The cost for Ground Zero workers

only seen death in a casket, understand it isn’t always like that.

It’s terrible, it’s horrific, and it’s sometimes grisly. We didn’t find everybody we wanted to, or in the ways we wanted to. But we accounted for everyone we found, even when I quite literally held what was left in the palm of my hand. I put parts of people into blue latex gloves and tied knots in the top, securing remains for families, for salvation.

The rescue, the digging, the sacrifice and the honor went on for weeks. For months. For those assigned to Fresh Kills, it went on for years. We never asked the cost.

Each day, after hours of work and hours of volunteering, we went home, to rest our bodies, if not our minds. We went home exhausted and grey with dust and smelling of Ground Zero.

That smell. If you weren’t there, you wouldn’t understand that smell, which rose from the rubble and carried through the city, rising up the rivers to the outer boroughs. That smoke and that scent filled our nostrils and permeated our clothes, and wound through our internal organs in the fingers of the nightmare we now live.

That smell is killing us now. It killed my academy friend Sgt. Christopher Christodoulou, with an aggressive Glioblastoma tumor that took the kindest man I’ve known. That smoke wove through Lt. Chris Pupo, infecting his blood with multiple myeloma. Pupo and I worked together on 9/11, and all those days after. His laughter was contagious, his spirit more so.

All of the rest of us are scared, not just of nightmares from the past, but from the possibilities of the future. Every cough, every lump, every odd heartbeat is cause for concern, cause to either run to the doctor or willfully ignore in an attempt to deny reality. This was the cost of our actions, the cost of doing what was right.

We didn’t ask cost then. You don’t get to ask it now.

Woods is a retired NYPD sergeant.