September 11, 2002

A passing year full of images, stories, war and recovery has done little to help me grasp the events of September 11, 2001. In fact, the near-obsession I have with inundating myself with as much World Trade Center content as possible has made me realize that I do that in some kind of meager attempt to “understand” the happenings that day. I’m completely and utterly unable to do that after a year of trying.

In response to my written account that I posted online a year ago, I began to receive hundreds of emails from around the world. From New York to California, Ireland to Germany and Japan to Australia, people wrote wishing me well and telling me how I would be in their prayers. I responded to everyone feeling sure that they would never fully understand how cathartic their notes were to my bruised emotional state. Many of those who wrote to me relayed extremely personal experiences of their own and told me how they had dealt with them. The results of all those emails on me was some kind of reinforcement that I didn’t walk this earth alone…that the horror and shock of that day owned no passport and truly did span borders and cultures…that so many people were grappling with the same emotions as I was. I very much felt that the disasters at the WTC and the Pentagon were not so much an attack on the United States as much as an attack on the morals and decency of all human life.

The First Six Months

I returned to lower Manhattan on September 17th, the Monday following the attack.

I didn’t really expect to work that day but as if the previous week had been just a dream, I again needed to see for myself the hole in the sky left by the fallen towers. The rubble still burned at that point, of course, and would continue to do so for an additional four months. My one and half hour commute stretched to almost three hours as the daily PATH train riders were forced to take the ferry. I do remember that first ferry ride. Packed in tight, no one spoke and everyone stood, mouths agape at an unfamiliar skyline. I was hypnotized by the destruction. That, too, would last for months.

After that first day back downtown, I didn’t or couldn’t comfortably return for some time. Immediately after the 11th, damage to the area resulted in my office lacking the 21st century necessities of telephones and internet connectivity and because the majority of my work relied on the latter, it was easier and more comforting to work from home. When our telecommunications capabilities were reinstated, I began to face up to the fact that I was expected back at the office. My company did a decent job of trying to get the employees comfortable and acclimated. They brought in a psychological counselor to discuss, as a group, how we were feeling. I immediately took a dislike to her and her style of speaking which just seemed to add to the overall depression in the air. My concerns seemed larger than simply getting my mental state back to a point where I could return to the mundane, unimportant focus of developing application interfaces. Indeed, how could I ignore thousands of bodies and body parts not two blocks from where I sat typing away on my computer? It seemed rude to me that I would be expected to do that. In one group meeting, I remember saying that this was simply not the kind of world I wanted my kids to grow up in. That was what I had been focusing on. I still very much feel that way.

The outside air was oppressive, especially on windy days, and the odor which became familiar to me over the course of the following month was that of soldering steel. In late October or early November, the authorities opened up some additional streets near ground zero and I was introduced to new smells. One day in particular, it was unseasonably warm and I ventured down near West Street to get a new perspective from a different angle. I was smacked in the face by an odor that I have never sensed before but immediately knew what it was. I was nauseated and never went back to that area again.

As many residents and workers in the Wall Street neighborhood have communicated elsewhere, the police presence and overall security was unavoidable. My building, whose entrance sat on Broadway, allowed me to get closer to “things” than most. My building I.D. card was like a backstage pass. For weeks after the 11th, I would look across the street at the Trinity Church cemetery which was buried under enormous amounts of debris. The air outside continued to be uncomfortable for quite a while and my company hired some independent contractors to test the environment in my office. Although the analysis that came back reported the air as being fine, the amount of conflicting opinions in the media and government organizations was disruptive and hindered a return to normalcy.

As the New Year came and went, more restaurants began to open and things did seem as if they were getting easier downtown. That being said, a cloud continued to hover above the entire downtown area from my perspective. It was a cloud of uncertainty. The cloud grew larger at times…I would sit in a nearby diner eating my grilled cheese sandwich on toasted rye and out the window, huge steel columns from the trade center buildings would be carted by on flatbeds. Incredible thing to see. Just incredible. And then I would finish my sandwich and go back to the office knowing that I would see the same thing again the next day and the next and the next…It was a constant battering of the senses watching those pieces of steel go by. Rescue workers filled that diner too and would come in wearing their pulverized-concrete covered uniforms and I would lose my appetite thinking about what made up the dust in their clothes.

Residual Effects

Much of the commentary surrounding the events of 9/11 span the attack, the destruction, the victims, the survivors, the mental anguish of an entire city and nation, etc…The effects of those events on me show up daily EVERY time I hear an airplane overhead. It’s not that I fear airplanes falling out of the sky. It’s the sound that brings back memories of that morning and for that, there is no escape. More troubling, perhaps, is how situations that would normally be uplifting can now spawn additional stress within me. I will never be able to look at a ticker tape parade without remembering the debris floating in the air after that jet hit the first tower. Even falling leaves have reminded me of it.

In all the time I’ve had to reflect on last September, the true fear for me had nothing to do with being in a dangerous place at all…I don’t remember ever actually fearing for my life as much as I just felt pure and raw fear in general. Later, I identified that fear as stemming from losing my nerve, something that I had not really dealt with before and certainly not along the lines of September 11th.

It would seem that most people take their emotional state of being in control of one’s environment for granted and rightfully so…indeed, a year later, I walk around in my daily life with a grasp on what is happening around me and knowing that I am in control of my life. My nerves are frayed for sure but what went barreling through my body as I watched the second plane disappear into the south tower is difficult to describe. Without disrespecting those that actually lost their lives in those buildings, it feels as if I, too, was hit by an airplane. The sheer speed of what overtook my conscience at that moment is imprinted deeply within myself. It literally introduced me to a side of my psyche that I didn’t know and now that I’ve been living with it for a year, I have come to realize that the airplanes did rip a hole inside me as well. Following that metaphor, the past year has been spent repairing that hole. Instead of closing it up the way it had been before, it’s like I’ve installed a window in its place and I can now see both in and out. It’s a view that I didn't previously have. I’ve always maintained to myself the importance of seeing things from a different perspective so in that sense, this new window can’t hurt me. I’m not used to it yet, though, and it clatters and shakes when airplanes pass overhead.

Closure is Cheap

The term ‘closure’, which for months and months, was used to describe the importance of recovering the remains of those killed on 9/11 bothered me to no end. I remember reading an essay where the author argued that you “close on a house, not a person”. I believe that because our future is so clearly shaped by the events of our past, an event like 9/11 is not something that people should ever put behind them. The masses of visitors to Ground Zero in the days, weeks and months after the attack seem to support that. Some of those who worked and lived down there seemed upset and disturbed that people would come and visit the area with their cameras. Outside of the additional foot traffic in the area which slowed things down a bit, I never objected to the visitors. The enormity of the event was too great a draw…it was simply unfathomable and people needed to see it for themselves. For most, the view was sobering and truly horrific, especially if they were previously familiar with that area of Manhattan.

During the past year, I have re-read my written account a number of times. Each time, I am reminded of other details of that day. I have, on occasion, been able to completely re-create certain aspects of September 11th in my mind and relive the emotions that swept through me. These don’t feel like memories…it feels as if I’m actually bringing myself back to Liberty Street at 8:45 a.m. and the brunt of that first explosion hits me and I take off up the street all over again. I don’t know of any other event in my lifetime that I’m able to relive like this without it feeling like a memory. I can smell the fires and the smoke, I can see the paper fluttering around me, I can feel the ground underneath my feet and I can hear the sounds of lower Manhattan under duress. I choose to relive this because it’s the oddest sensation I have ever felt. Not good...not bad...just very unusual.

All this written, my life has absolutely gone on. My children are growing, I still laugh and smile, I have flown on airplanes and I have worked.

The build-up to the first anniversary of this disaster was more trying than I thought it would be. In the days just preceding 9/11/02, I felt much like I felt after the initial attacks…extremely emotional, somewhat insecure and just overwhelmed with doubt about society in general. Oddly, those feelings subsided on the actual anniversary even as the country moved their terror-alert colors around like a Chutes and Ladders game.

I don’t feel as if I want to use this forum to discuss or communicate my political views of the war in Afghanistan or what looks to be an approaching war with Iraq. There’s too much noise out there already on this. My writing here is, once again, just a release of pent-up words stemming from an experience that I have not yet maintained control over and I doubt I ever truly will. If the worst that happens to me in my life is reliving a time where I did lose my nerve and survived it a little bit stronger, I can live with that.

Jonathan Segal

September 12, 2002

jsegal@mac.com