My mother and I had a special bond all my life. She would take me on bush walks, naming the different varieties of flowers and wildlife. She would lead me to our favorite waterfall, talking about poetry and music. She spoke of the beautiful, positive things in life and sheltered me from the bad. She fervently believed that good would overcome evil, as my father preached.
Growing up, I was never allowed to watch scary movies. If a TV show had a swear word in it, my mother would change the channel. I remember the first time I swore, when I was about fourteen. My mother sent me to my room for hours and gave me the Bible to read. The irony, of course, was that the Bible was full of terrifying stories: demons riding on three-headed horses, villains being thrown into burning sulfur lakes, prostitutes, and cities turning into salt—all the things in the world that my parents were attempting to shelter me from. My imagination exploded with images far more graphic than any movie ever could have designed. I often woke up from my dreams exhausted from the previous night’s adventures.
Throughout my childhood, my mother’s hospital was my playground. When we weren’t traveling overseas, I spent hundreds of hours there, including most of my holidays. There were around one hundred senior citizens living in the facility. While most little girls played with dolls, my playmates were these patients. I would walk around the wards and visit everyone, talking with them while they handed me candy. After I’d stopped by forty or so rooms, my pockets would be overloaded. I truly loved the old people. They treated me like their granddaughter. I would secretly tell them all that they were my favorite, and would lay my head in their laps and let them stroke my hair. I would dance for them and paint their nails and brush their hair.
Many of the old people were neglected and alone. Half of them had Alzheimer’s and dementia. Each time I visited those patients, it was like they were meeting me for the first time; they were surprised when I guessed so much about their lives, as if by magic. A kind blind lady knew me by the sound of my footsteps. I would try really hard to mix up my stride when I walked past her room, but she always knew I was the one sneaking in to see her.
When I was sixteen, I started officially working part-time at the hospital as a nurse’s aide. I was proud of my beautiful nurse’s uniform, which was a knee-length pale pink dress. I walked the hospital halls carrying bedpans as if they were laden with treasures.
Not long after I began, I saw a dead body for the first time. I walked into a room where the nurses were filling up open orifices on a fresh corpse, which they did so that fluids wouldn’t leak out. I was fascinated by the color of the dead woman’s skin and how her eyes were still wide open. When the nurses rolled her over, a great sound escaped her lungs. “She’s alive, she’s alive!” I cried, as the nurses shuffled me off down the hall and closed the door.
My parents tried very hard to shelter me and my siblings from the bad in the world. Later I learned that living in a bubble isn’t necessarily a good thing. Eventually, any bubble is bound to burst. Mine burst a few years after I had graduated from teacher’s college at age twenty-two. I was a passenger in a small bus, returning with my cricket team from the state championships, which we had just won. The driver was our coach, who had been drinking all day. Suddenly, he lost control of the wheel and crashed into a retaining wall, causing the van to flip and roll over. There were no seat belts on those kinds of vehicles at the time, so I went flying and felt my legs smash against the steel seats in front of me. Then I hit my head and blacked out.
When I came to, I saw smoke filling the bus. I pushed at the large side windows and got several open for me and my teammates to crawl out of. I walked in a daze down the highway until my legs gave way and I collapsed on the median strip. A news crew arrived on the scene and asked me questions until the ambulances came and pushed them away.
Over the following days, doctors revealed that the nerves in my legs from the knees down were badly damaged. Time would tell if and how well they would heal. In the meantime, I had lost the use of my legs and was confined to bed.
I had married my college sweetheart only a few weeks prior to the accident. Now I was totally reliant on him for everything. Even the smallest activity had become a monumental chore, requiring a great deal of skill and planning. Tragically, my new husband snapped under the pressure of caring for an invalid. He often left me alone for most of the day and night while he worked, went out drinking with his mates, or played sports. I had to fend for myself. Once, I lay for half a day soaking in menstrual blood because I couldn’t get to the toilet. Before I received a wheelchair, I learned to crawl out of bed and onto the floor. Then I’d move on my stomach like a snake, contorting my body up onto the toilet, where I would sit for hours until I had enough energy to pull myself back into bed.
Every morning, I woke up to a world filled with pain and suffering. I couldn’t reach most of the food, which was placed high up in the kitchen cupboards, so I often would sit hungry on the floor, crying. On an already slim frame, I lost forty pounds—and I nearly lost my mind. I was in agony and I wanted to die. Self-pity and anger at my new husband slithered in. I was heartbroken that he couldn’t look after me. After several months, he left me. Things like this weren’t supposed to happen in my beautiful world.
For weeks, I sobbed against the large window in my bedroom, where dribble and dried tears fogged my view. I strained to see out the window, looking for some sign of my husband’s return. Hours later, I would give up and slump back into my bed of self-pity.
I needed a lot of care, so I soon moved back in with my parents. They were nonjudgmental and cared for me deeply, but I still carried a deep sense of embarrassment at the failure of my marriage. The hardest part about living back at home was watching my brothers interact with their new wives, kissing each other and looking so much in love. It would remind me of my broken heart, and I would have to leave the dinner table. I continued to cry every day for the next six months, and had permanent marks on my face from where the tears ran down my cheeks. I was inconsolable. The pain in my heart felt physical, like a knife was actually stuck in my chest, ripping at my insides.
Then one day I suddenly stopped crying. I felt an overwhelming sense of peace. I realized that I had lost the life I loved but that the accident hadn’t taken my soul. I believe in a divine creator, and I know that God pulled my soul through to a place where things became more bearable. I felt a warm sense of not being alone. A light came on inside me, and I decided to live and to heal.
I went back to teaching math at the local high school, where I had worked before the accident. The school set me up in a classroom on the ground floor, where I could easily maneuver my wheelchair, and the students would push me around and carry my books. Slowly, my heart healed and I regained the use of my legs, until at last I could walk normally. I felt alive again.
I often have thought about the darkness of those years and what the experience brought me. I have realized that from that time forward, I couldn’t imagine facing anything worse than what I had already been through. Although I had suffered greatly, I hadn’t turned to drugs or alcohol. I had found a way to survive, and had connected to a deep, unshakable faith in myself and in God. And things had gotten better. I had no reason to fear for my life or whatever might come my way.
What I did do, once I recovered, was make up my mind to change continents. My parents were good people, but I longed to move forward into the world outside my childhood bubble. I was now in my mid-twenties; it was time to grow up.
I resolved to make a fresh start in America. Starting over would bring a whole new set of challenges, but at least I would know that I was on my own and that I could learn from my mistakes. I limped out of my old life and into one of my own creation.
CHAPTER 3
When I woke up from my dead sleep two days after returning home from Ground Zero, I felt a deep sense of guilt for being alive. I was in my mid-thirties and my life had already been a full one. I would have willingly swapped it to save anyone in those buildings
. The guilt consumed me. I screened my phone calls, talking only to my family and a few friends. I didn’t leave my apartment for a week. I felt that if I shut out New York, I would be able to shut out all the hurt that hung in the air like bad meat on a sweltering day. I turned on the television and watched the tragedy for the first time through someone else’s eyes. I cried until no more tears came out.
On the seventh day, I was ready to talk. My New York friends had heard about my adventures through my friend Katie and wanted to know if I was okay. They decided to cheer me up by giving me tickets to The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. Waiting in the show’s lobby, I met a woman named Samantha Aezen. She was working for the American Red Cross New York chapter and had some cards that children had written to the Ground Zero workers. She handed me one from a little girl that said: “If you have a broken heart, you can have mine.”
After a short conversation with Samantha, I decided to join up with the American Red Cross the next day and head back to Ground Zero. I had felt a strange impulse all week to go back to help, and I realized that the Red Cross might be the only way I could gain official access.
I placed my plans for my just-completed feature film on hold in order to volunteer. After all, my primary film investor and dear friend Jonathon Connors had now been declared dead. Every little detail in my life seemed shallow and insignificant compared to the important work I could be doing at Ground Zero.
I also had broken up with my boyfriend seven months earlier and had no one to come home to anyway. Nearly all of the volunteers who worked at Ground Zero had children and partners, but they felt called to a higher cause, and their families respected their decision. With my relative freedom, both in terms of home and work life, I felt that I had absolutely no excuse not to pour my heart into the recovery efforts.
I had about $10,000 in the bank. I knew that would be enough to cover several months of rent and expenses, and I felt confident that I would be able to stretch the funds somehow. Many of the volunteers, including myself, later found themselves short on cash, but relatives and friends came through to help us out.
The American Red Cross based their volunteer operations out of their Brooklyn chapter, just across the Brooklyn Bridge from Manhattan. All you needed to join was proof that you were over twenty-one years old and a bill stating that you were currently living in New York. They were so busy that, as far as I could tell, they were allowing every type of person in New York into their organization.
I mentioned my time at Ground Zero and expressed interest in returning to the innermost zone. They took my photo and made me sign a few documents promising to conduct myself in an appropriate manner. Then they signed me up to be a basic volunteer, with the understanding that I could be doing anything from feeding people to making coffee to loading trucks. It didn’t matter what chore they gave me, I just wanted to help in any way that I could. Happily, I got a full access Ground Zero badge with a green bar across it. The others, which had a yellow bar across them, meant that you were not allowed into restricted areas of Ground Zero.
I wore my green bar badge with pride as I lined up outside the Brooklyn Red Cross building with sixty other volunteers waiting to be bused back into Ground Zero. As we were driving over the Brooklyn Bridge, a hush fell over us. There was the familiar Manhattan skyline, only the famous World Trade Center landmarks were gone.
When the buses pulled up at the entrance to the restricted zone, we could see that another city had developed within the city of New York. It was to become my home for the next nine months. I worked down there seven days a week, sometimes eighteen hours a day. At night, a bus would drive me and the other volunteers back uptown, dropping us off near the areas where we lived. I would collapse into my bed, often still in my work clothes, for four or five hours of oblivion. Then I would mechanically get up, shower, and do it all over again the next day.
In the mornings, I would take the long subway ride from the Upper East Side to the Lower West Side of Manhattan. Going from uptown to downtown was a complete culture shock. Uptown, people were slowly and respectfully beginning to go about their business, eating in restaurants and returning to a quiet normalcy. Downtown was still a third-world disaster zone. Ground Zero had become an obsession for all of us volunteers, many of whom shared the common goal of finding loved ones we had lost in the attack. The gigantic mess seemed normal to us, while life uptown seemed bizarre.
I found that for the first time in my eleven years of living in New York, strangers talked to one another on the subway. The events of September 11 consumed everyone’s conversations. I carried my construction hat and Red Cross vest and badge, so I was easily identifiable as a volunteer working at Ground Zero. Commuters often would approach me, telling me stories of dead relatives or friends or how they had escaped on that fatal day. One morning on the subway, I felt overwhelmed with sadness and started crying uncontrollably. Three people immediately crowded around me, offering comfort.
On the day of my friend Jonathon Connors’s funeral, thirty-six other funerals were also held for September 11 victims in the suburb of Cold Spring Harbor, Long Island, alone. In those first months after the attack, thousands of funerals took place, many without caskets since there weren’t enough bodies to go around.
When I arrived at the church for Jonathon’s memorial service, I saw him standing right there in front of me, alive and breathing. My heart swelled and tears squirted out as I raced over to hug him. I wondered how it could be true that he had survived after all! But then I quickly discovered what nobody had told me: Jonathon had a twin brother. He had never mentioned it to me before. I spent much of the devastating service sneaking suspicious looks at this living ghost through the mourning crowd.
The American Red Cross is a traditional organization. They generally gave women the roles of caregivers, while asking male volunteers to load trucks, stock supplies, and do the more “manly” jobs.
I was based at Respite One in the hot zone of Ground Zero, below the National Guard checkpoint at St. John’s University on Warren Street. The female Red Cross volunteers there provided comfort—our job was to smile and keep the workers’ spirits high. We looked after all the workers involved in the massive cleanup of Ground Zero. Most of them refused to take breaks even to sleep and eat. We would gently insist on feeding them, clothing them, and getting them to sleep on the stretchers we had prepared. Our station was open twenty-four hours a day. It had a television room with couches, Internet-equipped computers, and phones to call home, since many of the ironworkers had traveled here from hundreds of miles away. It also had shower rooms. We gave out all sorts of supplies, from hard hats to gloves, socks, pants, shirts, and toiletries.
Upstairs, we had sleeping rooms with cots and a poster in the hallway that said QUIET ZONE. The lights were always turned down low. On each cot, we placed a blanket, a pillow, a gift bag of hygiene items, and a thank-you note from a schoolchild. I worked upstairs preparing beds and tucking in tired workers, fussing to move the blankets around them as my mother had done for me as a small child and as I had done as a teenager for the elderly folks in my mother’s hospital. When the workers passed out, we slipped their shoes off and changed their socks.
The station had a dining area with free food. Many of the fancy restaurants around town sent free meals to us daily, and other businesses such as Target, Poland Springs, Hershey’s, and Coca-Cola stocked our tables with snacks and drinks. I lived on Red Bull, Snickers, Milky Ways, and peanut M&M’s, and ended up putting on about ten unwanted pounds.
All the volunteers and workers were part of a big family now. We gave one another that familiar “Ground Zero look.” It was a glance exchanged without words that said we were all in this together and somehow we would pull through. We loved one another through our souls and shared daily stories from the battlefield.
One of my favorite workers was a retired firefighter named Paul Giedal who was filled with the hope of finding his son Gary, who had been working at Rescue One on September
11. At the end of the day he would say, “We didn’t find him today, Alison, but tomorrow we will.” He worked down there every single day, digging for his son. He never did find Gary, but he channeled his grief into helping others.
Every day, the female volunteers would drive a golf cart deep into the Ground Zero pit to serve the workers freshly baked cookies and a pot of hot coffee. One day, I announced to the workers that they could have anything they wanted. An older, hefty ironworker walked over to me, picked me up and threw me over his back, and carried me off, to everyone’s howls of laughter. Another day a fireman came in with a twenty-inch dildo and an unbroken bottle of champagne they had found inside the wreckage. We all joked about the sort of party we could throw.
Everyone found great comfort in the letters from children that came flooding in from all over the world. Samantha and I would sort the letters and hang them wherever we could. We tucked them into ironworkers’ pockets and under the windshields of their cars. Hard men of steel melted into warm pools of love and tears as they quietly read these precious messages, which said things like, “Dear hero, I know how you feel. My goldfish also died that day,” or “I am so proud of you my guts hurt inside.”
One little girl wrote:
My dad was a firefighter and he was in Tower One when it collapsed, so it really means a lot to me what you are doing. If it weren’t for all of you, my dad would have had no chance of surviving at all. Even though you didn’t find him, I still appreciate what you did for everyone else who needed you too. Thank you for working so hard.
Another little girl wrote:
The Third Wave Page 3
