9/11 After Ten Years

I was at Ground Zero today, doing a number of interviews with foreign television stations.  I took a number of photographs that can be found at http://gallery.me.com/charlesbstrozier#100446&bgcolor=black&view=grid

(I wrote this piece with Robert Jay Lifton and it was posted on the website of the Dart Center of the Columbia University School of Journalism)

This tenth anniversary of the attacks on 9/11, for all its potential to reawaken a painful past, is also significant in that it moves personal loss into collective historical memory. Something experienced viscerally becomes part of a much broader context. The trauma itself enters this larger sense of time. That can be a painful process but also offers a moment for reflection and the creation of new meanings.

For many immediate survivors, 9/11 remains an open wound — as it does for the many thousands of New Yorkers who continue to have trouble breathing, or are getting cancers at a higher rate than normal, or are still struggling with psychological repercussions from their experiences. Such suffering must be deeply respected and should be appropriately responded to at all levels.

More distant survivors — the rest of us — have a complementary task in our struggle to make sense of the event. No disaster — whether that of Hiroshima, or Auschwitz, or 9/11 — has an inherent meaning. It only has the significance we give it. But because we as humans are meaning-hungry creatures, we must connect such an event with some form of larger interpretation. Cultural meanings and symbols emerge from the interplay between the direct experience of immediate survivors and the reactions of those responding from a greater distance.

A problem, both cultural and political, is the inevitability of contending views on lessons to be learned from what took place, why the 9/11 attacks occurred, and how even now we should deal with their continuing consequences.

Our plea is for life-enhancing meanings that can interrupt the cycles of violence involving terrorism and responses to it. Such meanings have emerged from other catastrophes. A considerable number of survivors of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki have traveled around the world to tell their stories to warn about the dangers of nuclear weapons. Auschwitz survivors, immediate and distant, have taken strong and influential stands against mass killing and genocide. Cannot Americans begin to find similar wisdom in connection with 9/11?

We have surely learned of the absurdity of fighting wars that aim militarily at wiping out all terrorism. Such an approach only makes things worse and deepens the problem in the name of solving it. We need to protect ourselves and ward off attacks, as the world can be dangerous and violent. But our most basic approach should be that of searching for alternative directions that dampen rather than exacerbate violence. The Arab Spring, however uncertain its outcome, may offer such an opportunity in its impulse to overthrow tyrants and expand justice. We could open up new dimensions of dialogue with Islamic nations, in which our new understandings of 9/11 could play an important part. Both terrorist movements and American violence would be radically diminished, and we all would experience something closer to what the former Secretary General of the United Nations, Kofi Annan, called “human security.”

To carry out this mission requires that we acknowledge our vulnerability and military limitations. We must extricate ourselves from what can be called our superpower syndrome, with its assumption of American omnipotence and the illusion that we can control history. To accept limitation and seek nonviolent change are expressions of strength, rather than weakness. The tenth anniversary of 9/11 has the potential to serve as a powerful catalyst in this process.

In my interviews there emerged in most cases what can be considered clinical material, especially dreams, linking my formal research study involving respondents, a protocol, and tape recorder with my open-ended, completely confidential practice as a psychoanalyst.  I am interested in such personal data and both had questions about it in my (memorized) protocol and pursued in depth any hints of material that I felt would allow me to explore deeper psychological issues.  Deirdre, for example, described during her first interview on October 5, 2001, her dream a few days after 9/11 of Godzilla tramping about in New York.  Her dream finds the perfect science fiction image to fit the psychological state of the city.  The monster was huge, taller than the highest skyscraper, and as it trampled about and destroyed everything in its path.  Some two weeks later, Deirdre had a second dream that she was on a plane.  She was anxious and felt like she was having some kind of anxiety attack.  Subsequently, all of her dreams related directly to the disaster as she struggled to work through her trauma in her nightscape.  Some dreams have dealt with terrorists, sometimes there are bombs, and sometimes she is in California but unable to reach her family.  She has since lost most of the details in these dreams but was quite aware that all of them related directly to the disaster.

At the beginning of my second interview with Deirdre on October 26, 2001, I was immediately struck with how exhausted she looked.  I asked her if she was having trouble sleeping.  She said that indeed she found that she was unable to go to sleep until sometimes 2:00, 3:00, or 4:00 a.m.  She then found that she woke up at normal times, which completely “messes up my day.”  The problem is, “I just don’t want to go to sleep.  I just don’t want to go to sleep.  I’m dreaming a lot and most of my dreams aren’t very pleasant.”  I asked her what some of those dreams were about.  She noted that they were not only dreams but nightmares: “Lots of airplane dreams about being anxious on the airplane, being nervous on the airplane, plane crashes, planes crashing into buildings, hijacking dreams and things just similar to that.”  When she has her dream disrupted by such a nightmare Deirdre turns on the lights “like a child,” and perhaps watches some TV until she finally goes back to sleep.

Deirdre’s trauma after 911 connected with and evoked some kind of analogous childhood experiences of confusion and terror.  She reports that she had chronic nightmares from the time she was four until she was fourteen.  In that period of her life she woke up most nights from these nightmares.  She’d scream and crawl into her parent’s bed.  Before sleep she “stacked stuffed animals all around my bed to protect myself.”  She even slept with a Bible, even though she wasn’t religious.  She seemed to call forth anything at hand that might help.  Curiously, the same grandmother who was so soothing for Deirdre after the disaster had been the crucial figure in her life to help her find escape from these debilitating nightmares.  This grandmother had worked with her on a regular basis in talking about her dreams and encouraging her to write them down as soon as she woke up.  The grandmother then talked with Deirdre about the dreams.  The grandmother also took Deirdre to the library and checked out books on how to meditate and teach oneself how to go back to sleep after being awakened.  After that wonderfully empathetic help from a loving grandmother, not surprisingly Deirdre stopped having nightmares.  Deirdre’s parents had divorced when she was two and a half, and after that she lived with her mother and brother.  She spent most summers with her grandparents in Nevada, however, and it was in those periods that she became so close to her grandmother.   “She is a very important person in my life,” Deirdre comments.  The writing down of dreams and meditation at 14 gave Deirdre new tools for dealing with her anxieties.  “I would follow a maze in my head and just concentrate until I got to the center of it, and that sometimes I would not fall asleep, but be very, very relaxed to where everything around me was very quiet, but I was aware of.  Now I wasn’t completely asleep, very relaxed.  And everything was very soft and very peaceful and I could do that after a while to get myself to relax.   She [the grandmother] taught me how to do that.”

Deirdre makes a very interesting distinction between the “night terrors” that she experienced as a child before she was 14 and her Godzilla dream.  The night terrors were in fact much more debilitating for her.  She experienced them as a symbolic form of annihilation.  Her Godzilla dream, on the other hand, was part of the emotional process of recovering from her trauma on 911.  The dream itself, which came in the beginning of the second week when she started sleeping again, was disturbing and scary.  But she did not wake up from the Godzilla dream screaming.  That dream served, as Freud had it, to protect her sleep.  The dream was a way of working through anxiety and fear and allowing her to move forward with her life.  The night terrors Deirdre described as a child disrupted her life in different kinds of ways and laid the groundwork for a vulnerability and sensitivity to disruption later on.

Part of that sensitivity came from her early death encounters. When she was 12 years old she was standing at the bus stop waiting for the school bus to arrive.  It was in California and she was then in front of St. Ciprian’s Church.  Everyday she stood at the same bus stop at the same time waiting for the same bus to take her to school.  She was very familiar with an older man, probably in his mid- 70’s, who went walking at this time and crossed the street in front of her.  The man this day had on brown pants and what Deirdre called a “grey old man’s sweater,” along with a “little brown hat and cane.”  Almost every day Deirdre saw him out for a walk crossing the street by her bus stop.  On this day she was standing there as usual and watched helplessly and in horror as a truck coming down the road extremely fast hit him and dragged him for about 100 yards in front of where she was standing.  Deirdre and a friend ran down this street to see if there was anything they could do.  The man was lying there “all contorted and skin pulled and obviously dead.”  She ran to a nearby house and called 911.  In her memory of the scene she remembers being upset and crying but when a police officer came to school and told her that she could go home if she wanted to, she remembers thinking, “Cool, I get out of school.”  One has to suspect that the image of the dead man on the street after he had been dragged 100 yards by a speeding car had to bear some resemblance to the shattered bodies Deirdre watched falling from the sky on September 11.

Because my psychotherapy office is in Greenwich Village not far from Ground Zero, the effects of 9/11 impinged directly on my practice.  For the first week my patients and I had to cross the police lines on 14^th Street even to get to my office on 13^th Street and University Place.  If New York was the crucible of the disaster that was in fact national in scope, my office was near the zone of greatest impact.  To ignore the world that lay outside would have been fatuous and false to the reality of what my patients (and I) were feeling and experiencing.  At the same time, from the outset there was also a curious need to create the psychotherapy hour as a safe haven, a cocoon in which old themes could return in this new context.  It was this mix of the utterly familiar with the extraordinary that most struck me in my clinical work during the weeks and months after 9/11.

In the first week, for example, I was absorbed entirely with people talking about the trauma they were going through with the disaster itself.  The most dramatic story along these lines was that of Ginny who worked in lower Manhattan and stumbled through the debris and dust to come to her session on Tuesday afternoon. She had called me after the towers collapsed, reaching me in one of the intermittent moments when cell phones worked, and begged me to wait for her until she could make it to the office.  It was truly psychotherapy in an urban setting, now in the midst of a disaster.  I also had to deal that week with Andrea, who had literally been unable to get out of bed for three days after witnessing the events from sufficiently close to have watched bodies falling out of the sky. The world seemed over for her, and it took much patient listening to help her get back into life.  Beginning with my sessions on Tuesday, September 18th, however, that is, one week following the disaster, there was still a good deal of trauma, but in every case there was a return to a degree of normality, or at least a reemergence of personal themes in somewhat larger context.  This reemergence of the self was always introduced with an apology to me and, in an existential sense, to God.  How trivial I am to be worrying about my lover, says one person.  I must be very shallow to be talking about my boss when all those people died, says another.  What kind of thoughtless person am I to ignore those with real pain, says a third.  Of course, having offered such a caveat, or made that apology to some power greater than me, the patient would then feel free to resume his or her self-involved refrain about the personal problems that had brought them to therapy in the first place.  That was, after all, what they were paying me for.

The one amusing comment along these lines came from Eleanor on Thursday evening, September 20th.  She had shown up with her dog and was all flustered because her son had forgotten his heavy backpack in her office.  She had gone home to walk the dog, then swung back by the office to get the backpack before coming to therapy.  She showed up with dog in tow and carrying the heavy backpack.  She talked about some of the current crises with one of her sons, who was just starting high school, and seemed to be feeling overwhelmed by it.  At the same time, there were continuing issues with the other son’s ADHD that at times left her paralyzed with anxiety.  She paused after this litany and said:  “I have walk my dog.  My son may be using pot, the terrorists attacked, and I still have to make dinner.”

Recovery was not linear.  The disaster had a way of continuously reasserting itself, usually without warning (though the signs of despair could be unraveled in retrospect).  Ginny, for example, who had walked through the debris for her session on 9/11, seemed relatively okay in her sessions during the first two weeks after 9/11.  I was seeing her then twice a week (Tuesdays and Thursdays) and thus had the chance to monitor her psychological state rather closely.  But suddenly on Saturday, September 28, Ginny had a full-blown panic attack, something she had never experienced before.  I tried to stay in touch, taking a call at first and then communicating over the weekend by email. Then on Tuesday morning, October 1, she had a second attack.  At first she considered going to the hospital but with a talk on the phone she got through it and to work, when things got better.  In our session later that day at 4:00 p.m. she was at first a wreck but became increasingly relaxed.  Once she felt completely together, she was able to tell me that she had woken up early on Saturday morning with the image in her mind of me standing on the street watching the towers fall while she was locked in her building.[1]  It was at that moment that she experienced the first panic attack.  What she realized with a start on Tuesday morning was that what she felt along with the image was that I must have been scared watching the towers collapse.  That had brought on the second panic attack.  I was vulnerable and therefore not able to be the idealized source of complete security for her.  I told her that, yes, I had been afraid but was also here for her and would definitely take care of her.  With that the anxiety drained from her face.

I have also found in my practice that the impact of the disaster could linger for many years. I saw Julia for twice weekly psychotherapy in 2006.  She was then a 43 year old filmmaker.  She began therapy because of her despair over the breakup with a girlfriend in the wake of 9/11 that she seemed unable to work through and was interfering with her capacity for creative work.  She had written a script for a film, and was in the process of raising five million dollars to produce it, but found herself stuck in the final revisions. Much of her therapy consisted of working through on the basis of a detailed, almost obsessional, account of the hours and minutes around the breakup.  Julia needed to account to herself for her own actions, Julia’s cool rejection following the breakup, and most of all her continuing coldness and refusal to have anything to do with Julia in the years since the breakup.  Julia’s problems, however, were enormously aggravated by her fragile physical condition as a result of her experience on 9/11.  She had just arrived in New York to begin study at the NYU School of Filmmaking, and had moved into her apartment some three blocks from the World Trade Center.  When the disaster occurred, she unwittingly ran out onto the street with her camera and took footage for the next hour that she has not yet been able even to look at.  When the towers collapsed, she was caught up in the dust and immediately suffered severe lung ailments.  She had something of a predisposition in that she had experienced childhood asthma, but there was nothing from her childhood that could have possibly accounted for what she has experienced since 9/11.  She constantly suffers from asthma and has been hospitalized several times.  The count of lead in her body far exceeds acceptable levels.  The levels of her mercury, as well as several other minerals, far exceed normal levels.  Her cholesterol and her blood pressure have shot up to exceedingly high levels since the disaster and have even been difficult to maintain at normal levels on medication.  The psychological distress that Julia wrestles with is her determination not to be a victim, even though in therapy I have tried to get her to be more empathic with herself in this regard.

I watched relationships of other patients as well unravel in the wake of 9/11. My patient Samuel had developed a quite successful career in commercial photography in the years prior to 9/11.   He had, in fact moved up the ranks of his advertising firm until he was making over $200,000 a year.  He had been married for the previous 6 years with Annette, whom he had also lived with for the five years before that.   Both were now in their early 30s and had a 1½ year-old child.  They lived in a brownstone in Park Slope and seemed the picture of happiness.  Annette herself worked in the computing field and made $90,000 a year.  They were not in debt, and were able to save enough money to buy their brownstone a few years earlier.   They were excited about their young child, and looked forward to another child in the relatively near future.  In retrospect, it is clear there were problems that lurked below the surface. Samuel had a brooding temperament that led him into fits of despair and bouts of loneliness and withdrawal.  He had some trouble with alcohol and drugs, but had pretty much overcome what was, in any event, a relatively mild addiction.  The more serious psychological issues were an underlying depression and hints of paranoia.  All of this, however, was decidedly muted in his therapy before 9/11.

The disaster seriously affected Samuel professionally but most of all psychologically.   His advertising firm suffered significant economic losses from the disaster, and he was out of work for an extended period of time, even though his business recovered and professionally he was in a position to resume working.  Psychologically, however, something seemed to break in Samuel after 9/11.  He became gradually withdrawn in his life and unable to break through his depression in therapy.  He brought in his wife for some couple work, and I was impressed with the fact that she actually seemed a good deal more adjusted to live in the post-9/11 world than Samuel was.   She had her own vulnerabilities and, for example, had struggled herself with alcohol and drugs and in her youth and been quite promiscuous.  But, at this point in her life she wanted to continue to develop her family and have another child.   Samuel, however, seemed unable to deal with his own brooding temperament and emerging paranoia that began to take hold of his personality.  He became unable to see anything except the torments in the world, the “craziness” of his wife, and the difficulties he faced at every turn.  Eventually, he decided to leave his wife, which was part of a more generalized crisis in which he lost his job, which meant he no longer had either income or insurance to cover therapy.  He vanished one day without warning or goodbye, and I was left feeling I had failed him completely.

Many other patients, however, have reported growing closer to their partners in the wake of their brush with death on 9/11.  Ed, for example, a therapist himself, had been leaning toward an affair with another man before 9/11 but on that day found himself caught up in the arms of his long-time partner, crying and hugging, in ways that greatly solidified their relationship.  Judy Kuriansky, a New York therapist who studied these issues at the time, reported in 2003 reported that most psychologists believed that people “became closer and more committed” in the relationships after 9/11.  Her impressionistic data came from an online survey her students at Columbia University’s Teachers College conducted.  They found that fully 2/3s of women and men “wanted more connection with their partners.”[2]  While close to being purely anecdotal, such data suggest the idea widely talked about among therapists: the immediate response of most people after 9/11 was to reach out to loved ones and connect emotionally with great intensity.  Of course, those renewed connections often later unraveled, and for many, as for Samuel, something broke inside them as a result of the trauma, but it would seem a disaster prompts most people to yearn for connection with loved ones, to open up and become more available (if briefly), and to become closer in their relationships.

On 9/11 there were people who received grievous injuries.  A worker from the Office of the Medical Examiner who got to the site early to help set up triage was hit by falling debris that badly broke her leg.  Some were injured and at least one person was killed when hit by those falling or jumping to their death from the heights of the twin towers.  There are images, some of which I have in my personal collection, of victims bleeding from wounds to their heads, necks, arms, and elsewhere on their bodies.  The whole area around ground zero was one of great danger long before the catastrophe of the collapse.

But in general this was a most peculiar disaster in the ratio of deaths to injured that it left in its wake.  For the most part, people either died or survived physically unharmed, though of course thousands, especially among the 12,00 who worked on the pile in the weeks and months after 9/11, have lingering illness from their exposure to that toxic air.  But on that day of disaster fate choose radically.  Hundreds and hundreds (and, I believe, far more than is officially recorded, though it is impossible to determine the exact figure) plunged to their deaths from the upper stories, trapped by the intense heat and the fires.  Those who remained in the building or were trapped, as with the firefighters, were crushed in the collapse of two 110 story buildings.  Those deaths contrast with most of the 17,000 who escaped from inside the building and were quickly evacuated from the scene.  Disaster tourists who stood and watched were horrified and many later suffered emotional distress from the sight of all the death, but most relatively easily ran to safety when the towers fell down.  Some emergency workers close to what came to be called ground zero suffered injuries, but, again, what is remarkable is not how many were injured but how few even required minor medical attention.  The most common treatment that people required on the scene was cleansing of their eyes when the cloud of debris descended on them.

In contrast, as soon as the disaster was underway and it was clear it was a terrorist attack, all local hospitals geared up for a massive influx of patients.  All doctors were put on high alert and the hospital itself turned into an emergency room. Gurneys were collected and brought downstairs.  The call went out for blood donors.  Medical staff sought to coordinate their work in advance of what they assumed would be the onslaught of victims.

Instead, virtually no victims arrived.  They had mostly either died at the scene or easily escaped.  There is no more powerful image of this contrast than the scene outside St. Vincent’s Hospital late in the morning of 9/11 in a photograph taken by Roberto Rabanne and available in the online collection, “Here is New York,” of the New York Historical Society.  Underneath the beautiful sunny sky that day, medical personnel stand helplessly about on the sidewalk waiting for victims to arrive whom they can help.  So many gurneys and wheel chairs have been assembled from throughout the hospital that they overflow onto the sidewalk.  People are talking with each other, standing with their hands behind their backs, or staring helplessly into the distance.  It was the great wait.

I was being bombarded by spam comments (hundreds each day) and finally figured out that I could install a simple plug-in to filter them out. But in the process I deleted all the spam comments along with those legitimate ones that readers had posted.  In the future, my newly configured blog should now be allowing in only legitimate comments which I encourage you to make.  Sorry for the confusion.  This blog business is still somewhat new for me.

The 9/11 memorial in the footprints of the two towers with its cascading water includes most prominently the names of all the victims arranged around the banks of its eight sides.  There were many years when survivors fought in a most unseemly way about the placement of names.  The families of firefighters, for example, at various times argued their wanted FDNY members to be listed by assigned units and rank since that how they responded that day and with whom they most likely died, while others, such as Rudy Guiliani, argued that firefighters deserved special attention since they chose to enter the burning towers knowing the great danger but went in, heroically, to save others.  Such proposals, however, suggested that the lives of firemen somehow mattered more than other victims, and the uproar was understandable.  In the end, the arrangement of names follows much more logical criteria and all the listing of the dead provides each an equal and dignified place.  The final decisions about names in that regard were appropriate.

But what about this matter of numbers?  The official count, for one thing, fails to note, even if symbolically, the unknown dead such as undocumented workers in the kitchen of Windows on the World whose families were too scared because of their own status to come forward after 9/11.  Analogously, most countries build a “Tomb of the Unknown soldier,” which they maintain as a memorial to the countless number of soldiers who died in its wars without notice, simply disappearing from the face of the earth.  The most moving such memorial in this regard I have ever seen is an integral part of the Hiroshima Peace Park.  There, beneath a huge mound, now covered in grass, formed after an imperial tomb from the Momoyama Period (1583-1600) with a pagoda finial made of stone on top, lie the ashes of scores of thousands of unidentified broken and burned humans after the bomb was dropped, gathered from throughout the city and buried.

Equally troubling in considering the 9/11 memorial is its failure to include in its count of victims, and therefore honor, those who were at the scene, whether that day or working subsequently on the pile belching its noxious fumes, and died later from cancer, lung disease, or related illnesses (and will continue to die in future years).  Astonishingly enough, cancer has been excluded recently as a legitimate basis for obtaining health benefits from the government for those 60,000 who worked on or near the pile in those anxious months after 9/11, especially the first hundreds days when the fires still burned. Many other citizens in New York City—including my wife, Cathryn Compton, whose asthma significantly worsened after her exposure to the cloud of debris on 9/11—have suffered, and an indeterminate number have died.

A friend, who was a fireman at the scene on West Street, along with several peers, recently returned from abroad to learn that another peer with him that day had just died of cancer following a long struggle.  He joined another young fireman from the same group who died of a heart attack last December.  My friend noted today that he is now “the last man standing on West Street,” that is, of those at the scene in that particular area, all either died that day or lived to die later (except for my friend).

That firefighter who died on July 15 of cancer was fire marshal Steve Mosiello, who was a friend and neighbor of Chief-of-Department Pete Ganci.  Pete and Steve lived on the same block.  When you’re the top FDNY chief, it’s an early start and a late return.  Steve started his day at 4 a.m., waking and starting coffee and unlocking his back door before showering.  When he returned dressed he would find Pete in his kitchen drinking coffee. They would then drive together to the Fire Department Headquarters for a long ten-hour day and return home together at the end of the day.  On 9/11 Pete Ganci died, and it fell to Steve Mosiello to drive home alone and tell Pete’s wife, now a widow, of the death.

Steve Mosiello’s death from cancer was most surely brought on by his exposure to the chemicals and other toxic agents on 9/11.  But his name will not be found on that elegant marble of the Memorial, even though he is just as much a victim of the disaster as his buddy, Pete Ganci.

The very concept of the memorial fails to count, and therefore honor, those who somehow lived through the disaster and/or extended work shifts on the pile and have died of lingering illness since.  They were survivors, but in fact they became delayed victims. The honored dead who keep dying from among the large number of those who worked on the pile, as well as other New Yorkers, are just as much victims of the disaster as the nearly 3,000 names etched in the memorial that will open on September 12 to limited viewing.  The inadequacy of the 9/11 memorial in this regard is profound, even tragic.

[I would like to thank Tom Ryan for his suggestions and comments on this essay]

Albert Camus warned us not to be either victims or executioners.  The point, I think, is not to privilege a position of persecution anymore than one of victimization.  It is easier said than done.  We can easily agree on not wanting to become executioners, though, as Robert Jay Lifton has pointed out, in what he calls “atrocity producing situations” of war and other historical extremities, humans can slip into becoming killers for all kinds of complex reasons that can even seem rational in the moment, i.e. Nazi doctors.  But suffering equally can call forth a psychological position of narcissistic entitlement.  We would like to believe suffering ennobles, and of course in some cases–Jesus, Gandhi, and with many of my patients after years of therapeutic work–that is absolutely the case.  More typically, however, the victims of abuse, violence, and other outrages risk themselves identifying with the aggressor or living a life of self-involvement and pain that cuts them off from meaningful connection with other people.

The survivor, on the other hand, at least as I would prefer to imagine for heuristic purposes in the context of this short essay, experiences his or her suffering more as a form of moral witness (Avishai Margalit’s term).  The chronicler of a disaster—for example, the uninvolved journalist—merely records what happened but cannot tell us what it felt like to be in one, precisely because he or she has not suffered in the disaster itself.  Only the survivor has the capacity to become a moral witness.  Such a witness must experience the disaster, be at risk within it, and provide testimony for others that brings them a measure of hope. There is no reason such hope cannot be secular, and in the modern world our need to locate hope in disaster has special resonance for those who feel separated from specific forms of religious and even spiritual traditions. Nevertheless, for many the varieties of hope Margalit is describing is religiously charged. Not only is it a theological virtue—along with love, faith, and charity—but the etymology of hope lies in an “eschatological expectation of future salvation.” In the Christian tradition, God is described as “God of Hope” (Romans15:13), whereas the original meaning of sahid in both the Greek and Arabic is “witness,” though of course it has come to mean martyr. But Margalit stresses the redemptive meanings of witnessing: “the religious witness, through his suffering and ultimate sacrifice, expresses in times of trial his confidence in a world that against all appearances is still governed by a moral authority and a supreme and just judge, that is, by God.”

A moral witness is nothing if not authentic and as such describes but most of all uncovers evil. He or she is a “species of eyewitness.” The cannon for judging the reliability of both is similar. One must trust the truthfulness of the moral witness’s story; otherwise it is meaningless.  At the same time, it would be pointless to “put Primo Levi under oath.” Or is it? We must have absolute conviction that we can trust the survivor’s tale, and it is only within that trust that one experiences the horror and meanings of the disaster.  There is nothing worse psychologically or spiritually than coming to rely on the survivor’s tale, a story that makes us witnesses to their suffering and elevates their account so that it can serve broad human purposes, and then discovering it is somehow inauthentic, exaggerated, or filled with holes and deceits.  But if we can trust the account of suffering, whether of the gospels or someone watching people fall to their death on 9/11, that tale can expand our empathy and bring us into deeper connection with those who suffer.  And those who suffer in turn heal as moral witness because of this expanded empathic bond with others.

In a recent seminar in Kobe, Japan, where I was traveling in June, I had an opportunity to ask some psychologists from Tokyo about the experience of their patients regarding the release of radiation from the reactors at Fukushima Daiishi.  It was after lunch and before my talk, a brief and fleeting 20 minutes that proved highly informative.

All three psychologists stressed how upset their patients are, especially the children they treat.  The patients talk of radiation in vague but unsettling ways.  They can’t know what the future will bring.  They already have had to live with constant reminders of the disaster, for Tokyo suffered rolling blackouts for the first 4-6 weeks after the March 11 earthquake.  The Fukushima Daiishi nuclear power plants are 175 miles away from Tokyo but any new crisis or explosion could bring radiation into the air of this city of somewhere well over 13 million people.  It is that uncertainty that has such profound effects on the people of Tokyo, and, as one might expect, that fear gets expressed most clearly and directly by patients in psychoanalysis

One of the central ideas in my study of 9/11 and New York City is that the psychological impact of the disaster varied in direct proportion to the proximity of the survivor to ground zero.  Distance numbs.  In an analogous way, people in Japan further away from Fukushima Daiishi than Tokyo, in places such as Osaka, Kyoto, or Kobe, talk much less of the disaster and then only when I asked about it directly.  Most express concern for survivors but shrug off considering the possibility of any danger to themselves.  It was only talking with these psychologists from Tokyo, that is, those much closer to the threat, that I could feel more immediate concern for the threat.

Losing someone we love is one of the most painful experiences in life.  We may be left for days in a state of deep confusion with a glassy-eyed stare into middle distance.  Relatives and friends usually step in to meet our basic needs and help organize whatever immediate rituals seem appropriate and necessary—a wake, a funeral, a memorial service, the plans for sitting shiva, etc.  As survivors we stumble through such moments stricken with grief that only slowly and unevenly dissipates.  Then comes the numbed awareness of being alone in the world without our partner, or child, or parent who raised us. The memories can easily flood us.  Waking hours tremble with emotion and our nightscapes bring terrifying feelings of pain that we can only just push below the surface during the day.

Such mourning on the part of the survivor varies in intensity from individual to individual, but the pain almost always returns unbidden at the first anniversary of the loss.  That is by far the most important anniversary, one long honored in a myriad of social customs.  Until that threshold after a year, most people, for example, will retain the cherished relics of the one who died: pictures, clothes, personal possessions, even incidental kitchen utensils that have some kind of symbolic connection to the lost loved one.  That first anniversary releases the self of the survivor to imagine recovery.  The beginnings of recovery may not come as wished, and may be significantly delayed, but the idea of renewal at least enters into the realm of the possible.

For years after that the mourning process is more unpredictable.  Some hold onto their grief and are unable ever to move back into life.  But most people begin slowly to recover and even embark on new relationships, the making of new children, quietly relinquishing the hold of a lost parent.  Subsequent anniversary moments are always jarring but in time less traumatic and can even prove to be a welcome symbolic opportunity to reenter that psychological space of mourning which brings back the intense memories of and feelings for the one we lost.  Those relentless anniversaries, however, seem not to take us very from the aching hole of our sadness or, equally important, not that far from the actuality of the remembered death.

The tenth anniversary moves personal loss into historical memory.  We don’t forget but we do remember in new ways.  After a decade mourning is no longer an active process. It comes in fits and starts as the memories of those we lost lose intensity, and thus some of their meaning. Dreams hold onto the past with a rigid grip, but our lives are now move far from the time of loss and into realms we once thought would be unimaginable. A decade symbolizes a whole new era, a new life, not necessarily for the better, but firmly and decisively different. When closer to the loss we can sometimes fool ourselves that loss isn’t real. After a decade such deceptions no longer hold much appeal.

The approaching tenth anniversary of 9/11 may well recycle many of these same themes from the broad outlines of the mourning process for individuals, keeping in mind that collective experience is never a direct extension of what we know as individuals.  It is certainly true that now, after ten years, 9/11 will pass into history.  Of course for many survivors 9/11 remains an open wound—as it does for the many thousands of New Yorkers who continue to have trouble breathing, or are getting cancers at a higher rate than normal, or still struggle with symptoms of trauma.  But it is of great importance that now, and only now, the memorial will open, that memorial with its cascading torrents of water and rows of carefully etched names around the footprints of those towers that the attacks turned into mass graves.  Ground Zero itself is a long way from completion.  The Freedom Tower is a 40-story work-in-progress, the museum long from completion, the Path station not even moved yet from the north to the south side of the complex, and so on.  But the site will be symbolically completed with the memorial open to the public on a limited but continual basis.  After the tenth anniversary, the sense is that we will think differently about 9/11, reflect on it as part of ongoing history, study it more than relive it, a process, needless to say, that is not always welcome by survivors.  The tension between the desire of many survivors not to let go and the collective pressures to rebuild, memorialize, and even “move on” are part of the inevitable ways in which historical time absorbs trauma.  It cannot be avoided and can bring new meanings and a deeper understanding of loss in this much broader context.