Tag Archives: FDNY

twenty-four years … 9/11

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The Twin Towers in July 1983, with New Yorkers taking in the sun on the beach created by the WTC landfill. Photo by Marilynn K. Yee/The New York Times

This picture always gives me hope.

One finds beauty where one can. Creates a world of wonder where one can. Insists on the good in the world where one can.

New Yorkers have been engaged in that for 24 years.

We move forward – some of us still not able to walk the hallowed grounds. Some of us mourning deaths as recent as this year that are directly attributable. Experiencing grief and its attendant feelings of loss, especially when thinking about a loved one who breathed in the dust working the pile day after day … now suffering, or having transitioned on.

It’s what we can’t bring ourselves to think about that really hurts. The losses upon losses both personal and in the world at large.

We pray for peace and the grace of peace. And pray some more and more again. Until next year … when we again feel the stab and pang of how senseless it all has been.

Think to ourselves, may the memory of those who perished be for a blessing.

 

 

 

Twenty-three years … 9/11

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The vicissitudes of life create pathways of a present tense of existence.

One asks have I performed this or that task? Met the needed deadlines? Balanced all of the varying strands to ensure that I am reasonably on point in concert with the strains and stresses of any given day?

There are, however, those moments when free in mind and spirt I will walk along Brooklyn Bridge Park and in glancing up notice the sky. It is when I cannot help but gasp at the absence of my twin towers of memory.

They were the locating beacon points of the City I love. The edifices that always startled my imagination when I looked up to grasp their presence rising above the city scape.

And they always were a grand surprise. Whether shrouded in mist with the early glow of light on a rainy evening, or majestic as I would walk in and amongst them. Marveling at their symmetry and the quietude of the plaza where they stood so gracefully.

Their loss is also incalculable. So many lives snuffed out on the day they fell and in the succeeding years as first responders have succumbed to 9-11 illnesses.

But there is also the loss of how wars played out in their name leading to yet more death and destruction and a sense of existential threat and imbalance I would argue the USA has yet to recover from.

Were we to enable the symbol of symmetry again, we might, perhaps find ourselves. Understand that while we must defend, we must also have the balance of sure-footedness. That existential threat can be overcome by letting go of our attachment to fear of the unknown. That by embracing our past and our present, we can feel more confident in our future.

I still ache for the towers because they are my memory of place, not from some nostalgic sense, but for a sensibility that embraces the surprise and joy of seeing an old friend made new again. Their absence is also the symbol of a kind of anger and tactic of terror I eschew at every turn. Yes. I understand the politics of terror. It is out of a very old play book. What I have always hoped for and continue to strive for though is a world where such plays are no longer necessary. Perhaps I remain naive to think that such things can exist–but in my city of memory they do exist as two giant towers to the sun that bring light and a boundless sense of joy into being.

Twenty-two years … 9/11

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In a recent conversation with my dear friend Achim whom I had not seen in many years, I was reminded of the impact 9/11 had on all of us who called New York City our home.

He lived in the West Village in those days a couple of blocks from the Hudson River. His memories were filled with the shock of the experience, but also of how community had grown. He’d walk with neighbors to the West Side Highway to cheer on the workers making their way to the still smoking pile of concrete, glass, twisted steel; the tomb of the people who’d never made it out of the towers. His particular group moved to exuberance through their tears as turning back in silence, duty done, they’d walk back in a funereal silence.

Watching the towers as they collapsed was a waking nightmare in real time. Experiencing the incredulity that something so mighty as the twin towers could evaporate in seconds, one after the other, imploding as an accordion pancaking in on itself. The mind playing tricks, thinking, “What will it be like to have only one tower?” before the second one collapsed a mere thirty minutes later.

I saw it from my daughter Izzi’s window on Sackett Street in Brooklyn to the south west of the towers. My view of the tip of Manhattan unobstructed where the pair of buildings had always stood as an edifice of my New York.

There are days when I cannot fathom much of the world that has grown in the space of the buildings’ absence. What I am grateful for is to still be here along with my fellow denizens of New York who call the City our home.

 

 

Twenty-one years … 9-11

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My skyline remains empty.

My New York a place adrift in new sorrows.

And yet in this time our 21-year-olds have come of age. Have toasted their newness and sense of unencumbered power to take their place among us. To be with their friends. To work. To live lives of hopes and dreams. To fete with laughter and joy under shadows that may not enshroud their light, but exist in our imaginations.

The silhouettes of grace of an early morning sky on a lovely September day live in us as a before time. Shattering our ease and our comfort and our very sense of ourselves. Our grief remaining as a silent wound. Sometimes stirring our hearts. Sometimes our anger. Sometimes the foundations of our faith in the meaning of our past and our future as we rage and cry out and long for the relief of something greater than ourselves.

I miss my sky and its grittiness, emblazoning a sense of future in the form of two towering buildings that thrust into the sky to light up the night and the mist. To symbolize something crazy and unique in its time and place.

And perhaps that’s the real lesson for us all.

That in its failure to endure we have had to reinvent ourselves. Toasting along with our newly minted generation of adults a redemption of sorts, one that assures us that life goes on.

 

My 9/11 …

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World Trade Center, view from New Jersey

Twenty years has passed in the blink of an eye since the events of September 11, 2001, and yet we also have all of the extraordinary moments that we have lived through year in and year out since then.

I have raised a child, completed my BA and MA, published a book, started and retired from a 15 year successful career with the City of New York, nine plus years of which were spent with the special people of the NYC Fire Department in the post-9/11 culture of camaraderie and pain that is unique to the FDNY.

In that latter realm, I have had the honor of christening the fireboat Three Forty Three, a 120 foot vessel that graces New York Harbor having been named to honor the men and women of the Department who lost their lives in the horrific events of 9/11.

Each of us who survived the events of that day has our own stories of what has happened to us over these past twenty years.

We also never forget where we were and what we were doing on that beautiful Tuesday morning.

Yet we move forward, feeling the holes in the sky as deep scars on our collective psyche, and for many of us when looking at the reconfigured landscape of towering buildings, no longer seeing it as a symbol of home.

For New Yorkers, in my case a multi-generational denizen of the City, 9/11 carries special resonance and pain. Most of us knew someone who perished or in playing the six degrees of separation game someone who knew someone and so one. For some of us the loss remains unbearable and still we persevere.

I remember Peter “Pete” Mardikian.

He was 29.

He had been married for just six weeks–a wedding I’d been invited to but couldn’t attend in his wife, Corine’s hometown in Ohio.

Pete worked for me for a while at Imagine Software before a promotion that saw him working for one of the partners, Scott Sherman. We’d spent a great time in London together, all of us ensuring our software product didn’t crash and burn at the turn of the New Year on January 1, 1999.

Le Meridien Hotel Bar, Piccadilly, London

Along with others of our colleagues, Stephen Klein, Karen Rose, and Mark Lipsits among them, we’d meet up at the end of our long work days and sit up talking about the meaning of life until well past midnight at the bar of the Le Meridien Hotel off Piccadilly Square. As this was long before the days of smart phones and Instagram feeds, there are no photos to smile at documenting our moments together nor memes captured from Scott’s brilliant stories that had us reeling with laughter nor our wonderment at Stephen’s instance that we enter “drift time.”

So those remembrances have to live inside. In our collective hearts. In how we laugh about that time at the bar on the infrequent moments we meet up or pound out notes on Facebook.

But it’s without Pete.

Without his special brand of magic and sweetness. Without him as a 49 year old, perhaps a father a couple of times over, regaling us with the firsts of those kinds of experiences: first birthday, first day of kindergarten, first white belt ceremony … and so on.

At the 9:05 am moment in the 9/11 Timeline records, it is noted that Peter Mardikian called his wife on one of the few working phones. He was on the 106th Floor of the North Tower attending the Risk Waters Group Conference at Windows on the World. One other of our colleagues, Andrew Fisher, 42, also perished, and a third colleague in attendance left mere moments before the first plane hit the towers to go back to the office to pick up something.

Pete’s funeral at the St. Vartan Cathedral an Armenian Church on 34th Street and Second Avenue in Manhattan created levels of pain I did not think were possible.

All of us, his family, his colleagues, his friends were crushed beyond measure. We saw in Cori a figure of strength and fortitude we did not think possible and in our own grief looked to her to model how to endure his loss.

I spent most of my time with Scott. Both of us were 47 years of age. We were bereft at the notion that someone with so much left of his life could be lost. We felt like helpless parents with inconsolable grief at the notion that our bright, brilliant boy with a limitless future had perished so horribly.

He was our Petey. Our pal. And in those moments of pain we had to reconcile what life meant. How we could go forward. How we could separate our anger and the sense that life was not worth living in the presence of such horror. How to navigate those moments to get to the pivotal point where we were choosing to live. To experience grief as it is and then go on to live life as best we could.

Any loss is grievous. The loss of 2,977 in one day was incalculable for New Yorkers and incalculable still as we viscerally reconsider how it unfolded and the many permutations that have affected our world in the aftermath of 9/11. Those memories form indelible pictures that hit the senses in waves that strip us bare again. Causing that gulping feeling of a gut punch one never fully recovers from.

All we can do is continue to live our best lives if not for ourselves then for the those we lost.

May the memory of those who perished be for a blessing.

19 Years ago today

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19 years on …

The World Trade Center was my point of reference from the first time I spied the towers in the fog looking south on Sullivan at the corner of Bleecker in Greenwich Village.  I was with my father, with whom I used to roam the City on our occasional Sunday’s together. The towers had been on our radar all through its construction. We’d pass by the towers first as a hole in the ground and then as partially constructed buildings as we peered up from under the old West Side Highway on one of our jaunts through the docks on our way to Battery Park.

That night, with the windows illuminated in shrouded light felt magical and has been a point in time I have always treasured.

When I gaze on the City now, I feel the holes in the sky as a huge ache in my heart.

It happens whether I am looking across from the vantage point of the Brooklyn Heights Promenade or most recently from the vantage point of the Rockaway Ferry looking across towards Manhattan just past the Marine Park Bridge.

Our nation, our citizenry, our sense of who we are as a people have undergone many, many transformations since the ill-fated morning of September 11, 2001. Some have been for the good, but much, as now, has been fraught with conflict, fear, dislocation, and the kind of damage that can take generations, if ever, to heal.

I can only offer my fervent hope that we will persevere to better days.

Pass the James Zadroga 9/11 Bill Update

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Pass the James Zadroga 9/11 Bill Update

Senator Gillibrand and 9/11 Bill Supporters

It it weren’t so serious the analogy to a Mets game would feel apropos.  The sort of game where your heart-is-in-your-mouth because every pitch is a game changer that can mean the difference between winning or losing.  The problem is the James Zadroga 9/11 Health and Compensation Act is not a game, it is a very real necessity for the tens of thousands of first responders who have sought out monitoring and treatment.

So why is that the Republican Party is *still* obstructing passage?  As of this afternoon, Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma is continuing to affirm his intention to block the bill.  He claims that the bill is a “rush job” (how can that be when it was debated in the committee he sits on this past June?), but is also clearly griping at the price tag, which makes no sense since the Democrats have found a way to pay for it.  One would think that would be “win-win,” but no, folks with severe asthma, COPD and other serious respiratory disorders must continue to wait and wait and wait.

As my grandmother used to say, that sort of thing is a “shonda,” a shame, a shame that continues to disgrace our very understanding of what is right and what it wrong.

Meanwhile today, a group of ardent 9/11 supporters descended on capital hill to plea their case.  Let us hope that they manage to sway the seeming frozen hearts of those who oppose this bill and what it stands for.

Links to articles are here and here.

New York Senator Gillibrand’s heartfelt plea is here.

Pass the James Zadroga 9/11 Bill

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Pass the James Zadroga 9/11 Bill

Last night Jon Stewart did  something amazing — he dedicated his entire show to the cause of revealing the hypocrisy of the GOP in the Senate for failing to bring the all important James Zadroga 9/11 Health and Compensation Act to a vote.

The House passed the bill on September 29, 2010.  Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid claims that the Senate has the votes to pass it, however, the GOP is blocking Reid’s ability to bring the bill to the floor.

This piece of legislation will provide funding for 9/11 first responders to receive continued health care, medical monitoring and other financial support. Without it many will fall even further behind as they not only deal with the burdens of their diminished health, but the ignominy of fighting with insurance companies and workman’s compensation to pay their medical claims.

For those who don’t know, the men and women who worked tirelessly on the “pile” for months and months at a time are sick and getting sicker with illnesses that range from severe breathing disorders to cardiac disease to soft tissue cancers.

In giving a forum to Kenny Specht, Ken George, John Devlin and Chris Baumann, four tireless first responders each of whom is sick with horrific illnesses, Jon Stewart provided airtime to people who have otherwise been denied a voice.

Implied in his forum was the plaintive question — is America really leaving its wounded behind to die?   The politicization of the 9/11 bill sure makes it seem that way.

All truly proud Americans must do no less than Jon Stewart and provide a forum to call-out the continued hypocrisy of invoking 9/11 on the one hand for the furtherance of political agendas and on the other — failing to provide the material support necessary to give aid and comfort to the dying.

It is shameful — and every blogger, everyone on a social networking site should do no less than Jon Stewart and dedicate a post to exposing the hypocrisy for what it is, a disgraceful blight on the memory of all of those who have died.

The link to the Jon Stewart show is here.