My search for 9/11 answers
“Like the generations of leaves, the lives of mortal men. Now the wind scatters the old leaves across the earth, now the living timber bursts with the new buds and spring comes round again. And so with men: as one generation comes to life, another dies away.”
The Lycian warrior Glaucus speaks these words in “The Iliad” to the man who is about to kill him.
There were more than 120 babies born, after 9/11, to the widows of men who died in the violence. New buds. They will turn 20 soon.
Nobody knows how many pregnant women died that day in the smoke and the flames. Some of them, surely, didn’t even know of their own conditions yet.
I was sitting in my car today, parked by a harbor watching the rain streak my windshield. I was listening to an old interview by public radio journalist Robin Young with Jill Gartenberg, who gave birth six months after 9/11. She named the baby girl Jamie, after her husband Jim, who died on his last day of work in the North Tower.
They already had a daughter, Nicole.
He had taken a new job somewhere else. After the planes hit, he had about an hour to call people he knew and to give a remarkable interview on WABC. He told the families of trapped or missing people to stay calm.
Near the end, he called his wife one more time. “I love you. I love Nicole,” he said.
When I heard that, the rain was no longer the only thing streaking up my view of the harbor
We are here to love and work. He went to work that day at a job he had already finished with. And then, suspended in air, he said, “I love you. I love Nicole.”
More than most people with no direct connection to the tragedy, I was ensorcelled by 9/11. It became my Iliad, with firefighters and cops instead of warriors and kings, airplanes and ambulances instead of sailing ships and chariots.
I went back again and again, sometimes as a journalist and sometimes just as a person.
The city air was rich with smoke and toxins and hope and sorrow. Union Square was full of candles and pictures and messages, visible and otherwise.
After 9/11, the survivors of the dead came forward to say that their loved ones (or they themselves) had had premonitions, shivers, whirling sensations before the event, as if the veil separating the present from the near-future had started to shred.
There was an undeniable intoxication in the early days. We shouldn’t lie to ourselves. One element of any huge tragedy is the euphoria of one’s own heart still beating.
On the first anniversary, in 2002, I was part of a large CBS contingent broadcasting from the Verizon building which had been damaged by flying debris from the towers. There were still holes in the walls.
I worked there from morning until evening. There was an odd reddish dust blowing around the site, entering our building through those holes. You could feel it in your eyes, taste it in your mouth, watch it fill the cracks in your laptop keyboard.
The wind began to swoop down and scoop the dust in the air, where it formed twisting, changing shapes, each of them vanishing to make way for more twisting, whirling dust serpents.
In Islam, there is the idea of the djinn, beings who inhabit an invisible parallel world and make visits to this one.
I watched those reddish shapes, made of dust that was one-part human remains, and I thought, “Someone is trying to tell us something.”
Old leaves are scattered by the wind. My mother, the person who called me and told me about the smoking towers, died exactly five years later on 9/11.
The living timber pushes out new buds. Jill Gartenberg eventually married again. Her daughter is Jamie Gartenberg Pila.
After 20 years of reading, talking, contemplating, analyzing and reeling from the enormity of 9/11, I comprehend it no more than I did when I started. Someone is trying to tell us something, but I don’t know what.
The words that still hang in my mind, like those dust cobras at the WTC site, were spoken by my son. I went to see him as his middle school let out on 9/11.
I asked him what he had been told so far. A little. I assured him we would be all right.
“Will you be home at the regular time?” he asked.
No, I told him, I would be working deep into the night.
We are here to love and work. We try to be home at the regular time. One day, we stop coming home forever, and all that remains are words and memories. “I love you. I love Nicole.” There really is nothing more.