A scene of horror that day.
Although I’m not a direct survivor, the attack on my hometown hit me hard, one of several traumatic events that disrupted my life within the course of a single year.
First, my mother passed away. She died of lymphoma but also had a form of dementia which plagued her for a number of years. Rightly or wrongly, I’m haunted to this day by a feeling that my family and I should have done more for her.
In a shocking instance of the personal merging with the political, her death occurred almost exactly as the Second Intifada began in late September 2000. It is quite a coincidence that my father’s death occurred simultaneously with the onset of the First Intifada in December 1987. Still, the First Intifada helped give rise to the peace process of the 1990s. The Second Intifada, however–especially as it deepened and worsened for several years, costing thousands of casualties–was not only a material blow to the prospects for peace, but also an emotional blow for me as a passionate Zionist peace activist.
And then came the outrageous outcome of the 2000 Presidential campaign. Although I could not know how bad George W. Bush would actually be in office, I knew that he wasn’t up to the job. So, I felt myself in a deep funk even prior to Sept. 11, 2001. The events of that day compounded my sense of loss into what may have been a clinical depression. For example, I found it impossible to summon the emotional energy to file my income taxes for some years thereafter. Was this really depression? Who knows? Regardless, it was palpable and bad.
I’m a born and bred New Yorker. When I worked within walking distance of the Twin Towers, I’d occasionally go down to its basement mall on my lunch hour. In the mid-1980s, I had a girlfriend whose father was the World Trade Center’s chief engineer; he once gave my parents and I a VIP tour of the place. And I had a close friend who worked in one of the Towers. On that fateful morning, I called her and suggested she delay getting to work until that odd “accident” was cleared up. We both benefited that day from our habitual tardiness; we both generally would get to work closer to 10:00 than 9.
My cousin, Gila, a member of Kibbutz Kabri in the Western Galilee, stayed with me for an extended vacation that year. It turns out that Sept. 11 is her birthday; we weathered that day and its immediate aftermath together. Two days before, I had seen this rather stoical and unsentimental Sabra cry when her local train station in Nahariya (the end of the line for Israel’s coastal railway) was struck by a suicide bomber. She was mortified that the Intifada had reared its bloody head in her remote corner of the country. On Sept. 11th, happy birthday messages quickly morphed into calls of concern from Israeli relatives.
Rocky (after a bath)
Rocky
Gila was spooked by the TV images of the enormous debris cloud choking downtown New York into believing that the entire city would go up in flames. She eventually calmed down, but my little maltese pooch, Rocky (since departed from this world), barked urgently as the first of us to sense the wave of toxic odors of burnt plastics and other materials wafting up that evening from the ongoing fires, six or seven miles south of us. (You can click here for something I wrote five years later about our experience, including the text of my email sent that day.)
Sept. 11th is also the birthday of Gila’s nephew, Lior, who has been staying with me for the past three years. What are the odds? (I have no excuse if I forget their birthdays.)