Project Rebirth

by Dr. Robin Stern

  Someone else suggested they go up to the roof and take a look, since it was just a couple of flights up from their fifth-floor offices. The line of sight to the towers was perfectly clear, especially on that day, with its famously limpid sky. Joe’s mild curiosity soon gave way to shock, as the group pointed and stared at the flames coming out of the North Tower.

  Another detective came up with a portable radio. They learned the plane was an airliner. Still facing the Manhattan side, Joe felt someone forcefully grab his arm. It was his close friend and colleague, Lisa. The whole group turned their heads to the right to confirm the unthinkable: a second plane flying extremely low, starting to turn toward the other tower. The plane was so close that Joe could see the little oval outlines of the windows.

  They all knew what was about to happen. The plane went across the Hudson River and crashed into the side of the building, its nose coming out the other side.

  Joe felt like he could reach out and touch the flames. His eyes recorded the hit; his ears, the boom of the explosion; his skin, the whoosh of the heat. He looked at Lisa and said, “Oh my God. We’re at war.”

  Joe was born in Brooklyn. He grew up, as he says, in a simpler time. His family life was stable. He spent much of his childhood hanging out with a group of ten or twelve neighborhood kids who all went to the local Catholic church. Their days were filled with school, and then, after school, playing ball outside. Joe and his gang traveled around the neighborhood to local ball games.

  Police work was the Keenan family business. Joe’s father was a policeman, his uncle was a policeman, and his cousin was a policeman. But Joe learned early on that you left business outside of the family home; his dad rarely discussed his work. His parents urged him to get an education and go into work that allowed for an easier, less dangerous life, but Joe was always drawn to the uniform and the idea of serving.

  Joe met his wife, Jane, when they were both just fifteen years old. It was natural. Boys and girls were pairing up from the parish, and they were part of the same group. Jane and Joe were comfortable with each other and have remained so for the past forty-five years. Together they raised their three children, all of whom stayed nearby after leaving the nest. Life made sense to Joe and Jane, and family came first.

  On September 11, Jane was the first person Joe called when he understood how serious the situation was. The assistant principal at the school where Jane worked in Park Slope answered, and Joe told her, “Just let Jane know I’m not there.” He also advised that the students be kept at the school: “Don’t let them out ’til we know what’s happening.” Joe promised to call back when it was safe to dismiss the students.

  Joe’s college-age son, Joseph, was on his way to class in Brooklyn. Karyn, the middle child, was at home preparing for a job interview later in the afternoon at, of all places, the World Trade Center. It was Janine, the eldest, who called him with a more frantic tone from her office on the west side of midtown.

  “I can’t find Andy!” said Janine, sobbing. She feared the worst had happened to her fiancé.

  “You should stay where you are,” Joe instructed.

  But Janine was desperate to find Andy. “I’m leaving. I’m going down there,” she said, then hung up the phone.

  Joe knew Andy worked on Pine Street, a few blocks from the World Trade Center. There was nothing he could say to stop his headstrong daughter. Joe was worried, but he kept it to himself, not wanting to alarm the rest of the family.

  Joe’s whole detective squad, and all others in the building, went into rescue mode in a matter of minutes. They went down to the fifth floor to put on their uniforms and then gather into rank structure. They formed their own small army.

  Before they left the building, they saw the first tower come down as they looked on through their office windows. The dust rose upward in a cloud, the loud crumbling sound lagging seconds behind. Joe slowly took in the magnitude of what had just happened. This was unlike anything they’d seen before.

  The small army of police officers made their way across the Manhattan Bridge late that morning as orders began to trickle down from further up the ranks about where they could be of assistance. Crowds were streaming in the opposite direction, seeking refuge in Brooklyn. A man completely covered in dust, but still clutching his briefcase, sprinted past Joe. He was reminded of the pictures from Hiroshima and Vietnam as he saw the despair in people’s ash-covered faces. Everyone was in shock.

  As news about the attacks kept coming in, Joe discussed the best strategy for how to proceed with his team. They had limited information: The city was, indeed, in the midst of a terrorist attack, no one inside the planes could have survived, and officials feared that there might be another attack at street level. Beyond that, the police officers depended mostly on their instincts and drew on previous emergency experience, neither of which felt adequate in the face of such a huge disaster.

  Joe’s group was sent first to the Thirteenth Precinct in Manhattan and then to NYU Medical Center, which was expecting a large influx of injured civilians. But as Joe sadly and simply stated, “The wounded never came.”

  Hours passed at the NYU hospital. Joe, himself, was forced to receive treatment for irritation to his eyes, likely caused by all the chemicals floating around in the air after the attacks, as he waited for further instructions. He could only wonder, What next?, and fear made him assume the worst: riots, looting, terrorists on the ground gunning down more victims. As the day progressed, Joe kept a silent prayer going for his daughter Janine.

  When Joe finally made it home well after midnight, his daughter Karyn and son, Joe, were together and still wide awake. “Janine and Andy are at Uncle Jerome’s,” Karyn said. “Janine ran into Andy on the street. She was running downtown, he’d been running uptown, and they found each other. Can you believe it?”

  “A one-in-a-million chance” was all Joe could muster, his whole body relaxing with relief. It all sounded like a scene from a movie. Thankfully, this plot twist was an uplifting one.

  Joe managed to salvage his last bit of energy to check his email before going to bed. His in-box was full of messages from police departments all over the country wanting to know what they could do. They were trying to figure out how to get to New York City as quickly as possible, even from cities as far west as San Francisco. As the city’s police department kept stretching itself thinner and thinner to meet everybody’s needs, the generosity of others was reassuring, and that spirit would stay with Joe for a long time to come.

  One of Joe’s last assignments on the street, before his promotion to the Detective Bureau, was as a vehicular homicide detective. He had seen sights he never wished to see again: lives cut short, broken bodies young and old, scrap metal strewn on a highway from a crashed car. With decades under his belt, he thought he’d seen it all.

  Then there was September 12 at Ground Zero. “We saw steel girders, maybe five feet around, completely twisted like pretzels from the heat,” Joe recalls with a grimace. “Whoever was in there wasn’t coming out.”

  In the coming months, Joe’s assignment would be elsewhere, though he still traveled to Ground Zero at least once a day to gather or present information for the chief of detective offices.

  He arrived at the Sixty-ninth Regiment Armory, on Lexington Avenue between Twenty-fifth and Twenty-sixth streets, to the sight of thousands of people lined up. He was charged with gathering information from families who had missing loved ones to report. “These poor people, they all had pictures,” he says. “They all knew that their person was going to be okay. Husband, wife, mother, father, whatever it was. And we knew differently.”

  The Sixty-ninth Regiment building stands as the site of the only official Irish regiment in New York City, with a history that extends back to the Civil War. Under different circumstances, this impressive legacy might have emboldened Joe, proud as he has always been of his Irish roots, but the next two weeks under the main hall’s imposing vaulted ceiling would forever haunt him.

/>   Joe quickly felt the weight of this unprecedented task. The grizzly panorama at Ground Zero brought back painful images of his work investigating vehicular homicide. Working with the victims’ families brought back a different but all-too-familiar emotion from those years: futility in the face of grief.

  The Sixty-ninth Regiment building was once divided up into galleries full of electrifying paintings by Cézanne, Matisse, and Van Gogh in the early 1900s. It was now without decoration, sectioned into smaller squares by slim curtains. Detectives paired off and one by one interviewed throngs of sorrowful faces, questioning individuals inside the curtained spaces, asking them to describe their missing loved ones.

  Joe went around the room, noticing the patterns of behavior in the victims as well as his own detectives. He was struck by the need to touch. “Invariably, one of the family members would hold the detective’s hand as they were talking,” Joe remembers, choking up. “And we talked with them for however long it took, knowing there was nothing we could do to help these poor people.”

  The armory was like a distressed beehive. Cops moved around the labyrinth of curtains gathering as much information as they could, often knowing their efforts would prove fruitless. The busyness was the only thing that might stave off the deep sadness, so people just kept moving.

  Joe knew that the detectives themselves were crushed, some already suffering from secondary trauma, also known as compassion fatigue or vicarious traumatization by psychologists. He explains, “Some of the officers skipped meals and refused to take breaks. They were spending too much time with each subject and having a hard time controlling their emotions. They stayed late after they were finished and came early before their tour started. I was doing the same thing.”

  Recognizing that this behavior wasn’t sustainable, Joe started insisting that people take care of themselves: “I made it a point to demand that they took breaks and ate meals. At that time I was not making friends, but in the years since, many detectives, even some I didn’t know, have come to me and thanked me for being their ‘boss’ at that time.”

  Dr. Emanuel Shapiro, senior psychoanalyst and senior supervisor for therapists in training, spent many months in the fall of 2001 working with first responders and volunteers. He explains, “Secondary trauma is the therapist’s or other crisis worker’s symptomatic counterpart to the victim’s post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). It is an occupational hazard of care providers, be they family, friends, therapists, medical professionals, or volunteers.”

  Caregivers are always at risk of becoming depleted and traumatized in their effort to take care of others. Trauma social worker and educator Laura van Dernoot Lipsky talks about the importance for first responders to practice the art of “trauma stewardship”—a daily practice of tending to the hardship, pain, or trauma of the world, while also being mindful about the kind of self-care necessary to make this practice sustainable.

  “More than anything else, what we need in order to practice trauma stewardship is knowledge of our own lives—what we feel, value, and experience, and what we need to do to take care of ourselves,” Lipsky writes. She recommends everything from meditation and a supportive community to creative outlets, such as playing music, dancing, and visual arts.

  Sometimes the fatigue builds up simply from the experience of futility. Joe had been in this place many times before as a vehicular homicide detective: listening and nodding as a desperate family member shared his or her story, all the while thinking that there was no good news to give, that there would probably never be good news to share.

  Just after Joe was informed that the victims’ center was to be transferred farther uptown, he received a call from longtime friend Deputy Inspector James Luongo. Luongo had been selected to be the NYPD’s commanding officer for the recovery effort at Fresh Kills and was now in the process of recruiting his own handpicked team of trustworthy supervisors.

  The time had come for Joe to do something difficult yet important for the families he’d been interviewing for the past two weeks. “I was completely drained by the experience at the victims’ center,” Joe remembers. “I just could not bear to be with people suffering and crying from broken hearts. It still affects me.”

  Because it is a Wednesday at Fresh Kills, Joe expects visitors. A few months after the site was established, the Office of the Mayor’s Community Assistance Unit had started arranging for 9/11 victims’ families to visit once a week in groups of twelve. Some of them bring flowers, hoping to pay their respects to loved ones. Without the comfort of a funeral or memorial service, complete with their loved ones’ bodies, mourners are forced to make ad hoc rituals to find comfort and, possibly, a sense of closure at Fresh Kills.

  Joe feels added pressure to prove that their work has been thorough and conducted with utmost respect, but his no-nonsense Irish American upbringing, as well as twenty-five years as a seasoned cop, tell him he shouldn’t expect any praise. In fact, he expects the opposite. Police work is usually thankless. Joe knows that to the general public, the police are never “good news.” They show up when there’s crime, injury, and death. They bust down doors, ask intrusive questions, and take nothing for granted. They leave expensive fines, legal charges, and loss in their wake. Joe says that in order to be a good cop, “you need to understand where you stand in relation to people; you need to understand that as a cop, you’re really dealing with people when they’re having problems.”

  He’s heard rumblings about families being upset with the work going on at Fresh Kills and the handling of the recovery more generally. Staten Island, long the butt of New Yorkers’ jokes, is not known for being a pleasant haven, and here the city is, shipping the delicate remains to a former landfill on a daily basis. The recovery effort is slow, simply because it is so painstaking. This leaves some families waiting for their loved ones’ remains, frustrated.

  And yet, this Wednesday in early 2002, he’s met with public recognition and appreciation, not frustration. A group of visitors bears a special gift for Joe and his team. The two groups run into each other around lunchtime, as Joe’s team is about to take the bus up to the local mess hall, known to the workers as Hilltop Café. “We brought you cookies. Thank you for all the hard work you are doing for us,” a young woman says as she hands over a tin box.

  Joe and his team are stunned. The detectives don’t eat their lunch at the mess hall, like usual. They share the cookies, relieved to have a sweet break from all the sadness of their eighteen-hour daily grind.

  Once the summer of 2002 arrives, work is winding down at Fresh Kills. On an early July day, Joe wakes up at two thirty in the morning, his regular time, and tiptoes around the bed, careful not to wake Jane up.

  As he drives from Brooklyn into Staten Island via the Verrazano Bridge, he remembers the first days at Fresh Kills. Before the debris of 9/11 crept in, it was a barren land of peaks, valleys, and creeks, just off the highway and yet disconnected from civilization. “The city on the hill,” as they’ve come to call the site, was built of the trailers and laboratories, the cafeteria and rest center, the lampposts and roads, the sweat off their brows.

  Fresh Kills served as a main New York City landfill for fifty years before it closed down in March of 2001. At one point in its history, it was also the world’s largest. Residents of Staten Island were never thrilled by the dubious honor. If anything, it promoted the already discriminatory association of Staten Island with the city’s dumping ground. That chapter had closed, and months later Fresh Kills began a new one: as the site of the city’s largest crime scene ever.

  Like archeologists digging into Pompeii’s tragic past, their task was to recover as many personal effects and human remains as possible. Unlike the victims of that ancient volcano’s eruption, the destruction here was man-made, at first requiring inspection for forensic evidence. To Joe’s surprise, larger objects he would have assumed loomed among the debris were for the most part pulverized, not spared from destruction. They were more likely to find smaller ob
jects, scraps of metal and bone fragments, rather than squashed desks or human limbs. The official tally would cite 4,257 pieces of human remains and fifty-four thousand personal effects recovered.

  For Joe this had been an assignment like no other. For one, there was the unbelievable and sometime horrific scale of the task. Most important, it was the opportunity to bring hope to grieving families, something he often wished he could have done during all those years as a police officer in his neighborhood.

  Joe also experienced his own dose of hope from other police departments around the country who made good on their promise of pitching in. After a massive fund-raising effort, members of the San Francisco Police Department got their wish to be present at Fresh Kills. Joe was also impressed with the officers from all over the East Coast who would drive to Staten Island during their own off-duty hours. They worked with Joe for two or three days before traveling back to their regular shifts. He would send them to Father Ryan, a Jesuit in charge of Staten Island’s Mount Manresa retreat house, who was generous enough to host these off-duty cops and provide their meals. “It felt great to know that we had friends everywhere,” Joe explains.

  Joe was also proud to have given tours of Fresh Kills to President Bill Clinton and the royal chief medical examiner of Great Britain, who asked if Joe would be able to replicate a similar operation in England should anything, God forbid, similar happen there. Joe joked that he would have to ask his bosses, President Bush and Mayor Giuliani.

  By seven thirty at night, Joe is already driving back home. Dinner with Jane awaits. Jane doesn’t work summers, and Joe wonders what it will be like when they are both able to just up and leave, travel the world. Joseph and Karyn will probably be home too. Heading back to Brooklyn as the sun starts to set, Joe feels ready to move forward with his life. He can confidently describe his work at Fresh Kills as the “crowning jewel” in a career that he already loved. He says, “I’ll never have to worry again about whether I did my job. That’s important to guys like us. No matter what else I move on to, it’ll never be as fulfilling as working here was.”