I cannot speak for 9-11 survivors for I am not one. I am only a walker. A person who walks with people on the way back from hell. I can only give you my understanding of those whose staggering gait I know deeply. I’ve been a post-trauma specialist and psychoanalyst for forty years. I’ve worked with 9-11 survivor families, individuals and first responders from New York and New Jersey who survived or lost loved ones in the 9-11 Trade Center bombing, as well as working with 9-11 survivor families on the west coast, those who lost their loved ones in the four highjacked planes that day…
Some of the public forgets those four planes filled with passengers were heading for California, even though they remember they were hijacked and flown off-course –meant to become airliner incendiaries to bomb four targets in our country.
Too, it’s easy to forget that when there is news of 9-11 in media now, that the never-old extreme pain can tremble to the top of people’s hearts again on both coasts, and at points in between as well. 9-11 didn’t happen to buildings made of cement in New York, nor a cement building in Washington DC. The attack of 9-11 bombed the hearts of people across the entire country and much of the world.
I could tell you stories about the lives of first responders, survivors and survivor families that would make many beg, beg me to stop, beg to be spared one more image of gore and grief. I could draw horrific images so vile and so vivid, that some would sicken and literally have to go vomit, for so shocking are the stories to the systems of the body and mind … even to a third party merely hearing them recounted.
This is only to say, now these 9 years later, those who are not what we call ‘inner circle,’ or ‘first witness,’ tend to no longer register the terror and the torment as lacerating; and those affected secondarily like post-trauma workers and other helpers, we learn to survive what many others would buckle under; yet we have our own ongoing hauntings to deal with, and we’re trained well to do so– not to be feelingless, quite the contrary, but also knowing how to heal from soft skin to strong scar tissue.
And the inner circle people, the first witnesses, the ones were able to flee, those who had their family members and friend not only ripped from them, but burned from them, exploded into pieces from them, hitting concrete from 100 stories high on fire from them… these souls still walk in waves, like the waves of the ocean; some soothing memories, some violent memories of near unbearable pain from so many things, regret, loss, would have, if only, should have, what if, immaculate love, imperfect love, cherishing equal to the angels.
We are definitively certain from our years of work in trauma — and it was a pathetic ideal when it first surfaced as part of someone’s idea of ‘the grief movement’ years ago… that there is no such thing as one year of mourning and then you’re over it, and so move on. One never ‘gets over’ deep trauma. One learns, body, soul, spirit, mind and heart instead to, as my youngest daughter says now 14 years after losing her first son, our first born grandson, We learn slowly… to live… with what has happened.
And this proves out for most all… one can count on the waves of grief to, as time goes on, strike us father and father apart, thankfully, ever so gratefully… but when they do strike, they strike hard and as sharply and with as much immediacy as they struck us down the very first time. Then, there are those nearly universal gestures of grief, people bend chest to knees, and howl, or else sob silently… and feel like one will die all over again.
Except now, this knifing-grief, even though it still draws so much blood, is shorter in duration, though as deep in pain as ever. It does not go on relentlessly for weeks and months without relief. Now, nearly a decade later, it may be minutes of the sudden storm, debilitating one’s spirit for several hours or days after. But then there is coming back. The people who have been so tested and managed to prevail… they know the way back by now. They have done it now, many many times…
walked the road from hell back into the world of the living. Over and over, with their scarred but indomitable spirits pretty fully unfurled. Most of the time.
May all be comforted on this day and always.