only thirty days, on a range of emergency issues. They would go on to create the Disaster Mortuary Operational Response Team, identifying ninety-six badly burned bodies in just three days and returning their remains to their loved ones.

  The fire began in that nightclub when one of the night’s acts used pyrotechnics that ignited flammable sound-insulation foam on the walls and ceilings around the stage. Within just five and half minutes, the whole club was engulfed in flames, the heavy smoke obscuring the exits and making it difficult for people to find their way to safety. More than 230 people were injured and 100 were killed, making it the fourth-deadliest nightclub fire in American history.

  Tim’s temporary detail to Rhode Island would eventually lead to a full-time position helping the governor coordinate all the state’s public safety agencies. He moved to Providence, where he could be near his brother Chris once again and continue his firefighter brothers’ legacies of assisting civilians in emergencies.

  On September 8, 2003, Tim and his brother Chris stood together among a sea of thousands of other brave men and women in Bergen Beach, Brooklyn, at the very last funeral for a firefighter killed on September 11. The wake and church service for Mike Ragusa, age twenty-nine at the time of his death, were over, and everyone stood outside. Helicopters flew overhead in the clear blue sky. People sniffled quietly, overcome with the emotion of finally being at the end of the official mourning rituals. The firefighters held formation, held their breath, held their pain.

  The pipe band marched by while the trumpeters played taps for the 343rd firefighter since September 11, 2001. Tim explains, “The pipe band made a promise that they would not play a happy song until the last fireman was buried. They came back the opposite way and played two of the happiest songs that they knew. As they went by, the whole line of five thousand firemen gave them a standing ovation for, like, ten minutes.

  “It was kind of closure for us, you know,” he goes on. “Especially for the band. I don’t know if you can imagine playing these sad dirges more than 343 times. It was a good sign for us, time to move forward and try and start seeing the happy things in life again.”

  Being in Rhode Island had its perks. Tim took daily walks by the water, reflecting on his life and its many twists and turns. He had a new hero in Governor Carcieri—“After so many bad things,” Tim describes, “he represents honesty.” Tim was also regularly seeing a counselor, whom he instantly trusted, as she had also seen his brother. And best of all, he was able to see Chris regularly. “We yakety-yak like two old washwomen,” Tim jokes. “When I’m with him, that’s all I need. I don’t need anything else in my life. He fulfills me.”

  Tim also craved a deeper, more consistent relationship with the families that his friends in New York left behind. “It’s sometimes hard for us to have a relationship,” he explains. “Some of these folks who were so horribly impacted—[they] need to leave that whole life behind. That’s the only way they can survive. Maybe these folks don’t really need me in their lives anymore. It’s not out of a lack of love, but out of pain.”

  Terry’s wife, Beth, moved to Long Island to live a quieter, easier life. Baby Terri, not such a baby any longer, thrived in elementary school. Tim dreams of taking her down to Ground Zero when the Freedom Tower is finally finished, pointing to the top of the building way up in the sky, and telling her that this is her daddy’s legacy.

  Tim needed to feel needed. He worked excessively at his new job in Rhode Island, trying to stave off the dark thoughts and deep sadness by spending hours and hours at his desk. Some days were good. He felt as if he was really building support for a more comprehensive emergency plan for Rhode Island, really making a difference in people’s lives. Some days were bad. He would stare at his computer screen and a dead blankness would fill his mind. At these moments, he felt a fatigue unlike anything he’d ever experienced, as if his very soul were tired. “Sometimes I’ll just sit there and cry quietly,” Tim explains.

  It wasn’t long before Tim realized that Rhode Island was yet another place he was retreating to, to hide from his past. The “blues”—as Tim called the feelings of
depression that plagued him—continued. Tim realized he needed to make a big change. “I’ve been running for three years,” he admits. “My soul has been in turmoil.”

  On July 12, 2004, Tim retired, determined to keep growing his roots in Rhode Island without the distraction of a demanding job and with the comfort of a small pension. He devoted his full attention to the website he cofounded with his brother in 1999, TheBravest .com, which celebrates and honors firefighters. He sipped tea and read the morning newspaper front to back, took long walks around Providence, and continued to see his counselor, trying to unpack all the pain and loss he’d been storing up over the past three years of feverish work.

  Much of Tim’s post-9/11 life was spent trying to figure out how to be the keeper of his firefighting brothers’ legacies. Sometimes he questioned whether he did the right thing that day, but he quickly corrected his doubts with the surety of God’s plan: “Of course I feel horribly guilty. I wish I could have stood there and held the towers up. But God has something else in store for me. The only way I can help people is to be alive to do it.”

  After a couple of listless years in Providence, Tim moved back to New York in 2005. “It’s better for my life to be here and better for my brother’s [Chris’s] life for me to be here,” Tim explains. “He’s got some challenges right now with his kids, work, and the website. He didn’t need to have a third child around. He wanted to spend time with me, but it was a burden.”

  Back in New York—among the skyscrapers and smoke, the constant ambulance sirens and the familiar buzz of unending activity—Tim thought of his lost friends all the time. Their ghosts were all around—at the pub where Terry and Tim used to have a pint, in every firehouse he passed, and of course, at Ground Zero itself. Tim ached for the familiar pace of emergency-responder work. Though he knew that his healing was facilitated by slowing down, he was sick of all the downtime. He was ready to work again.

  In 2006, he took a job with Solutions America, the political action committee for Rudy Giuliani, who would make a run for president in 2008. Building on Giuliani’s reputation as rising to the occasion amid the devastation on September 11, Tim envisioned running a program for first responders in his name, but for a time he was simply charged with traveling around and spreading Giuliani’s message. He explains, “It’s very deep and very emotional to be a part of this, to be able to go throughout the country and meet these people and hear their stories about how they came to help us, and be able to share my stories with them.” Shaping the ongoing narrative of September 11th, and listening to the way it had shaped others, was another facet of Tim’s healing.

  In large part, he took the job because he believed it was something his lost friends would respect: “My friends were carrying the torch and now they’re gone, and it’s time for me to carry the torch a bit. In their honor, in their families’ honor, but even more to protect people here. I believe in the mayor so strongly. I think he’s a good man. I think he’s a great leader.”

  The voters disagreed. In January of 2008, following a debilitating defeat in the Florida primaries, Giuliani announced that he was dropping out of the race and endorsing John McCain, the former POW, whom Giuliani believed “could be trusted in times of crisis.” He went on, “Obviously, I thought I was that person. The voters made another choice.”

  Tim was disappointed. This time, it wasn’t so much a fallen leader that he was mourning, but his own idealism. Politics had proven to be, in Tim’s words, “a dirty, dirty game.” He felt that it was his duty to carry on the legacies of his fallen brothers, and yet he struggled to find the most effective, most noble way to do so. He’d tried to stay close to their widows and children, but in some ways he was too potent a reminder of the men that they had lost. Many of them were trying to move on, which meant letting some of their past relationships languish. He’d given back at the national and state levels, but without being connected to the site where his friends had perished, it didn’t quite fulfill him. It was noble, to be sure, but not a direct enough expression of his loyalty. His relationship with his own brother Chris, while still paramount, was no substitute for the loss of so many other friends and mentors, most especially Terry.

  In many ways, it was as if a simpler time had passed, and there was nothing he could do to get it back. Tim longed to return to the singular focus of emergency work, the clear mission of helping people in crisis, the burly arms of a brotherhood, but his life would never be so straightforward again. It had been colored by profound loss, the complexity of grief, the disappointment that inevitably follows high hopes for resolution.

  It was as if Tim’s very DNA had been altered by the losses he experienced. Thrity Umrigar, an Indian novelist, writes:Perhaps time doesn’t heal wounds at all, perhaps that is the biggest lie of them all, and instead what happens is that each wound penetrates the body deeper and deeper until one day you find that the sheer geography of your bones—the angle of your head, the jutting of your hips, the sharpness of your shoulders, as well as the luster of your eyes, the texture of your skin, the openness of your smile—has collapsed under the weight of your grief.

  Indeed, Tim felt the ten-ton burden, not just of his own sadness, but of the responsibility of carrying on his brothers’ legacy, as surely as he did the ache in his back and the beating of his own heart. He had been forever and inextricably altered.

  Though Tim had literally attempted to work through his grief, as Freud might have advised him, it would prove too stubborn, too unpredictable. Tim was faced, and is still facing, the nonlinear project of healing and paying homage to the emergency workers who died on September 11, not just an abstract group to him, a nameless crowd of yellow and black, but ninety-three people whose names, faces, and stories he knows personally.

  Mourning of that magnitude is most certainly not executed in five distinct stages, as Kübler-Ross suggested. In fact, its nature—in many senses—is the exact opposite of Tim’s training. There is no preparedness plan possible, no step-by-step system to follow, no way to keep one’s heart safe from the flames of sudden loss. It just is. And nothing could be harder to process for a man who has dedicated his life to preventing what danger may come.

  Digging Out of the Darkness

  Joe Keenan

  A couple of guys put down their rakes and came running back from the field, abandoning the pile of debris they were inspecting. As they approach the wind tent, with their goggles and white Tyvek suits glimmering against the gray landscape, they look like astronauts exploring an alien planet. The image is complete when they proudly hold up a battered, ashen American flag.

  “Look what we found here!” one of the guys exclaims. He asks Detective Sergeant Joseph “Joe” Keenan about taking a picture with the flag.

  “Guys, we have a procedure here,” Joe reminds them. Joe, softspoken but strong, in his early fifties, sometimes feels like a teacher who has to keep reminding his students how to behave, but he’s glad that the workers respect his authority.

  It is another wintry morning at Fresh Kills. For more than six months now, most of the wreckage from the World Trade Center has been lying all around Joe at this former landfill, a twenty-onemile drive from Lower Manhattan. He is one of the supervisors of a recovery effort that includes more than a thousand workers, among them NYPD officers, FBI agents, and sanitation workers.

  Joe’s job is undeniably grim. On any given day, his team of detectives finds yet another fingernail or sliver of bone as they inspect a load of debris. These sometimes very delicate remains are saved and cataloged in hopes that they might bring comfort, however inadequate, to a grieving family member, or insight, however late, to those who are still investigating the attacks of September 11.

  One of Joe’s superiors at Fresh Kills, FBI Special Agent Richard Marx, would later state that every day there was like September 12 for most of the workers. There was the eagerness to lend a hand, and the outpouring of energy and generosity. But there was also a closeness to destruction and death that kept st
retching for months, even after Ground Zero had been swept clean. The Fresh Kills workers began to crave the experience of finding human remains. It’s gruesome but precious, and undeniably strange, but meaningful nonetheless.

  Joe recalls the workers’ emotional response to finding remains: “They were so happy ’cause they thought they’d done something good.” Finding remains and thereby helping a family identify and honor a loved one fulfilled the purpose of their work. If the load they worked on wasn’t “hot”—as they came to call a load with remains of the catastrophe, either human or industrial—Joe’s team would often leave work dejected.

  The morning of September 11, 2001, Joe was at his office at 300 Gold Street, right at the end of the Manhattan Bridge on the Brooklyn side, working on a report alongside the six detectives on his team.

  “I don’t even remember what the meeting was about now, but at that moment it was important,” Joe says, underscoring how everything was about to change. He does remember that they were to present the report soon at One Police Plaza, the NYPD’s headquarters in Lower Manhattan, near the World Trade Center.

  Joe walked out of the room to make copies and came back shortly. “A plane just hit the World Trade Center,” stated one of the female detectives. Must have been a Piper Cub, or some other small plane, Joe thought, not too worried, stroking his strong, square chin and smoothing out his signature white mustache. Maybe the pilot had a heart attack.