THE TOLL

Death as a Constant Companion
By DAN BARRY

In its essence, the World Trade Center calamity is not about geopolitics, or security, or even terrorism. It is about death: a sudden, wholesale death whose aftershocks continue to rumble through the ground of the living, refusing to ease into memory's recesses in conformance with the natural orderof things.

Here it is, one year later, and families are still receiving word that their loved ones' remains have just been identified, and all they can say is, "Thank you,"because in this new world they are considered fortunate. It may mean a wrenching funeral several months after a wrenching memorial service, but at least they have something to bury. Hundreds of families most certainly will not be so - blessed.

Here it is, 12 months later, and the dead look back at us from photographs on the walls of the city. Sometimes they are smiling; sometimes the wet of four seasons has blurred their images the way that tears blur ink. They look back from behind the cashier's shoulder at the corner diner, from the corridors of Pennsylvania Station, from a small memorial near the Hudson River's lapping banks. Some of the photographs carry the reminder, "Remember Me."

Here it is, 52 weeks later, and some seem to live their lives half-dipped in amber. Heidi Wiener, whose husband, Jeffrey, was killed, cannot believe that she has about a year's worth of work to do on her doctorate - the same as a year ago. She senses others growing impatient with her sorrow, as though grief followed the course of a fever.

 Here it is, 365 days later, and questions persist. Do we look differently at death now? Are we more comfortable with the open secret of our certain mortality, or do we find it more terrifying? How have the simultaneous and violent deaths of 2,801 people in our midst in New York - filmed to ensure the constant reliving of it - changed us?

Experts speak of the human reflex to block out threatening thoughts and images, like the way that some people in New York City sought to compartmentalize the trade center collapse, even as the acrid smell of destruction continued to waft uptown. The posture was that "it was something that happened all the way down in Lower Manhattan," David Rosner, a professor at the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University, said with mock emphasis. "It's somewhere below 14th Street, where I rarely go."

These coping tricks generally proved no match for the gravity of it all, the death of it all. Death was no longer just a foil in a Woody Allen movie, or a muted subtext of a larger drama, the way that the shooting deaths at Columbine High School in Colorado stirred musings about how to raise teenagers. Suddenly, death was intimate. And while it is too early to assess any long-term effects, subtle changes have surfaced since Sept. 11 in the attitudes, and even the language, about death and grieving. 

It may bring no comfort, but it is no less true: the United States of today now has a sense of what other societies and generations have gone through and go through.

People died in the trade center without leaving a trace, as they did in Hiroshima in 1945, when America dropped an atomic bomb that killed as many as 150,000. Human remains were being recovered months after the twin towers fell, just as they were after a dam burst in 1889 to flood Johnstown, Pa., and kill more than 2,200 in a community of about 30,000.

People in New York continue to harbor fears of another attack, fears that are part of everyday life in the Middle East.

The trade center collapse was also not the first time that New York City experienced mass death. In 1904, more than 1,000 people died when an excursion ship called the General Slocum caught fire while taking a Manhattan congregation of German-American Lutherans to a picnic on Long Island. In the 19th century, several cholera epidemics swept through the city, including one in 1832 that killed more than 3,500 inhabitants of narrow Lower Manhattan streets that would one day be coated with Sept. 11 dust. 

"Carts rumbled through the streets, piled with bodies," said Michael Wallace, a historian. "Death was in your face." 

Mr. Wallace, who admits to having been shaken by the calamity in his city, still finds himself examining it in historical and international context. "Let's talk Dresden; let's talk Hiroshima; let's talk London," he said. "The experience of large urban populations with phenomenal disasters shows far greater numbers dead, and far greater damage done to the infrastructure. Sept. 11 is a shock partly because Americans don't remember all the dreadful precedents." 

That is partly because of geography; the United States is protected by two oceans, and with the horrific exception of the Civil War, has comparatively little experience with the ravages of war on home soil.

But it is also partly rooted in basic American optimism.

 Americans tend to see "illness and suffering and death as anomalies, even though we all know that we are going to die," said Mr. Rosner, of Columbia. "We think we can somehow outlaw and conquer death. We have tremendous faith in technology, and are used to controlling events."  The American tendencies to see the United States as almost sacrosanct property, to encourage mourners to get on with their lives, to embrace Botox - to "deny nature," as Dr. Sherwin B. Nuland, an expert on death and grieving, put it - were challenged by the terror attacks. The calamity delivered a one-two punch to the collective American consciousness. 

"It presented us with this massive reminder of death, and how unpredictable, uncontrollable and arbitrary death can be," said Thomas A. Pyszczynski, a social psychologist at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs.

 Perhaps the first lesson learned, or relearned, about death is the most basic. "It never goes away," said Dr. Nuland, the author of "How We Die: Reflections on Life's Final Chapter" (Alfred A. Knopf, 1994).

 "Most people who haven't had a death of someone very close to them don't realize that it never goes away," he said. "They talk about nonsensical things like closure and healing, but what people are coming to realize is that when someone close to you dies, one of the stars you steer by falls from the firmament. If 9/11 has taught us anything, it is about the continuity of loss, and how things are always different after death."

 Meryl Mayo is among the thousands who now know how sudden and violent death has made things different. On Sept. 10, 2001, she was Meryl Mayo, the wife of Robert Mayo, a deputy fire safety director at the World Trade Center. They had an 11-year-old son, Corbin, a house in Marlboro, N.J., and fresh memories of a vacation just spent at the Jersey Shore.
Now, she said, she is Meryl Mayo the widow; she is incomplete, changed. "I used to be a full-time working mother, an all-around person," she said. "I don't have it anymore; it's gone. I'm not that strong woman I once was." 

Another lesson is that for all the emphasis Americans give to technological advancement, they cling to ancient rituals, including the ritual of retrieving and burying their dead. It is a ritual that helps people come to terms with the "phenomenon of absence," said Dr. Robert A. Neimeyer, a psychology professor at the University of Memphis who has written extensively on grieving. "The presence of a body helps to confirm the reality of the loss."

But it is a ritual that was denied or delayed for thousands of people as a result of the Sept. 11 calamity. Details that would normally be nightmarish became almost comforting because they might lead to the fulfillment of the burial ritual: that some remains had been found on a rooftop; that workers were sifting for bone fragments on a garbage dump; that the medical examiner's office was preserving 20,000 body parts in refrigerated trucks parked near the Franklin D. Roosevelt Drive.

Intensifying the pain of surviving family members was the realization that they had been denied control of their traditions. "The burials and cremations were basically conducted by the terrorists," Dr. Neimeyer said. "There's a special act of violence in that." 

THE LOWS of Arkansas felt that loss of control and, like many other families, they went to extraordinary lengths to reclaim it. Sara Elizabeth Low was one of the flight attendants aboard American Airlines Flight 11, which crashed into the north tower of the trade center. She was 28; the daughter of Mike and Bobbie Low of Batesville, Ark.; the younger and only sibling of Alyson Low, a teacher. The family held a memorial service a few days after the calamity.

Nearly 10 months later, in early July, two Batesville police officers pulled up in front of the house, and the Lows knew. They knew that some of Sara's remains had been identified - three bone fragments, it turned out - and they knew that they had to go to New York to bring Sara back to Arkansas.  For the trip, they tucked the box of cremated remains between a folded  American flag and one of Sara's uniform jackets. Now her ashes are kept in her parents' home."We thought for a while of taking her to a cemetery where several generations of our family are buried," Alyson Low said. "But it took us so long to get her home that we want her to stay there." 

So many people from the New York metropolitan area were killed, and so many funerals and services were held, that individual losses were sometimes lumped into a larger communal loss, at the expense of a victim's memory. For example, the funeral for a firefighter killed in the line of duty is normally a distinct and memorable event, with bagpipers and processions following a specific protocol. But because 343 firefighters were killed, there were  services almost every day, sometimes several a day; distinction gave way to sameness. 
Narratives developed, partly to help the living grapple with the abstract  concept of death, but partly to help them assert the individuality of a loved one.

Talat Hamdani and her husband, Saleem, embrace the narrative that their son, Mohammad Salman Hamdani, was a hero - a credit to the United States, to Pakistan, and to the Muslim religion. Few would dispute this. A research technician at Rockefeller University with experience as an emergency worker, he apparently rushed into the towers to help in the rescue. The eventual discovery of his remains dispelled scurrilous whispers about his disappearance and allegiance.

Sitting in their living room in Bayside, Queens, the Hamdanis talked proudly of their oldest son: how a memorial fund has been established in his name; how President Bush publicly referred to his heroics. His father recalled the way that his son would say "Abu, Abu" - for father - when asking for money to give to the homeless, which was often. His mother remembered how Salman always defended his two younger brothers, and how the family learned that he had been a bone-marrow donor only after his death, a detail provided by the medical examiner's office. 
Now, with tears streaking their faces, the Hamdanis made it clear that they would return all the flags and presidential tributes if only they could see Salman come striding through their front door again. Instead, their hero smiles from snapshots on their refrigerator door. 

Tensions stirred by the use of the word "hero" - were the emergency workers the only heroes? Or were all who died heroic in their own way? - reflect another revelation since Sept. 11: the inadequacy of language to describe death. Public officials routinely say that the victims "gave their lives," but some argue that the lives of victims were taken, not given. Even saying that the victims "died" falls short for some; they prefer "murdered." 

"And it's not a tragedy," said Edward T. Linenthal. "It's an atrocity."Mr. Linenthal is a professor of religion and American culture at the University of Wisconsin at Oshkosh who has written extensively about the fallout from the Oklahoma City bombing that killed 168 people in 1995. What he has found, he said, "is the way that language can soothe or transform these events into consolatory - but only partial - narratives."
"There are the narratives that we want to celebrate, of civic heroism, of kindness and courage, of people remaining in the World Trade Center to help people in wheelchairs," he said. "But in addition to that, these stories are about meaningless mass death," he added. "They're about people who should be here." 

Karen D'Ambrosi knows about the inadequacy of language and narrative. What more is there to say than, yes, the cremated remains of her husband, Jack D'Ambrosi, a vice president at Cantor Fitzgerald, are kept in three urns in her home in Woodcliff Lake, N.J.: one each for her and her two daughters, 11 and 13 years old.She has heard people say that she was lucky because her husband's body was found, or because at least he died quickly (which she does not believe).The other day a colleague at work told her he did not know what to say, which, strangely, seemed the right thing to say. "That is enough," she said. "There is nothing to say."

The World Trade Center collapse remains so crystal clear in public memory because many of its horrific details were captured on film: the people jumping; the buckling of the towers, the cream-colored billows sweeping like tidal waves down city streets.  

"It became personal," said James E. Young, the author of "At Memory's Edge: After-Images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and Architecture" (Yale University Press, 2000). "Everybody felt that it had happened to them.
"In some ways, the communal sharing of the losses was good and true, said Dr. Nuland. "We have allowed ourselves to grieve as individuals and as a society," he said. "I just think this is, paradoxically, one of the healthiest things our society has gone through in our time. It has reversed the trend of distancing."

Perhaps it is too early to make grand statements about society at large, about whether the events of a year ago today have brought fundamental or fleeting changes to its perception of death. What is certain are the profound changes to the lives of those who lost a loved one under violent and wrongful circumstances. The deaths of more than 3,000 people in the attacks that day caused ripples in thousands of individual ponds, ripples that have yet to calm. "There is no old self to put back together, but a new self," Mr. Linenthal said. "People have to carve their own way through the alien landscape that they've been placed in. Maybe it helps that you've shared death with so many. But maybe it doesn't."  

On Long Island, Dennis Farrell is a Nassau County police lieutenant in charge of the homicide division and the oldest of six boys - six, he still says. The cracks in his no-nonsense persona are found in recent additions to his office. There is the cross made of steel from the disaster site and the framed photograph of his younger brother Terrence: a husband, father, brother, son,friend and New York City firefighter. Many hours after the collapse, Lieutenant Farrell drove to his brother's firehouse in Queens to see if there was any word. "Just give me one minute," a fire official told him, and instantly he knew. A seemingly harmless phrase thathe had used so often was now being directed at him. 
"My head dropped," he said. "I've been a cop for 33 years, and every cop inevitably says it. `Can you give me one second? I'll be right back with you.' "In Queens, Patrick Lanza did not lose anyone so much as he lost a kind of innocence. At 54, he had never done any police or emergency work; he was an aide to a City Council member and before that, the operator of an icecream store. A regular guy. But when the towers collapsed, he hooked up with a police unit and spent three months digging for human remains. He found them: an arm; a woman's torso; some firefighters.For the last several months he has been working for the city's Community

Assistance Unit, driving family members in a van to the disaster site, absorbing their stories so much that they have become a part of him. The Korean couple who communicated only through sobs; the mother whose son called from the tower, and all she could do was tell him to go be with his co-workers. Mr. Lanza's voice broke as he recalled these stories. "It's so far past being a job for me," he said. 

And in Manhattan, Heidi Wiener is now a 35-year-old widow: her husband, Jeffrey, was an executive for Marsh & McLennan. In the year since his death, she has struggled with so many things: the memorial service, the funeralseveral months later when his remains were found, the low-flame jealousy that everyone else is progressing in life except her.
Perhaps others found comfort in the twin towers of light that adorned the Manhattan skyline a few months ago. She only felt twin stabs of pain. 
But sometimes at night, in their - her - one-bedroom apartment, Ms. Wiener writes letters to Jeffrey in her journal, telling him about her day.
"Some days I'm not any better off than I was in September," she said. "But then I see that I was here, and now I'm here. And I'm seeing that I'm not in the same place where I was in September. That I'm a little bit stronger."
Ms. Wiener has even had days where she is in a great mood for no apparent reason. It does not mean that she isn't grieving, she said. It just means that she is in a great mood, and she might as well embrace it for as long as it lasts, because it won't.

Für das Internet bearbeitet von Hanjo v. Wietersheim am 18.09.2002.