"the fire that writhes inside..."

Twenty-two years ago I lost a baby and the towers fell

On Sunday I was at church, standing in the pew with my family, and I looked down at the date of the Mass reading booklet my daughter was holding.

“Oh, tomorrow is a sad day,” I said.

My 10-year-old looked at me quizzically, of course. If September 11 means anything to my kids it would be something along the lines of a history lesson. They are too young to understand how this day changed the world.

Photo by Lerone Pieters on Unsplash

After Mass I came home to see that The New Yorker had emailed an old article from November 11, 2001 by John Seabrook about the collapse of the World Trade Center towers. The Tower Builder focused on Leslie E. Robertson, one of the chief structural engineers of the buildings. With the landscape still in fresh ruins from the attack just two months prior Seabrook wrote:

Unlike most of his colleagues, who have been widely quoted and interviewed, [Leslie Robertson] has remained largely out of the public eye since September 11th. His only public appearance was at a previously scheduled meeting of the National Council of Structural Engineers Associations, on October 5th, in New Hampshire, where, as the Wall Street Journal reported, on being asked by an engineer in the audience, “Is there anything you wish you had done differently in the design of the building?,” Robertson broke down and wept at the lectern. Guy Nordenson, a structural engineer in New York and a professor at Princeton, who, like many of his colleagues, regards Robertson with great respect, showed me a recent E-mail he had received from him. It was a response to a letter Nordenson had written to the Times, praising the towers’ structural design for keeping them standing as long as they did, and allowing some twenty-five thousand people to escape. “It’s very Les,” he said, referring to Robertson, and pointed at his computer screen. “Almost Shakespearean.”

Robertson had written:

Your words do much to abate the fire that writhes inside 
It is hard 
But that I had done a bit more . . . 
Had the towers stood up for just one minute longer . . . 
It is hard.

More than just Shakespearean, it is poetry. It is what I am studying now in my MFA program. The line breaks. The repetition. The punctuation. The words so sparingly chosen yet strong enough the hold the flood of guilt and grief.

Clearly Leslie Robertson had nothing to do with the 19 hijackers who decided to commandeer four commercial aircraft full of passengers. Yet here he is thinking that had he made different choices he could have saved more people with just one additional minute of structural integrity. (Keep in mind, he did design the skyscrapers to withstand impact from a smaller jetliner.)

The devastation from those four planes in New York City, the Pentagon, and a field in Pennsylvania reverberated and radiated out through the news streams. Starting with the confusing first moments broadcast on morning talk shows, the images went on and on for days and weeks and months. Ashen survivors streamed out of the apocalypse. Pictures of the lost and missing were posted on every city wall. Songs were sung. Flags were flown. Wars were commenced.

What do you remember about 9/11?

On Tuesday, September 11, I was in a hotel room in California, still on East Coast time. I was looking out at a dark blue sky lightening with morning sun. It was my second day visiting headquarters at the product design and development firm where I worked as a benefits administrator and international recruiter. I was temporarily based in our Boston office but had to fly in for my in-person performance review, so I had taken a United flight the previous day just a little after 8am from Logan Airport.

I missed 9/11 by one day.

Like many who were traveling and out of town, I was now stranded—away from loved ones—not knowing when I could go back home. No more planes were flying overheard. The skies held an eerie silence, save for birdsong.

I worked in human resources and was the point person for non-citizens’ visas and work permits. We had employees on client trips who were marooned all over the US and in different countries. We had green card and visa applications that went into a precarious limbo. My job changed dramatically—irretrievably— overnight.

Many people seemed to know someone who had been affected by 9/11. Among the lost were family members, childhood best friends, college room mates, maids of honor. My parochial vicar had lost his twin brother in one of the towers. How do you offer pastoral care in a state of unreconcilable sorrow?

What many of my colleagues in California did not know was that I had recently suffered a miscarriage. I had gone in for a 12-week ultrasound and no heartbeat was detected. I had to have a D&C since what was left of the little one would not leave naturally. I rested for the time I was told to, but as people who know me can tell you I am not one to sit still. I needed to work. And so I did. And when the time came to travel, I went.

And then the terrorists attacked.

And 2,997 people died.

I was stuck in California, unable to avoid loss—in the personal and the public, the concrete and the abstract— because it was everywhere around us now. It was keeping me on the wrong coast of the continent, away from my new husband. I had wanted to work, but now I could do nothing but work because where else was I going to go? To my hotel room where I could turn on the TV and watch non-stop horrible news? The method of escape had become another prison.

If this were a hero’s journey then I was in the belly of the whale. In trying to run away from my sadness, God brought me deeper into it in one of the most surreal ways possible.

I had a few blessed friends who took me in for meals and who knew about the lost baby. I played with their children. Had nourishing conversations. It was good to have good people around me, but in the end I still had to come to a reckoning.

How could I grieve my own small, secret loss when it was instantly superseded by undeniable national tragedy? Subconsciously, I felt robbed of the right to mourn the life that briefly lived in me. How could I cry for a being that many could argue was not even alive? My brokenness felt insignificant by comparison. Yet it was real. I had no name for it for a long time. A demon is easier to face when you can call it by name.

I think Robertson and I suffered from the same thing: survivors’ guilt. After 9/11 the phenomena was seen in form of workers who were fired the week before, parents who took their babies to school that day, missed plane flights and the like. One could argue that Robertson doesn’t fit the mould of this disorder since his life was not actually in danger. I am prepared to disagree. I think survivor’s guilt is simply not being able to answer this question:

Why am I still alive when others are not?

Robertson could not have saved any more people any more than I could have saved my unborn child. Neither one of us was at fault. And yet we have these intricate reasoning minds that make excuses and justifications and formulations. We try to make sense where no sense is supposed to be made.

Robertson told Seabrook, “The World Trade Center was a team effort, but the collapse of the World Trade Center is my responsibility, and that’s the way I feel about it.” That does not make sense.

I told myself that I should have rested more, had more folic acid in my diet, gone to the ob-gyn earlier. It probably would not have mattered. I probably would have lost the baby anyway.

Here’s the point: None of us deserve anything we are given. Much of what we have is by chance. And if we do the right thing it is because we had the good fortune to learn how to do it. Yes, sometimes we do wrong and suffer the consequences. And sometimes we do right and are rewarded. But a lot of our lives are determined by dumb luck. Or if you are like me, we can call it Providence.

We are alive because we are supposed to be alive. Leslie Robertson passed away on February 11, 2021, the day before his 93rd birthday. Eternal rest grant unto him. And here I am—writing in Boston. I still fly out of Logan Airport from time to time, just as I had on September 10th, twenty-two years ago. Before I leave for a trip I kiss my husband and five children and tell them how much I love them and how much I will miss them while I am gone.

Then I leave it all to Providence.

And by the grace of God, I return.