Public Tragedy, Personal Grief
We Don’t Always Get to Say Goodbye
This week, a French friend recommended “Turning Point: 9/11 and the War on Terror.” As much as I am transfixed by this 20th anniversary, as much as I am driven to read articles and remembrances and even share my own, I turn away from pictures or video of the day. I do not have to close my eyes to see the pictures and video from that day; they are burned somewhere in my amygdala and accessible as vividly today as they were 20 years ago. I explained this to my friend, and he agreed; there is a similar documentary on the Bataclan attacks, and he cannot bring himself to watch it.
The ringing of my phone woke me up that morning. I have always assumed it was my cell phone, but now I have to wonder…was I sleeping with my cell phone next to my bed even then? Could it have been the landline? It was dark. I was disoriented. There is an unwritten rule that calls in the middle of the night are never a good thing.
“Kerry. You can’t go to work today.” It was my mom. No hello, just an urgent request. I commuted to the East Bay from San Francisco daily.
“What do you mean? Of course I’m going to work,” I replied, wondering why she would care.
“They flew a plane into the World Trade Center. Do not go to work.”
I could not comprehend. “Oh my God. Are the people on the plane okay?”
“Go turn on the TV.”
I turned on the TV. I woke up my roommate. We sat. We watched. We sobbed. We saw the second plane hit.
The reality did not seem possible. We knew these buildings as landmarks of our childhood and young adulthood, as symbols that the journey into the city from the suburbs was complete, as navigational points on our journey to something bigger and better.
The phone rang again that day, or maybe emails popped up in our inboxes. My roommate finally heard that a cousin who worked in a tower was safe. My boyfriend heard that his brother-in-law, who worked in downtown New York, was okay. In the evening, my friend Melanie called; one of our childhood friends, Stacey, worked in the North Tower. They could not find her.
Our friendship may have been forged out of circumstance — our fathers worked together, our mothers liked similar activities, we both liked swimming and dancing and so carpools were created — but we found connection in dreams and make believe. In my memory, we both wanted to be writers or journalists and even created our own newspaper, although we only “published” one version of one edition, and the news was likely not so newsy by the time we finished it. After she went to boarding school, we exchanged letters for a while; we exchanged a few emails while she was in college, but then fell out of touch.
A few weeks after 9/11, still a bit shellshocked, I visited my grandmother, a born-and-raised New Yorker. Born in 1918, she had memorable stories of the touchstone moments we studied in history class: Pearl Harbor and World War II, the JFK assassination and now 9/11.
“Grandma, which one of these events had the biggest impact on your life?”
“Those were all great tragedies. But the biggest to me was when Knute, [my first husband], died.”
She likely saw the surprise on my face, and went on to explain. When her husband died, she became a single parent of three girls, the youngest just 10 years old, and took over the family business. She said goodbye to her husband, her old life and her (expected) future at once.
I vividly remember this conversation, in a restaurant over Chinese food, but I do not remember talking about 9/11 with my sister or brothers or parents, though I am sure we have. I wonder now if my youngest brother, in high school at the time, watched it on TV in a classroom like I watched the Challenger explosion when he was just a baby. My middle brother was in college in New Jersey — was he already in New Jersey, or was he at home, waiting for the school year to start? My sister had just moved to California; I am sure we saw each other the following weekend, but I have no concrete memory of what we might have talked about or done.
Years too late, I wrote a letter to Stacey’s mom. I sent it, though I have no idea where I found an address, or if it made its way to her. I learned this year that Stacey’s best friend has written a book about her; I look forward to reacquainting myself with my childhood friend.
My mother hates to say goodbye. She hates the finality of it, fears it might actually be an ending. I used to make fun of her for that. Then my friend gave me one last gift, one last lesson that I learned about in The New York Times’s Portraits of Grief. Like my mother, I do not say goodbye very often; like my friend, I say I love you.
