Today is September 11 and I am a New Yorker. I anticipate this day, I usually take the day off work but this year it falls on a Sunday. I asked my FB friends to be "mindful" about which images they post today, although TIME, Reuters and Huffington Post aren't friends of mine and they went ahead and re-posted all kinds of horrors.
When I first moved to Colorado, people talked about 9/11 very differently. They remember the Football game from the night before. They remember watching it on TV. New Yorkers remember the weather - the soft cool morning with clear skies and bright sun, They remember the sounds - metal screaming against metal, bodies hitting the pavement, the sirens, the alarms. They remember the smells - smoke, and later, the smell of the burning people. The only planes in the sky were fighter jets, everyone had to walk home. Everyone had to account for their friends and relatives.
September 11 was 15 years ago. But for so many, it's not just one day a year. I hope it's not everyday anymore, but it could be. I was a newlywed. My husband had gone downtown for a meeting. We both worked for Catholic Charities as therapists. That night we were asked to volunteer downtown, helping people de-escalate. There was NO de-escalating anyone. They were looking for their fiances, spouses, posting photos, checking the hospital rosters the volunteers were holding. My spouse went, but I stayed home, too afraid to go near the site. All day we were told anything could happen any time, and I lived by a major bridge - I was not allowed to go under it on my way to the hospital to give blood. I was given an appointment to come another day. There were no patients who needed it today.
Our agency negotiated a contract with the City to administrate funds for families and people who lost their jobs because downtown was shut down. We were also sent to various sites to provide counseling and provided onsite counseling in the offices. I remember one woman who worked for American Express housed in the WTC. She walked all the way from one end of the island to the other to get home, the long way. She often sat in my office struggling to stay in the present. Other times her eyes were shut and she was back downtown running for her life. I would keep talking to her to help hold her mind in that office with me, safe and quiet. I felt like I failed her. We had no idea what we were doing. We were struggling as much as anyone else. Two years later, the agency gave us a therapist of our own to do some de-briefing groups. It seemed like an after thought by then.
Today I tried anything to avoid seeing images, to think about my life that day. Since then. I get angry at people for being so flipping patriotic when they were somewhere else, watching TV, watching football. As a social worker, a clinician, I hear un-believeable stories of victimization and survival. People who have been raped, stabbed, shot, slashed, relatives of the murdered, and my own first hand experiences of work in the ER with people who are fighting to live, or dead, and being prepped for organ donation, or being re-opened in the ICU because the ORs were booked. Or the rubble and the smell and the zombie like people milling around you.
But I can't stand people making a trauma their own when it was not. You're a firefighter? That's great, I know you have trauma. But you're a firefighter in Boonie, IA and 9/11 was not your trauma. I have to deal with that, I hold my tongue a lot. First responders died in greater numbers than any other group, they ran to the danger. They worked in the middle of the danger. The Twin Towers have been targeted since the moment they went up and were a firetrap by design. They face outrageous risk of post traumatic stress disorder and secondary trauma - car accidents, and fires. The things they've had to see that can never be un-seen.
Those images replay in the mind, anytime you smell something burning outside on the wind. When a plane seems just a little too low over your neighborhood. Be kind to each other. You haven't walked in their shoes. And you haven't walked in mine.
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