The Gift of a Friend’s Death

Dedicated to the three sons
of my friend Scott

 

Every once in a while I sob uncontrollably.  Not from sadness, but from feeling the pain of human suffering throughout the world while also feeling the many ways I have been blessed with teachers and experiences that help me navigate that suffering—sometimes even gracefully.  Just before I was born the universe whispered in my ear: Everything is an opportunity to grow love.  

Usually, it’s an exquisite piece of music that gets me rolling.  Such was the case the day I began this essay.  The result, as always, was a new awakening to life’s sacredness.  An hour later, as if to underscore that sacredness, came the news that Scott, a man I’ve been a friendly ear to for maybe a hundred telephone hours over the past several years, was killed instantly in a work accident at age 53, father to three school-age sons.

Projecting what Scott felt upon leaving his body, I sense an explosion of sorrow at the profound loss for his boys––a singular, powerful shaper of reality for the rest of their lives.  Yet one, Scott knew from his own hard-won understanding, that can help them eventually discover just how possible it is to find heartbreak a gift.

As am I, Scott was a recovering alcoholic, which means he was familiar with the attempt to escape pain, the motivation of every addict no matter the drug of choice –– booze to tiddlywinks.  

Those of us who bring addiction into our lives (and don’t die prematurely) sooner or later confront the presence of despair––the recognition that we either change or completely self-destruct. 

When that choice of change is fueled by a passion for health, we eventually bow in gratitude to the addictions that help awaken that passion.  Perhaps especially our addiction to beliefs.  Most deadly of these is the belief that other people and outside circumstances are responsible for how we feel.  

And from there, over time, we come to respect all experiences as opportunities to become ever more awake to the choices we make, why we make them, and the impact of those choices on ourself and others.   

This sense of becoming is where Scott was in his relationship with himself.  

In his quest to make ever-healthier choices, Scott honored not only his recovering alcoholic identity, but also the many other hats he wore –– “Dad” always number one.  Followed by ski instructor, teacher of sailing, guide for those up for the thrill of the Zipline, competitor in trivia competitions, and collaborator with his mother in editing crossword puzzles for some of the nation’s major newspapers.  Not to mention enthusiastic amateur astronomer and science fiction geek who, as a kid hardly 10, saw the original Star Wars film a couple dozen times the summer it premiered.

Further, like many of us, Scott carried with him lessons from long past trauma.  One of the most indelible for him related to the September 11, 2001 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center.  It occurred within sight and sound of where Scott was working at the New York Stock Exchange.  

Several months ago Scott warned me that one of these days he would like to tell me his story of 9/11, since he was right in the midst of the chaos that day.  It would be a long story, he said, and one emotionally charged for him, so he’d let me know when the time was right.  

This past September 11, commemorating the event’s 20th anniversary, I published an essay that included a small excerpt from a novel I’ve written.  The excerpt is about an 86-year-old African American woman who dies in the collapse of one of the towers.  When Scott read my fictional tale on that anniversary day, he knew it was time for him to share with me his experience, for it included his participation in the rescue of one of the few survivors of the devastation––as it turned out, an elderly African American woman.

Our conversation four days later, September 15, by phone as were all our chats, was our last.  

He spoke for an hour and 45 minutes.  I hardly said a word, except at the end to convey how grateful I was to be the recipient, and to ask whether he’d be willing to tell me the story again someday soon.  There was too much richness for me to absorb in just one telling.

It’s rather humbling to appreciate that we never know what anyone says.  We know only what we hear, or how we interpret what we’ve heard.  Which makes what follows simply my best sense of Scott’s story.  The gist I’m confident about.  The absence of Scott’s eye, however, means there are surely details that will never enjoy the sharpening they deserve.

One of his colleagues at the NYSE was screaming as though the world were coming to an end, “Holy shit!  A plane just hit the World Trade Center,” and Scott thought, “What’s the big deal?”  

You see, Scott’s father was a small plane pilot.  In fact, Scott himself was a pilot.  The New York metropolitan area was home base.  Scott was very familiar with what was and wasn’t possible in the air space over Manhattan.  Only small aircraft were permitted to fly within a reasonable distance of buildings.  If one had hit a tower, it meant only that mechanical failure or the pilot’s misjudgment caused the plane’s wing to clip the structure.  Scott was absolutely positive that that was what had happened.  It was the only story that made sense.  Furthermore, it was not unprecedented.  A shame, yes, but hardly worth screaming about.  

And when he went out on the street and looked up at the crash scene, he was mystified at how a small plane could cause such damage.  Barely had he begun to consider the illogical possibility that an aircraft other than a small plane was the culprit, when the second airliner hijacked by terrorists struck.  The sound was hideous beyond anything Scott had ever heard.  Ash soon began to snow across lower Manhattan.  As it did, the wound to Scott’s sense of reality grew and grew.  

Inhabiting Scott’s consciousness that September morning is difficult for all sorts of reasons, one in particular having nothing to do with the day’s events.  Most New Yorkers were born and raised somewhere else.  Not Scott.  His feelings that morning, whatever they were, were rooted in the fact that New York had been his home for all of his then 33 years.  

Soon after he and most of his colleagues were freed from their professional responsibilities, Scott wandered by foot nowhere in particular.  

Close by, in New York harbor off The Battery, the southern tip of Manhattan Island, was the first scene to stop him: an expansive flotilla of private boats, a crowd scrambling onto them.  One fellow jumped up on the seawall to shout at the boaters, “Where are you going?”  The answer was, “It doesn’t matter.  Come with us.”  Almost forcibly, the man was pulled aboard one of the vessels.

This is not for me, Scott thought, turning in the opposite direction, up the west side toward the spot that would soon become known as ground zero.

He was quite sure that eventually he would run into a police barricade, preventing him from getting too close to the heart of the mayhem.  But that barricade never appeared, a fact he realized only when he found himself in the midst of destruction previously imaginable only in one of those “space invaders attack Earth” movies full of gruesome special effects.

Even if I were capable of capturing the scene in words, it is unnecessary.  Writers better equipped than I have already done so.  More significantly, so have photographers.  It may be impossible to know the fullness of Scott’s response to his surroundings that day, but it is very possible to have a sense of what he saw, should that be useful to you.  One of the many gifts of the internet.

A firefighter, single-handedly wrestling without success the business end of a firehose in full blast, called to Scott, “Help me!”  Scott hefted the section of hose immediately behind the man.  The nozzle under control, the firefighter, Scott in tow, took off toward the black smoke pouring out of the entrance to a hotel adjacent to the World Trade Center.  At a critical closeness to the building Scott realized he might very well die if he followed the man inside.  With neither training, dress nor equipment to protect him, Scott let go of the hose as the firefighter disappeared into the smoke.  

Yet he had made a decision.  He didn’t want to be a spectator.  He wanted to help. 

He approached another firefighter who seemed to have some authority.  “What can I do?,” he asked him.  “Take care of the Chief,” the firefighter barked.  “Come with me,” he said, leading Scott a couple of blocks north to where a man, obviously the Chief by his uniform and bearing, stood like a statue staring west down a street at the end of which was the Hudson River.  

Scott figured he’d be the Chief’s gofer.  Take this message to so-and-so kind of thing.  But the Chief was oblivious to Scott’s presence.  In fact, he seemed oblivious to everything around him.  Scott stood by until the Chief slowly trod toward the river, unaware of people or traffic.  Later Scott learned that members of the Chief’s battalion had perished in the collapse of one of the towers.  [Funerals for 9/11 firefighters totaled more than 300.]

For several hours Scott assisted firefighters on a heap of rubble several stories high in their search for bodies and survivors.  That there were none, triggered a growing hopelessness in Scott, not just for their mission, but for life as a whole.  These feelings were electrified when he accidentally stepped on a small mound of human flesh, the body part impossible to identify.  

Then, one of the firefighters yelled at him to go tell the guys down there to bring up the Stryker––on the double.  Scott flew, having no idea that a Stryker is an ambulance cot used to transport a live body.  He helped carry the Stryker up the steep mound of destruction.  And once the elderly African American woman was secured on it, Scott helped carry her back down to safety.  

“In hindsight, that event saved me from a loss of hope,” Scott told me.

As exhaustion of every kind began to take its toll, Scott walked home, a distance of six miles or half the length of Manhattan.  Along the way, he passed a temporary emergency medical facility that had been set up that day to treat survivors.  So far as he could tell, except for the medical professionals, the facility was empty.  

Scott would learn that, medically speaking, there were two categories from the World Trade Center terrorist attack: You were okay, or you were dead.  Some estimates suggest there were as many as 15,000 people in the towers that morning.  While deaths numbered more than 2,800, virtually all the people in the towers below the impact of the planes survived.  This was due to the evacuation efforts of firefighters, police, transit workers, emergency medical teams—and no doubt ordinary citizens like himself, who didn’t want to be observers, but wanted to help.  

As time lengthened to months and years, Scott wondered whether all the details he remembered actually happened.  Did he imagine any part of those hours on the surreal mountain of collapsed building debris, debris that might collapse even further, taking him with it?  Was the African American woman real? 

Compelled to find out, he initiated an exhaustive search of every available photograph of Ground Zero that day, attempting to find one that included him.  For ten years, nothing, until 2011, in the 10 year anniversary commemorative edition of the New York Post.  Ah, there he was among his compatriots.    

He also followed every lead he could think of to identify the African American woman.  Besides confirming that he wasn’t delusional, he wanted to know her story.  Then, one night, I don’t know how much later, he turned on his television.  The show “Nightline” was just beginning.  He never watched “Nightline.”  Just as he was about to change the channel, the show’s host said something like, “Tonight, we’ll meet one of the few survivors of the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center.”

My sweetheart became a grandmother for the first time on September first, this year.  Her grandson lives in Manhattan with his mom and dad.  She and I will visit soon.  I asked Scott if, while I’m there, he would enjoy coming from Vermont to New York and telling me his story again while we walk to all the key locations.  And if he were willing, I said, I’d like to wire him up and record everything.  It might be a nice gift for his boys one day.  

“Oh, that would be fantastic!,” he said.  

That was September 15.  Scott died September 23rd.

When I get to Manhattan this fall, I’ll take that walk for both of us.  I’ll listen to the version of Scott’s story I carry in my heart.  I’ll celebrate his love for his boys, as well as his passion to be ever more aware of the choices he made, why he made them, and the impact of those choices on himself and others. 

And very possibly there will be a few moments when I’ll sob uncontrollably.