Hidden Trauma

Entry 1

Jenny was 4 months pregnant and alone in the city when the towers fell. I can't get that out of my head, it was nearly  24 hours later, before I could talk to her.  She was overwhelmed with grief and an indescribable need to help people. 

The second night, a group had organized a sleep-in at Union Square--people were scared and needed that sense of community. Jenny asked me if I thought she should go. I said it sounded  like a good idea. I don't recall if she went. Looking back, I feel an extraordinary amount of guilt not being able to there with her. 

The scale of the disaster is hard to overstate--and hard to understand unless you actually were on the ground and saw the devastation., the destruction. The smell. Even I, visiting the pit for the first time a month after the fact (the soonest I could leave Alabama), overwhelmed. By then, t-shirts showing the Twin Towers with the tag line, "I survived 9/11," were being sold at your finer establishments in Chinatown. Tourists were posing at the cordon around the pit, presumably for family Christmas cards. Still, the devastation was not just visible in the wreckage, but in the faces of first responders and everyday people,  on the walls covered with pictures of the missing everywhere you looked, in the dust that still coated cars and windows and brick and cobblestone.

Whenever I talk about 9/11 and it's aftermath, I tell with pride that my wife, four months pregnant, was volunteering on the third day after the attack for 12 hours a day every day until school reopened. Her job? Jenny pushed wheelbarrows of bottled water into the pit for the first responders. When school reopened, she volunteered every Saturday and Sunday until I came home in December.

I hate this day, hate that Jenny is gone, but love this memory, indelible, a perfect representation of selflessness that people are capable of in the face of such grave atrocity.

 

Entry 2 9:13 p.m.

I am not two people, not a dichotomy, not a house divided against itself, at least with respect to Jenny. She wasn't all good--although many of her good parts were amazing--nor all bad. I posted the above on Facebook today after drafting it here as I sipped coffee in the morning stillness. Those were happy days, heady days before 9/11 to be sure, and then as we approached parenthood some months later. I write my true feelings in both places, I just reserve this space to talk about the hurt she caused the family. I understand why we aren't to besmirch
the dead, and so I keep mum, although I drop hints and slipped once in a comment. I don't want my kids to see me trash talking her. Not that I do that here, but perception is everything and God knows I don't want to put a divider between my kids and me over airing dirty laundry in public.