rc_story8.xml

rc_story8.xml

born-digital

email

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2003-09-18

I am a Red Cross Disaster Services volunteer and I worked at a Respite Center at Ground Zero for three weeks in October and November 2001. I made some friends there to whom I've remained close. I wanted to share an e-mail I sent to one of them shortly after my return home. I want people to know that the work affected my whole life, even now two years later. Hopefully this e-mail expresses a little bit of how I and other volunteers were feeling about our experiences:

November 28, 2001. Tonight, I thought I had finally run out of tears. I was watching a videotape a friend sent me that contained a segment from a recent episode of "60 Minutes" called "Band of Brothers." It was a story about the FDNY bagpipers and how, by Thanksgiving, they will have played at over 300 funerals and memorial services. They showed a funeral at St. Patrick's Cathedral, just like the ones we stumbled upon a couple weeks ago. It could have even been one of those, who knows. It was just too familiar: the casket on the fire truck, the flag hanging between two ladder trucks, the bagpipes playing Amazing Grace. Did you know that they always play Amazing Grace when the casket and the family are going into the church? And I sat there watching it and couldn't cry. I wanted to cry. I tried to cry. But all I felt was this sick, hollow feeling of grief that went beyond tears. And I thought maybe I was finally at a point where the tears won't come so readily or so often. Maybe this was a small victory for me.

Then they showed members of the band talking about how the hard part is standing in front of the church while the wife and children are going in. How they can't look at the children because it just tears them up inside. But one guy said what's even more heartbreaking than watching the family go into the church is going in themselves. He said that very few band members will go through the church doors for the service. He said it's just too much, it's too hard to do that. The program then went on to say: "But this day, every single member of the band came prepared to do that for their beloved drummer, their only member to die at the World Trade Center. They called him Bronco. He was 30 years old. He left no parents, no wife, no children. The band was his family. They gathered to, as they say, 'pipe him to Heaven.' Usually one lone piper plays Amazing Grace. Not today. For Bronco, there was a symphony. And when the playing stopped, they all carried their instruments, and their love, through the church doors."

I found myself sobbing during this part, and I realized it felt good and right. Why did I think that I should stop crying? These "boys" I've come to think of as mine aren't able to stop crying, so why should I? I want to keep feeling compassion for them for a long, long time. If that means shedding frequent tears, then so be it. It's better than becoming complacent and hardened to everything that's happened. I never want to forget a single minute, a single emotion, from my WTC experience. The whole thing made me a better person at the time, now I have to strive to continue to be that better person for the rest of my life. Maybe having my heart broken just a little every day is part of being that better person.

The hardest part about being home is not having someone around who knows exactly how I'm feeling and why I'm feeling it. But only someone who's lived it can do that, and there's no one here who has. I'm getting together next week with the guy from my chapter who worked in the warehouse at Respite 1, but I don't think even he can completely understand. His center was sheltered from the destruction. He never stood on a roof and looked down on the pile. He never walked down the street to work every day and came face to face with the skeletons of those walls. He never sat on his bus after work for over 30 minutes with that horror staring him in the face from a half block away. He never stood in the Oasis and watched 40 men rest with such deep grief etched into their faces that it wasn't even erased in sleep. I'm not in any way trying to diminish his experience, it was just different than mine and I don't think he'll be able to completely relate to what I'm feeling.

Maybe Ill have to break his heart just a little.

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