With Rosh ha-Shanah just a day away, and September 11 in its midst, I can’t help but think of that naïve, Park Slope Food Coop member that I was. If she could see me now, surely, I’d get a huge eye roll of disapproval.
It was my first job out of graduate school, working with predominately children and families up on Third Avenue, in East Harlem. When I could finally step outside on what was a noticeably bright, blue-skied morning, a plume of white smoke billowed in the distance instead. Shocking.
The Twin Towers had fallen, and the unthinkable had happened to so many ordinary, some heroic, lives—their families, loved ones, friends, strangers.
I was seeing clients who had significant trauma as the morning was unfolding. I remember saying something like, “See you next week,” walking into the waiting area to pick up my next client, only to arrive to a quiet commotion between staff: a plane had hit the Twin Towers, and it was bad. Tense as staff were leaning in, listening over the radio of the unfolding terror.
Back into session with another young child, seen conjointly with his mom, grappling with their own issue of gravity. The terrorist attack was not their worry or even curiosity of the day. Their life was happening now too, in that small room, the lived pain that had brought them there.
Back to the waiting area.
The second tower had been hit.
And then they came down. Or that was another session later, it’s a bit of a blur. Back and forth, quick hugs with close colleagues in between. White chalk-like smoke, debris and all of it… swallowed the streets below.
Quick call. Check-ins on the land line since cell phones were out. And onto see the next client.
When I finally had a moment, calls to family and friends. Quick stories shared. Several friends of friends were missing. I later learned that one made her way down the countless steps in pitch black, obstructed by the most awful, the stairwell, running down through the unspeakable to reach physical safety. The tower came down soon after. She got out.
I can remember the nearly 3,000 people behind the pieces of paper that flew with the wind across the river, even if I never knew their names. And I can outright refuse to turn victims into distorted abstractions or perpetrators for that matter. I can call something what it is when the words matter.
The bridges were closed; I couldn’t go home from Manhattan to Brooklyn. I found refuge at a family friend’s apartment.
I wore the same outfit, a white button-down shirt, in a fog, for about a week. When I was back in the Manhattan apartment, I vacillated between the X-Files, phone calls, and almost nonstop news coverage and the man falling from the building too many times on TV. It was devastating. I was fixated on the coverage because how could this happen here in the U.S.? Such naïveté.
As a therapist, my purpose was to show up for my clients and to be present for them. Therapists met as a group for consultation and support a couple of times a day for check-ins. And mind you, terrorism was terrorism. There was no debate about what had happened. Fear. The juxtaposition of working with clients in their own preoccupying trauma and what was unfolding downtown was something I was trying to make sense of. It was an unintended early lesson in managing my own reality, countertransference, and ego in order to best show up for the person in front of me. And in managing my own assumptions about where someone should be emotionally. Mind you, it was mostly children and families. But it was also a reality check about how so many of my clients wanted help with crises or whatever it was they were facing in their everyday, not with what was happening downtown.
I couldn’t stop thinking about those deemed “missing.” I made my way with a friend down to Union Square where posters of the missing were affixed throughout the park, people gathered.
There was a fight. Ugly, angry words exchanged. And finally, an embrace between two men. Many of us cried.
I remember calling my cousin in Israel when it first happened, and when I was fearful and catastrophizing about driving home across the Brooklyn Bridge.
“How do you live with the fear of terrorism, of missiles, of the unknown. That this could happen again?” “Eh, I live my life, what am I going to do. We can’t live in fear.” That shrug-your-shoulders Israeli intonation of survival.
It took me almost two weeks (a week after the bridges finally reopened) to move through my anxiety to cross back home to Brooklyn. Though I was seeing clients, I had been in a shutdown sleepwalk outside the walls of the counseling center.
I drove with my friend who worked with me and too lived in Park Slope. We held our breath, driving in silence until we made it to the other side.
Then a sigh of relief.
When I got home, I embraced my friends.
One had taken photographs from the roof just as the second plane hit the second tower. She didn’t develop them until years later. Or maybe she did, but didn’t look at them until she was ready, when life and time and the raw aftermath had passed.
Too much.
My downstairs neighbor held on to papers that blew over from the towers to this side of the river. He kept them on display in his home. It felt weird.
I wanted him to return them.
To someone. Someone’s handwriting—is he or she alive? Who was it?
There was something else, an object, but I don’t remember what, that he kept as another keepsake. Though well intentioned, I imagine, I recall feeling that there was something perverse about displaying these fragments of people’s lives, people who may have been killed, might have tried to escape, or made it out safe somewhere. A piece of someone’s life had landed across the river. I wanted to know who took that pen to paper. Were they safe?
The view from our roof was like looking at a faraway futuristic world of Armageddon. That silver crooked mass jutting from the ground, white smoke rising above it, moving in this direction or whichever with the wind.
I had friends who were social workers at NYU Medical Center that day and for days afterward. When news of the attack happened, they mobilized the ER and stood outside waiting to treat massive amounts of people, to comfort the families and process what had happened.
They waited. The people never came. It was heartbreaking and surreal.
We know who did it. We know it was terrorism, orchestrated by Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaeda.
So hearing the twisted revisionism, the attempts now to water down what it was—terrorism—leaves me sad and disgusted. My younger self wouldn’t believe it. There are still moments of shock at such a horrific erasure of reality. Back then, it was fringe and seemingly unwell conspiracy theorists who engaged in historical revisionism and hate. The cult-like groupthink now feels more worrying.
On October 8, a soccer mom relayed that her son came home upset about “What the terrorists did in Israel.” The mom swiftly told me, “And I told him, we don’t call them terrorists. That’s dehumanizing.” And that was just the beginning of what has unfolded before my eyes. Inversions, projections, revisionism, hate.
Of not being shut down into silence. I think about the young people in classrooms who deserve better than revisionism and fixed binary explanations of the world. Of the normalization of projections of who is deemed “oppressor vs. oppressed,” all dressed up as education or social justice. Of colleagues being put on “Zionist lists,” because they have Jewish-sounding names, and of clients being handed litmus tests for what they are allegedly permitted to believe or say for entry. Clients seeking help and presence. This ideological capture continues to violate our profession’s core ethics and our most basic call to do no harm.
“Eh. I live my life. What am I going to do? I will not live in fear,” and I will not mince words about what I see. I think of my cousin’s refrain often now, especially after October 7, when the world has seemed both upside down and crystal clear.
I think of Rosh ha-Shanah and this new year. This sweetness of beginning again, even when the world feels like everything except sweet. Maybe it’s the sweetness of attunement to reality. Of staying connected to what is real, even when there are many who push to distort what we see, what we know, and what we remember.
I think about how, on September 11, as a younger person in the beginning of my career, I learned about showing up while I couldn’t control what was happening downtown. I cannot tell another person, or my clients how they are supposed to feel. I can only be there, pay attention. I can manage my own fear and ego and do my best to make room for someone else in their world. That’s continued to be at the core of the work. And it’s our most basic ethical duty.
I can remember the nearly 3,000 people behind the pieces of paper that flew with the wind across the river, even if I never knew their names. And I can outright refuse to turn victims into distorted abstractions or perpetrators for that matter. I can call something what it is when the words matter.And then I can change clothes, clean up, and show up for this ride in life. Fully present. I will not live in fear nor mince words about what I see.
Hineni.
