What Do You Do After?

Sep 15

A 9/11 remembrance in creative in-breaths and exhales

Photograph by me, of (the phenomenal) Naked Shakes production of *The Tempest*, by William Shakespeare, for “Shakespeare Summer at Elings Park.”

The 24th anniversary of 9/11 was a few days ago now. In the headline din of yet more collective trauma playing out, my silence sat on my chest. Sometimes that’s all there is in a grief anniversary (of a national attack buried under a freshly enflamed political mood)—silence devouring your tongue till a voice or memory is ready to rise.

Today the memory rose. I remembered that some people create to find their way through rupture. My way, as it turns out, is to nearly disappear, and then to organize my way back to the living. My habit of lists takes the shape of my in-breaths, exhales. Autonomic. Organizing chaos has often been the generative seed to my creativity—after the initial silence.

What do you do after?

Last year, my memoir about 9/11 and searching out collective grief ritual to help me through my own, came out in print. What a joy to hold it in my hands—Ash and Spirit had taken three years and a re-release to get it to land. In it, day by day, story upon story composes a chaos of loss. It organized a healing.

Here’s Day 22, to remember 9/11 by this year.

Day 22 / Return

Day One

I’m in New York:

I used to live here.

9/11/01 was my second day of grad school.

I watched flames and smoke from a street corner near class.

Many students left soon after.

I didn’t have an apartment yet.

But I stayed, realizing that I had prepared for this day so thoroughly that I sent one set of storage boxes to my parents in the Midwest and the other to Suzy in California: In case I died, I didn’t want my parents to have to wrap their heads around the evidence of a life lived creatively.

Being here was a dream.

There was no better place for me to be in the world.

Where would I go?

Eventually, the grad-school-in-NYC part of my life ended.

I’ve been back lots of times.

But I’m nervous now.

Because it’s the first time since I lived here that I’ve allowed myself to feel the trauma of the events.

I’m a late bloomer.

And I had an iron cage around a tiny heart.

Since nearly losing it—and by losing it I mean white-knuckling my mental health, pilfering food and living on the charity of friends and strangers—I started a slow return.

This visit is part of it.

Not worth my tit

The overarching theme in my 9/11 interviews:

New Yorkers see the crushing need for peace more than anyone else I’ve talked to.

War is reiterating, on foreign soil, the death, destruction, fear, and anguish that knocked the wind out of our nation on that day.

The more life we extinguish, the less ground we gain. The less distance we travel in healing our grief and the schisms of the world.

NYC graffiti:

“Our grief is not a cry for war.”

“We were born innosent and kind.” [sic]

“One Love. People get ready.”

Your Tat is not worth my Tit.

“here is new york"

The previous quotes are from photos at the New York Historical Society photographic exhibit, “here is new york: remembering 9/11.”

The photos are presented simply, no frames, 11″ x 17″ prints hanging on string with binder clips, filling all the wall space and strung overhead across the rooms as well. The exhibit covers the space of two large galleries with photographs taken by scores of photographers at or in relation to 9/11.

They show survivors, World Trade Center rubble, layers of dust, writing in the dust on windows of abandoned cars, emergency workers, onlookers, blast views, planes headed into the towers, jumpers, distressed onlookers, stunned, dust-covered survivors holding their foreheads in one hand and a water bottle in the other, hand over the mouth (the international sign for grief and disbelief), missing flyers, impromptu memorials of candles and flowers and cardboard, butcher paper in colored markers, chalk on the sidewalk overflowing with sentiments, shopkeepers and volunteers feeding emergency crews, prayer stations, revenge signs reading “Wanted Dead or Alive” with a picture of Bin Laden, a Humvee squeezed onto an antique, tiny downtown street, more dust, papers scattered about a church graveyard, countless tears, that clear clear 9/11 sky, NYC concrete corridors, every last person facing the direction of the smoke, watching in disbelief, subway stop memorials, people staying together, strangers in each other’s arms, firemen holding hands on their way into the pile, kids’ drawings, missing sisters and fathers and migrant workers and traders, blood, twisted metal, mettle, post-apocalyptic organization, blue sky….

A habit of lists

From my desk here in [my town], composing from materials I’ve collected in my return trips to New York, my research and interviews and story sketches, I thought for a moment that I might not post the quotes I copied from the New York Historical Society exhibit photos, worrying that I might be bombarding people with 9/11. But it strikes me over and over that what I’m doing is healing. And others, from what I heard in response to my original stories, are healing along with me by watching, listening to, or otherwise being a part of mine.

The quotes:

“Not in our name.”

“This is no time for cowboys.” (Sign around the neck of a life-sized John Wayne cut-out.)

“The news makes me cry.”

“Patriotism scares me.”

“END WAR” (Written in block letters inside a ONE-WAY sign.)

“PWPD/FD Meet Here—FLFD” (Written in the ash and dust on a van window.)

I also compiled a list of names from some of the photos of missing persons flyers, to press their letters into paper, feel the grooves their names made on the back side of the page. Later, after the fliers captured in the photos had been rained away, other people compiled more lists of names, along with a few phrases about each person, to serve as a public memory. I imagine the list makers felt compelled the way I was, to collect and compose a body of loss, to make real and mourn each individual absence, to keen into the volume of our collective mourning.

As I write, it’s raining here on the California Central Coast. Land of the Maxfield Parrish sunlight and clouds, views and mountains, sky. It rained in NYC on 9/11, the day I was visiting the Historical Society exhibit. I find it interesting that out of two galleries of walls filled with photos, the one that struck me the most was a simple cityscape, point of view looking down an empty avenue, even more distinguishing, the absolute clarity of sunlight caught in the photo. I got stuck in this photo all those years ago, and that’s where I’ve been walking around since.

Going back to NYC in 2007 was the first time I faced what I’d been eluding. I went to the observances. Let my grief surface. Let myself be someone who grieves over this trauma. Before I returned, I was so interested in how it is we move on from grief, how it transforms us. But being at the World Trade Center site as the names were being read—as the rain was falling, as, across the water, lights shone in remembrance, upward into a black sky—made me realize there is no hurry. Grief takes its slow steady time, unwinding like the coils of a snake languishing in sunlight, loathe to leave the rock that has been warming it. Grief transforms. We are changed in it. But first grief is grief. Its own spirit and will and breath. Before it moves through, it inhabits. The exquisite journey is to cohabitate.*