My nephew died in 9/11. I think I can offer some help to grieving families in Surfside
When my nephew was murdered in the 9/11 terrorist attacks (he was a passenger on the first plane to smash into the World Trade Center) it took three and a half years for his remains to be found and returned to his parents — my sister and her husband — in North Carolina.
I say “remains,” but all we had was one seveninch piece of Karleton Fyfe’s thigh bone. The rest of him — ashes to ashes, dust to dust — returned to the universe to become part of someone or something else in nature’s recycling economy.
As I’ve followed the horrific search-and-rescue operation at the collapsed Champlain Towers South condominium in Surfside, I’ve been reliving that awful of time waiting to see if any part of Karleton would turn up.
Perhaps the most difficult moment for me recently was when rescue crews found the body of the 7-year-old daughter of a member of the Miami Fire-Rescue operation and had to call him over to identify her.
I imagined what it would have been like for my sister to walk around Ground Zero and have someone point to a mangled body to ask if that was her son.
In a Kansas City Star column I wrote after we buried what we had of Karleton, I raised the question of why human bodies, including dead ones, are so important in the aftermath of a deadly catastrophe:
“The question some of us struggled to answer,” I wrote, “was why it was even a little comforting to have a bit of his physical remains. What did our faith, our understandings of body and spirit, tell us about this?
“Well, we are a family of diverse faith commitments, so everyone had to answer that in his or her own way. But we all understood that this bone fragment — carefully packed and shipped here from New York — wasn’t the essence of Karleton. His soul, his spirit, could not be confined to some material that once pulsed with his blood and marrow.
“Karleton’s father helped us with all of this by noting that the atoms and molecules that made up Karleton now have been mostly scattered into the cosmos and that someday they may become part of other people who, like us, will be required to perpetuate the memory of someone they love.”
That will be important for Surfside’s grieving families to remember. For people of faith, the ones who perished in the collapse are, in the end, gone neither physically nor spiritually. Nature simply doesn’t lose the atoms that made them up. And some part of them will live in the memory of survivors, even if the major world religions are wrong about there being an afterlife.
In fact, in Karleton’s case, I’ve preserved many family memories of this fabulous young man — 31 years old at the time of his death — in my new book, “Love, Loss and Endurance: A 9/11 Story of Resilience and Hope in an Age of Anxiety.”
Family members of the Surfside dead may not write books, but they can share stories, photos and letters. News reports say many of those caught in the collapse were Jewish, and one of the grounding articles of faith in Judaism is the importance of memory.
Time and again in the Hebrew scriptures, for instance, the people of Israel are asked to remember that they once were slaves in Egypt and were rescued by divine order.
There will be funerals and memorial services. There will be family gatherings to tell stories — some of them funny. Humor, in fact, will be a critical medicine as Surfside families move through the bitter pain of bereavement.
On April 5, 2005, my two other sisters and I got an email from Barbara that said of Karleton’s remains:
“He is home here with us. Now tell me again why this young man is lying in this bag. Just what is the God damn reason for it? Sorry. I’m just a little pissed. At least he is back home. Love, me.”
“There was a University of North Carolina Tar Heels basketball game on national TV that night. North Carolina was playing Illinois in the Edward Jones Dome in St. Louis for the national championship of the men’s NCAA tournament. North Carolina won 75-70. “He watched the game, too,” Barb reported that night. “I put his UNC hat on him, gave him my chair and he loved the evening. Truly, that’s what I did.”
It’s hard to imagine an act that was more Barblike or more Karleton-like. My heart smiled.
Surfside families, may you find such moments in your agony. May they help you to heal and remind you of all that was wonderful about the people you’ve lost.