Project Rebirth

by Dr. Robin Stern

  It started as she was hiking up. She was sucking wind, really struggling to keep up with the rest of the tour group, and decided to call on her guardian angel. Big Daddy, I need a sign that I can actually do this! Just minutes later, a porter passed her wearing a Boca Juniors soccer jersey, the uniform of Sergio’s beloved Argentinean soccer team. Tanya knew that he was with her.

  As discussed earlier, psychologists historically pathologized when a person has a continued relationship with a dead loved one, but many contemporary experts in grief and healing actually see it as an adaptive, and potentially healthy, behavior. Bonanno himself admits to speaking to his dead father in an elevator. He writes, “Continuing bonds are more adaptive in a context where they are understood and culturally supported.”

  In other words, talking to the dead might get one committed to an asylum in the United States but might be perfectly acceptable in Bangalore. It was fitting that Tanya was communicating with her long-lost Sergio in Peru, as the Incan people are believed to have had elaborate rituals of conversing with and honoring the dead. Spanish invaders recorded detailed accounts of opulently dressed mummies being offered the finest food and drink at ceremonies.

  But Sergio was not the only man communicating with Tanya that day. When Tanya finally made it to the top of the “lost city of the Incans,” she reached into her backpack, as promised, and pulled out a card that Ray had written her.

  Things with Ray started at a slow simmer. They would ride together on occasion, talk about everything under the sun during lunches at roadside cafés. Ray had been through a painful divorce, so he had his own scars. They talked about the pain of loss, the end of their innocence, shared fears about risking a chance for happiness again. They were good at being friends. At first, Tanya didn’t see the potential for love. Her feelings for Sergio had been so all consuming, so unmistakable, so charged. With Ray, it was subtle and comforting and good. At first, she didn’t recognize what was happening: “I had envisioned that the person I was going to wind up with was going to be so completely outgoing like Sergio, but Ray has this very quiet confidence about him. He didn’t fit into my image of who I was going to be with.”

  Tanya even tried to set him up with one of her girlfriends, but Ray slowly, patiently made his way into her heart, her home, and eventually her future. Ray’s card read: “I hope that while you are there, and you see this civilization that has outlasted even the dream of the builder, that you would consider building a dream with me.” Ray, a former firefighter who now worked in construction, was asking her to consider a future with him.

  Perhaps it was the vastness of the landscape, or maybe the strength she felt from conquering such a massive mountain despite her struggles, that led Tanya to feel so expansive. She felt as if she had the capacity to carry on her many identities—the motherless baby, the seeker, the widow, the business owner, the biker chick, and the mystic. That day in Machu Picchu, she felt as if she had the capacity to move forward: “I felt connected. Connected to Sergio, connected to the earth, connected to history. I considered my future. I’m ready to fall in love. I can’t worry what other people are going to think about the person. If I’m in love with someone, that’s it.”

  Tanya and Ray lay in bed, talking about Tanya’s transformative trip. It was hard to explain—the level of deprivation and tenderness in the Andean village, the porter’s message from beyond, the freeing vista, but Ray was a patient and curious listener. At a pause in their conversation, he leaned over and slipped an engagement ring on her finger. “I love you, Tanya,” he said. “I want to marry you.”

  Tanya felt her epiphany atop the mountain suddenly replaced by a rush of fear. “I miss my other ring,” she exclaimed without premeditation.

  “Put it on,” Ray said, reassuring her. “I would never take that away from you. One of the reasons I love you so much is how devoted you’ve been to Sergio. I feel like Sergio gave me a gift in you.” Once again, Ray was able to quiet Tanya’s fears. Through his own unshakable security, he was able to reassure Tanya that loving him didn’t diminish her love for Sergio in any way.

  Eventually, she understood that she was not replacing Sergio with Ray, but adding another great man into her life story: “I will be Ray’s wife. I was also Sergio’s fiancée. I was also my parents’ daughter. I’m starting to allow myself to be comfortable in that. You bring everything forward with you.”

  In part, Tanya’s resistance to moving on was a product of fear. She worried about experiencing the same kind of pain again—giving over her heart and her hope only to have it demolished. “How am I going to create a whole new life without being afraid it’s going to be taken away?” she asked. It’s a fair question for someone who has already lost so much. In fact, it’s a fair question for any of us, and one frequently asked. How can we love with all of our hearts, throw ourselves into a shared life, when we know it can be taken away in an instant?

  We do it because it is part of the human story, because it is what people have done for millennia, what we will continue to do. We lose. We heal. We fall in love. We create new stories, new lives out of great tragedy. We continue to take the lovely, dumb leap of faith into loving again because it’s what makes our lives worthwhile; it’s what makes humanity somewhat miraculous—our capacity to recover and revise and carry on.

  Tanya promised to marry Ray. “I’m surrendering,” Tanya explains. “I’m surrendering to the possibility that I can have a life again. Ray deserves this. He’s so good.”

  But wholeness would not come so easily. Tanya acknowledges that she is still in process: “Integrating is painful, difficult, challenging. I had to let go of the person I became after 9/11, to let go of my widowhood. That was somebody I’d grown accustomed to being.”

  And it was somebody that Sergio’s mother, whom Tanya had remained very close to, was accustomed to her being. Tanya understood that while she had the luxury of healing and moving forward, finding another love, Sergio’s mother could never find another son. Both of them had suffered an irreplaceable loss, but Tanya’s allowed for new beginnings. Delia, Sergio’s mother, had to process an abrupt and unalterable end.

  When Tanya finally got the nerve to break the news to Delia, that she was officially engaged to be married to someone else, Delia was honest and supportive: “I’m not ready to meet him quite yet,” she told Tanya, “but I will be. I just want you to be happy.”

  And happy she was. On May 22, 2006, Tanya and Ray rode a big, beautiful motorcycle to a luscious outlook in Maui, looked out over the ocean, and made their new beginning official. “ ‘From this day forward’ was so significant,” Tanya explains. “This is the journey. We’re starting it here.”

  Reverend Al, a rotund local in traditional Hawaiian garb, officiated. When he rode up on his own white Harley, they knew that they were—once again—blessed from the beyond.

  Tanya returns to New York, as always, for the anniversary of September 11th. But this time, things are undeniably different. It is a landmark five years since she lost Sergio. She is now wrapping up some of the many ongoing memorial projects that she has been so committed to over the years: a slide show of Sergio and a memorial book featuring snapshots, inspirational quotations, and people’s memories of him. She will read his name in the ceremony that year.

  Tanya had been diligent over the years to make sure that Sergio’s name was included in any 9/11 memorial, even going so far as having a street named after him. Each year, she creates a sign honoring his memory and takes it down to Ground Zero, where she joins the other families. She describes her loyalty to this ritual and her commitment to memorializing Sergio in many ways: “I don’t want people to forget that there were people, lives, dreams, loves, that were just so senselessly taken. What I can be responsible for is my story, Sergio’s story. I can make sure that he’s not forgotten.”

  But five years out, she recognizes that these rituals might need to adjust to her new, integrated life now that she’s married to Ray. She’s happy to have do
ne so many projects—both for herself and for her and Sergio’s community of friends and family—to make sure that he is memorialized, but she has realized that his legacy will now live on in less explicit ways. She wonders, “Maybe by next year I’ll have a baby. I don’t want to feel guilty about not getting this stuff done before then. I want to go into the next chapter feeling like I did it all. Hopefully, this weekend I’ll be done, and can say, ‘Wow, in these five years I’ve done a lot for him.’”

  A few weeks later, when the doctors tell her that the official start date of her pregnancy was September 11, 2006, she smiles to herself. Of course.

  When Delia hears the news, she tells Tanya that she is ready to meet Ray. “I want to be a part of the baby’s life,” she tells Tanya. Delia flies down to Miami to visit and they arrange to meet at a restaurant. The first words out of Ray’s mouth are “Hi, Mom!” Once again, Ray has managed to disarm Tanya, and now her dear Delia, with his openness and comfort in his own skin. From then on the conversation flows. When it is all over, Delia exclaims, “¡Ya está!” (“It’s done!” in Spanish), and tells Tanya to make sure that there is always a room available for Grandma to stay over.

  Emilia Grace is born the following June, her first name a tribute to Tanya’s late father, Emilio. Tanya is reminded of her favorite quotation in Sergio’s memorial book: “When you were born, you cried, and the world rejoiced. Live your life in such a way so that when you die, the world cries and you rejoice.”

  The feeling of first laying eyes on her daughter comes with its own surprise for Tanya: “I thought I would be more overwhelmed with tears, but I felt deeply calm.”

  Emilia Grace grows into a chubby, happy toddler—a constant reminder of the innocent goodness of hard-fought new beginnings. Samantha Rae follows a year later—due on September 11, 2008, born a week early. Both beautiful girls are manifestations of C. S. Lewis’s beautiful words: “Miracles are a retelling in small letters of the very same story which is written across the whole world in letters too large for some of us to see.”

  The births of her children are chances for rebirth for Tanya. At first she wonders, “How do I explain Sergio to them? What would be the best, least confusing way? I think I’ll just say, ‘Now he’s Mommy’s guardian angel, and Daddy’s guardian angel, and your guardian angel.’”

  Tanya doesn’t ride her motorcycle anymore. With two little girls at home, she’s too busy, and even with her guardian angel, she’s a bit more wary of the danger of that four-hundred-pound machine. She wants to be around for her daughters and for sweet Ray. Plus, she doesn’t need that balm of the ride like she used to. She still has her moments of grief, without a doubt, but they are private and brief. Sergio will always be a part of her.

  Tanya has been working on her own memoir, committed to sharing her journey in hopes that it helps others who are faced with moving beyond great and so often unexpected loss. She reflects, “I don’t think I ever thought that I would get to this point where I would merge to this degree. I always thought that it would be two separate things. But I am so content and so proud that I have been able to bring it all together.”

  Conclusion

  So what have we to learn from these often sad, quietly triumphant stories?

  Well, for starters, we have learned that much of what we thought was true of grief is simply wrong. Kübler-Ross, albeit well intentioned, was wrong. Freud was wrong too. Kübler-Ross, while a pioneer in the field, failed to highlight the individualized process by which mourners grieve. Freud’s writing, albeit different from his own experience, renders mourning as a linear experience that reaches an end. Grief is not a linear, tidy, or tamable experience. When people are led to believe it is, they are left feeling inadequate and sometimes guilty. Grief doesn’t really end, so much as reconstitute itself. As Pulitzer Prize–winning writer Gail Caldwell wisely observes, “We never get over great losses; we absorb them.”

  Counter to our quintessential American industriousness, grief cannot be crossed off a to-do list. As soon as you think you’ve successfully “completed” it, that you are done with mourning, the feeling sneaks up on you in the quiet hours of night or in the middle of the grocery aisle. You are undone once again. And sometimes very, very pissed off at being strapped with sadness when you thought you’d “done everything right” to rid yourself of it.

  Grief also can’t be conquered, wrestled to the ground by a strong, determined spirit. It’s simply bigger than you, no matter how big you might fancy yourself to be. To fight grief is to throw oneself, with naive audacity, against the fattest Buddha in the world, sitting and meditating, unmoved by your desperate flailing. He won’t be done until he’s done, just as grief won’t leave your heart until it’s ready to be absorbed into your emotional bloodstream.

  Or perhaps it never really leaves. When writer Meghan O’Rourke and psychologist Leeat Granek created a research survey on grief on Slate.com last spring, they were shocked to find that within just a couple of weeks nearly 8,000 people had responded. A large portion (33 percent) said that they experienced their loss more than eight years ago, suggesting that even if you adapt, it is still a huge part of your new life. Twenty-seven percent said that they never went back to feeling like themselves or “normal” after their loss.

  Grief changes you. Plain and simple. It alters the way in which you understand yourself, your community, and the world around you. It creates a whole new dimension to love—that which you’ve felt, that which you will feel. It deepens and widens your understanding of suffering, not just as it alchemizes in your own idiosyncratic psyche and body, but as it emerges for others. Your sadness becomes the world’s sadness, and also its potential for transformation. Elie Wiesel, who survived incomprehensible hardship during the Holocaust, explains it this way: “Because I remember, I despair. Because I remember, I have the duty to reject despair.”

  We remember our suffering—a state that, indeed, is twinned with despair—and yet, in the act of remembering and honoring what we’ve experienced, we turn away from despair. Once you have known the pain of excruciating, incomprehensible loss, you can’t un-know it. You know it forevermore, for yourself, but also in empathy for the rest of humanity who must revel and suffer through this universal experience of birth and death, life constantly in flux, decaying and renewing, coming and going. It is one of those great paradoxes of the human condition—when you endure suffering, you also earn the empathy that is born of surviving it and the beauty of its acute end.

  Grief is not obedient and it’s not finite. In this way, it’s actually quite like love. We love people until we must grieve them, two sides of the same universal coin. In the throes of love, we easily forget that either death or grief will follow. This is good. Even necessary. It keeps us brave.

  After all, how could Tanya have ever thrown herself so wholeheartedly into her life with Sergio if she’d known that it would one day end, abrupt as a slammed door? How could Nick have had any normalcy in his relationship with his mom if he’d known that one day, out of nowhere, she would be wrenched from his young life, leaving a gaping hole? How could Larry have ever built his entire life around the unconditional love he discovered with Gene if he had known that conditions outside of his control would one day rob him of a future with his beloved? None of us know what heartbreak we might bear, nor should we. Love is a risk you take despite all the evidence that it might one day crush you.

  You can’t avoid it—the loving and the losing—but the consolation is this: Your love never actually has to end. This is what these stories teach us. Accidents, disease, natural disasters, terrorists, or innocent old age might take away the man you love, your mother or mentor, your dear, sweet brother, but it can never kill your precious knowing of that person. Flesh and bone are cremated, buried, decomposed, but memories are immaterial and eternal. You have no choice about death, but you have the power to keep your sacred relationship alive.

  While letting go, as Freud asserted, is an essential part of the grieving pro
cess, the healthiest mourners are those who also carry on. The courageous survivors contained within this book accept the physical deaths of their loved ones and carry their memories and their special relationships on in various, very personal ways. Freud was primarily interested in the negative aspects of being attached to the deceased, while we discovered the transcendent possibilities of staying intertwined. Far from damaging the subjects, the ongoing process of integrating their lost loved ones—their values, gifts, memories—into their future strengthens and enlivens them, even adding meaning to their lives.

  Brian is still honoring his brother each and every day, not just through his continued commitment to Ground Zero, but through his unfettered commitment to his family. When he lights up a room talking about “my girls,” he’s really talking about both his two daughters and Michael’s. Nick is working on an online start-up for social good called TwoSeed. It’s innovative platform combines the brain of business acumen with the heart of altruism, just as his mom always did in her work, friendships, and family. Tim will devote himself, until his last breath, to serving the memories of his fallen brothers—whether that’s through his own website, with advocacy work, or mentoring the next generation. In this way, Terry and his other heroic friends are never truly gone from his daily life.

  Interestingly enough, even Freud himself admitted that it wasn’t really possible to strike dead—completely “finish” mourning—those we love the most. When his daughter Sophie Halberstadt died from influenza in 1920, he was devastated and found that he wasn’t so much “working through” the pain of his child’s death as learning to coexist with its profundity. In 1929, writing to his friend Ludwig Binswanger, whose son had recently died, he explained:My daughter who died would have been thirty-six years old today.... Although we know that after such a loss the acute state of mourning will subside, we also know we shall remain inconsolable and will never find a substitute. No matter what may fill the gap, even if it be filled completely, it nevertheless remains something else. And actually this is how it should be. It is the only way of perpetuating that love which we do not want to relinquish.