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When You Can’t Change the Channel

Now you know. Life doesn’t happen in chapters with neat beginnings, middles, and ends. Sheer survival doesn’t work like that. Every signpost, every landmark, every little anchor that you trusted to help you mark your day is no longer accessible. You have been beamed up into this new God-awful reality, with no idea how you got here or where to go next.

Now you understand that the event was the opening scene in a disaster movie that goes on and on. Now you get it: Tom Cruise is not coming to rescue you. Every morning, you get up, wishing you didn’t have to. You put one foot in front of the other. Every breath hurts. Throughout the day, surges of energy suddenly drop off, leaving you queasy and off-balance. Sudden noise makes you want to jump out of your skin.

When It Hurts to Be Alive

To others, you look the same. From the inside out, you no longer recognize yourself. It’s impossible to remember “before” and even harder to conceive of an “after.” This is all there is, all there ever was. You can’t change the channel. It hurts to be alive.

“I never realized how physically painful it is to be so intensely affected by this. It hurts your gut,” says Margie Miller, whose husband Joel was working at the insurance brokerage firm Marsh and McLennan on the 97th floor of Tower One at the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. The hijacked jet with its load of fuel smashed through the upper floors of Tower One. Joel Miller was among those incinerated, although his family hoped against hope that was not so.

“If you had to die that day, that was probably the better way to go,” says his widow. “I am grateful.”

With 20/20 hindsight, it seems ironic that Joel Miller was an assistant vice-president for disaster recovery who was always in his office by 7:30 am.

“He kissed me goodbye as he did every morning. I was half-asleep,” she remembers.

The calls started coming in a few minutes before nine.

“My girlfriend, Jeannie, called and said, ‘There’s a fire on top of the World Trade Center. Where does he work?’ ”

Friends who gathered on her front lawn were invited inside.

“We sat on my bed and watched TV, trying to figure out what we were looking at,” she says.

Within minutes, the second plane hit. After attempting to call, text, and page her husband, Margie started calling women whose husbands were Joel’s colleagues.

“How is Paul? Have you heard from Harry?” she kept asking.

No one had heard from her husband.

“By 9:15, it was just catastrophic. I kept trying to zoom into the building and count floors from the top but you couldn’t,” she says.

Her sons and sister-in-law started calling to ask if Joel was at work.

“I didn’t hear from him. I didn’t hear from him,” she kept chanting.

Then it hit her.

“Truly this is not going to be a good end.”

New York City shut down.

“The bridges are closed. The city is closed. Please stay where you are,” she remembers telling her sons. “I don’t want to worry about any more people.”

That evening, she called the police and reported that Joel was missing. When law enforcement officers came to her home, the first thing they asked was, “Where is his car?” She remembers them asking if maybe Joel could have gone somewhere else. “If he did, he would call me for directions first,” Margie smiles sadly. “He has a poor sense of direction.”

A neighbor’s kids found the car where Joel had parked it at the train station before catching the 6:20 train to Penn Station that morning.

“At home, it was a mob scene,” Margie says. “People needed to gather, to be supportive and process this together.”

Getting Used to It? Not.

Margie cried every day.

“For months and months and months. You took a million showers to cry where the kids couldn’t hear you,” she says. “You get into the car to run errands so you don’t upset people in the house. You don’t know how to stop. If you lost a limb, you’d know it’s missing. Every day, you get up and you put on your prosthetic and you function. But you can’t help but notice that your leg is missing.”

Now a professional speaker who addresses audiences on resilience and life lessons from September 11th, Margie says, “The important thing is I put my prosthetic on and I go out and function.”

It Didn’t End on September 11th

The unsettling process of mourning those who died on September 11th remains complicated by the problems involved in identifying fragments of human remains, even with advances in processing DNA.

“In 2016, a woman got the first piece of her husband,” says Margie, who received two fragments of Joel’s remains several years apart.

“The very first time, they came at 10:30 at night. I had a hang-up phone call just before they knocked,” she says.

A few minutes later, there were two detectives at her door. As soon as she saw them, she knew why they were there. Her immediate reaction: “Oh my God. Thank you. Thank you.” It was all she could say.

They told her they needed to come in.

“You don’t,” she told them, but they insisted. “In those days, they were mandated to put a notice in the newspaper once they had a positive I.D. You got a number and the medical examiner’s retrieval information. I was stunned. What arrangements do you make for a small piece of tibia bone?”

Margie buried Joel’s leg fragment in a small box. Two years later, the medical examiners identified a knucklebone fragment. It was buried in a container. Almost a decade later, three more fragments of Joel Miller’s body were found after another excavation uncovered 1,800 pieces of human remains. She is planning her husband’s third and hopefully, his final funeral.

When people ask, as they often do, “Aren’t you over it by now?” Margie understands that they just don’t get it.

“It’s not something that ends at the cemetery,” she says.

With empathy, she recognizes there is no point in making them suffer. She shrugs, “When I bury the last three fragments, I’ll let you know.”

A Badge of Honor

“Getting up and putting on your shoes after a disaster is a badge of honor,” says Dr. Demaria, the founder of the World Trade Center Family Center on Long Island. “True healing is when you somehow transform the nature of how you perceive what you have gone through.”

Like Chicago Mayor Rahm Emmanuel who said, “It’s a pity to waste a good crisis,” Dr. Demaria believes that a catastrophic event like September 11th “helps you sort out what is really important.”

Any critical incident can serve as “a cleansing even though it’s a hard time,” he says.

While some people apparently seem to “magically go through life without having to face a death or a job loss, it’s important to face adversity and face into anxiety to rise above it,” he says, adding, “Like it or not, we grow through pain.”

Running for Her Life

Nora Quinn had just made the turn onto Boylston Street and was heading for the finish line.

“It was jam packed with people. A young man screamed, ‘You’re almost there. You’re almost there.’ With that, I heard the first bomb go off,” says Nora, a runner in the 2013 Boston Marathon, where three people were killed and 260 wounded by two homemade bombs.

Quinn recalls that there was so much noise, no one reacted to the sound. She thought it was a celebratory cannon.

When the second bomb exploded, Quinn saw smoke.

“Everyone slowed up or stopped to look at that area,” she says.

When runners started asking each other where to go, she told them not to run past the large glass convention center because the windows could blow out.

“When you finish a marathon, you get very cold. I sat down and started shaking,” she recalls. Someone lent her a phone to call her husband. When he didn’t answer, she left a voicemail message, saying she was okay.

A tall man with white hair and a runner’s bib told her he would lead her to the spot near the finish line where the runners kept their bags.

“We started running, but we weren’t allowed to go near the finish line,” she says. “We were trying to get back to our buses. Then I saw a foot with a sneaker in the street. I said, ‘Oh my God!’”

She pushed through her shock and kept running to the bus where a volunteer was there to give Nora her belongings.

“My body was shaking. I was crying. I couldn’t open my bag. Someone had to open it for me,” she says.

When she looked for the man with white hair to thank him, he was nowhere to be found.

Nora says, “I think he was an angel who came to guide me to safety.”

Back home on Long Island the next day, Nora felt calm enough to go for a walk. “Wednesday, it really hit me. I could not stop crying. People were sending me flowers,” she says. “It sent me over the edge.”

When she could not shake off the intrusive, recurring images of that severed foot, Nora called me. It wasn’t difficult for her to describe the chronology, but when she got to the point in her narrative where she encountered that severed foot in its sneaker, her voice broke. I reassured her that her reactions were normal and appropriate, given the situation.

Information is the most powerful remedy for acute stress reactions and it helped her calm down. Nora’s breathing slowed and deepened. Breathing is our primary nonverbal language. Sharp, uneven breaths convey a message of stress, even though someone might insist she is perfectly all right. When she was telling her story, Nora’s breathing had been shallow and tight. I was relieved to observe the change.

Nora experienced a flood of relief after exploring a few of the emotional first aid tools. She especially liked color breathing and rubbing her feet on the ground (See Keys to Emotional First Aid, page 63). I showed her how to anchor a sense of safety by linking a gesture, in this case a clenched fist, with a positive memory of being in a safe place. When a wave of anxiety hit, Nora would inhale, clench her fist, and smile as a cascade of calm and well-being flowed through her body. Years later, she continues using these tools to lower her stress levels.

Soon, she was running again. Four years later, she finished the Boston Marathon.

“I think 2013 made me more determined to become a better runner,” she says. “And it has definitely made me more empathetic.”

Even though she was thousands of miles away, when a truck bomber drove through a crowd in Nice, France, in July 2016, killing 86 people, Nora was personally affected.

“I knew the panic they must have been experiencing and what they were going through,” she says.

Some Will, Some Won’t

Not everyone recovers, however. In working more than 200 disasters, from the 1998 terrorist bombing of Pan Am 103 in Lockerbie, Scotland, to the 2012 Newtown, Connecticut, school shootings, Dr. Demaria has found that about one-third of a post-disaster population faces recovery difficulties. They are most likely to develop chronic post-traumatic stress disorder, leading to severe anxiety, chronic depression, and a greater tendency towards substance abuse. They are at higher risk for suicide.

Of the other two-thirds, one-third will recover to some extent while remaining vulnerable to triggers, such as anniversaries, gunshot sounds, or news footage. They are more likely to experience spontaneous flashbacks years later, in which they feel they are reliving sights, sounds, tastes, sensations, smells, and emotions of the original horror.

The remaining third are those who transform the event into a major catalyst for positive change. With post-traumatic growth, they can say that while they wished they had never gone through it and would never wish it on anyone else, it opened a way for them to receive the fifth gift.

POST-TRAUMATIC STRESS EFFECTS IN DIFFERENT POPULATIONS

When it comes to healing after a catastrophic loss, we don’t get there overnight—far from it. As we begin to understand that nobody heals on a schedule and the path is often one step forward, two steps back, humility and patience become the gifts we cannot leave home without.

Humility opens the way for us to accept how deeply we hurt.

Everyone’s timeline is different and there is no schedule for healing.

More than fifteen years after the 9/11 attacks, they remain stuck in the initial stages of shock and anger. “Some people are ‘glass half empty’ people,” says Margie. “Patience helps us relinquish the idea that we should be over it already.”

Her resolve to find meaning in her loss and to live “with the grief, not in the grief” gave her strength to reframe the loss as an opportunity to grow. She also believes that losing her home and possessions in a fire five years before September 11, 2001, helped to season her and give her endurance to keep going.

“As much as you don’t want to cope and you want to just lie in bed, what we do and how we learn to cope is how we teach our children to deal with bumps in the road,” she says.

After six years as a peer counselor at the WTC Family Center, Margie remains humble and empathetic within the community of 9/11 families and is generous with her support.

“I’m just one of you,” she tells them. “Maybe I’m one step ahead today, but I may be one step behind tomorrow.”

Keys to Living with Traumatic Loss