Project Rebirth (16 page)

Larry became an active member of his local congregation of the United Church of Christ, a large one at almost four hundred members, in 2006. The fifth-anniversary ceremony at Ground Zero had been a tremendous turning point in his life. Laying down a rose for Gene that day had taken on a new meaning: It was a type of letting go that had not been previously possible for Larry. He had come to the following realization: “I am a whole person, but I don't want to operate in a vacuum. I think I operate better in a community, with other people.”

He had been mindful of finding what is called an Open and Affirming church. According to the UCC Coalition for LGBT Concerns' website, this designation stands for “congregations, campus ministries, and other bodies in the United Church of Christ which make public statements of welcome into their full life and ministry to persons of all sexual orientations, gender identities, and gender expressions.”

Larry had been very active in various church communities throughout his life, but in San Jose, he was happy to find a place where he could develop his spirituality and not have to defend his sexual orientation. Larry explains, “I'm not out to convert anybody, but to me, the love of my creator is the most important and constant thing in my life, so I just feel that that's the calling. I need to share this with others. If I can help one person release the hurt and help them realize they are loved and cared for, that's enough.”

During one of his trips back to New York City to honor Gene at Ground Zero, Larry experienced a chance happening that he believes might have been destined.

After the annual memorial ceremony, he took the subway to the hotel, hoping to change his clothes before meeting up with friends for dinner. He decided to stop by the bar for a drink before taking the elevator up to his room.

A few minutes later, a woman approached Larry and sat down on the stool next to him. She pointed at the ribbon he was wearing on his shirt, which was actually a victim's family badge. “So of course,” Larry recounts, “she asked me who I had lost at the World Trade Center. And I told her.”

“How weird!” the woman replied. “I used to work at Aon. I left in 2000. I knew so many people there.” Aon lost three hundred people in the attacks. The woman proceeded to name several of her former co-workers. Larry recognized many of them. Eugene's name was familiar to her as well, so she asked what he looked like.

“He was a gorgeous black man with the most beautiful smile,” Larry answered, a smile spreading across his face.

Her jaw dropped. “I saw his poster . . . and I saw you on TV. I knew I recognized you from somewhere!” the woman exclaimed. “Thank you so much for fighting for our rights. I'm gay too, and that might be a fight I won't have to take on because of you.”

Larry felt as if Gene had played some role in sending this grateful woman, a reminder that his bravery in the face of loss hadn't been just for his own personal benefit.

Today Larry still misses New York: the vibrant Greenwich Village nightlife, the pageantry of opening night for a Broadway musical, the convenience of taking the subway everywhere. And he is keenly aware of how much he still misses Gene. He thinks about him every single day, without fail. “I'm not sure you ever finish the grief process,” Larry reflects. “My faith tells me he's safe now and that someday I will be there too. Having that faith has gotten me through a lot of days.”

Rabbi Michael Paley, scholar in residence at the United Jewish Appeal Federation in New York, explains that spiritual belief “allows one to have access to other worlds, allows us to see possible in the impossible.” Faith that he will be reunited with Gene is a comforting thought to Larry in difficult times.

Although Larry religiously returns to Manhattan to honor Gene each September, he has settled into the more tranquil pace of his life in San Jose—surrounded by lots of family and friends. He continues to be an active member of his church, volunteering twice a week in the office, playing in the bell choir, and helping out with LGBT-related ministries.

Ten years later, Larry still doesn't feel the push to find a new romantic love, only to deepen his spiritual connection. He explains, “I believe in a creator, and my journey is to figure out what that higher power wants from me and what I can give back.”

Gene, though gone, has continued to be a major source of energy in Larry's life. He is still there in spirit, pushing Larry forward in his activism, giving him confidence to be more outgoing, reminding him of all the joy to be had in living.

Larry thinks of Gene in his last moments, extending a hand to frightened co-workers, and feels compelled to bring the same level of brave altruism to his own daily life. Supported by his continued relationship with Gene and his everlasting relationship with God, he keeps on. Larry summarizes: “You have to plug yourself into the source if your life is going to shine.”

Larry, like so many of those who lost loved ones on September 11, carries Gene with him in a truly substantive way. He's not just a faint presence or a nostalgic memory, but an active and ongoing influence on who Larry is, what choices he makes, and how he sees the world.

Freud believed that the end of mourning is marked by what he called “interiorization”—the total inward acceptance that a person's death transforms that person into only a memory, only a past-tense preoccupation. French philosopher Jacques Derrida offers a different perspective: “Upon the death of the other we are given to memory, and thus to interiorization, since the other, outside us, is now nothing. And with the dark light of this nothing, we learn that the other resists the closure of our interiorizing memory.” In other words, as long as we continue to be in dialogue with those we've loved and lost, as long as we make choices influenced by what we think they might recommend, or try on their worldview from time to time, they remain, in a sense, “alive” for us.

Though experts long believed that such a continued relationship might be harmful, preventing the bereaved from truly moving on, new research and evolved wisdom indicates that many of the healthiest and happiest mourners are those who figure out a way to continue to feel connected to those they've lost. As Larry demonstrates, the more we embrace the nuanced truth—that death doesn't actually kill a bond, but alters it—the more gracefully we heal.

Tim Brown

 

 

 

T
im Brown scanned the chaos in the lobby of Tower 1, the North Tower, assessing the situation—the abandoned newsstands, the people in business suits and janitorial garb bottlenecking at the top of escalators as they headed toward the exits with naked fear on their faces. He went downstairs to the fire command post and discovered a black-and-yellow-striped sea of New York City firefighters—thirty or so in all.

Tim quickly spotted his mentor and best friend, Terry Hatton, suited up and ready to head higher in the flaming tower. Even in this cacophony, Terry was hard to miss; at six foot four barefoot, and nearly six foot eight with his gear on, he was a mountain of a man, one of the most respected leaders in the most respected fire department in the country. Tim and Terry had met through work, but their friendship extended far beyond the brick walls of the firehouse. They drank together (Tim could hold his liquor far better than Terry), talked about their dreams and frustrations, and celebrated Terry's marriage to salt-of-the-earth Beth when the happy day came. If they had been actual brothers, Terry would have been the older one.

Tim, in fact, was a man with many brothers—three biological and many, many picked up along the way. One might describe his whole life as being built on a foundational belief in the importance of brotherhood—that old-world value of being there for the man who would, in turn, be there for you. It was an idea that gave him great comfort, an idea that guided his entire life.

As Tim approached, Terry and he locked eyes. Finally face to face, they gave each other a knowing look and a hearty hug, made even heavier by the force of Terry's gear. “Might be the last time I see you, brother,” Terry told Tim. “I love you, man.”

Prior to the attacks on the World Trade Center in 2001, Tim accepted an assignment from the FDNY to serve in the New York City Office of Emergency Management (OEM), established in 1996. The OEM was located in what many called “the bunker” in 7 World Trade Center. As a supervisor of field operations, Tim's responsibilities that day were to coordinate emergency response in the field and communicate the conditions back to the state-of-the art communications center. This could mean anything, including working with the FDNY fire chief, the Port Authority, Con Edison, and the mayor.

From the moment the lights flashed off and on again at 8:46 a.m., Tim put down his newspaper, abandoned his breakfast, and jumped into action. After making sure that the watch command was up and running on the twenty-third floor, and grabbing his three portable radios, he went to assess the situation on the ground—“already like a war zone,” as he describes it—from three sides, a maneuver that was a holdover from his firefighter training. He went to the lobby command post in Tower 1 to assist the incident commander but was quickly redirected to the Tower 2 command post when the second plane hit. After trying to help a group of people who were trapped in a burning elevator car, Tim needed to get the paramedics into the lobby to start removing the injured.

When Tim was returning to the Tower 2 lobby with the paramedics, they suddenly heard an unmistakable sound—the creaking of 1,172 feet of load-bearing perimeter steel columns. He explains, “There has never been anything more clear to me in my life than what that sound was. I knew instantly that the building was collapsing. The sound was deafening and it was progressive. You could actually hear each floor collapse.”

Tim ran toward the Marriott in 3 World Trade Center for cover, but just as he went in, the lights went out and the wind picked up to what scientists now believe was 185 miles per hour. “I couldn't see anything. I couldn't hear anything,” Tim remembers.

He knew he'd be killed if he went outside, where steel was crashing down onto the street, so he wrapped his arms around a nearby column in the Marriott and held on for dear life. Tim remembers, “When the buildings were falling down on top of me, I could only think of two things: I want to quit my job, because it's not worth it, and I want to be with my brother Chris.”

Chris Brown, meanwhile, was in Providence, Rhode Island, relieved to have his first day off from the firehouse in weeks, until he heard what was going on in New York and was flooded with thoughts of his brother Tim inside the towers. He watched the play-by-plays on television and prayed that his phone would ring and that his brother's voice would be on the line.

Tim's helmet blew off. The noise was unbearable. The dust and debris hit him in the face at piercing speed. He was waiting to get crushed. It felt like years went by in those eight fateful seconds. It would turn out that when Tower 2 collapsed, it
did
fall on the hotel and Tower 3, except for one tiny section where Tim clung to his column and waited to die.

Tim describes the calm that followed: “The collapse stopped. The wind stopped. The noise stopped. You couldn't see anything. It was an eerie silence for a minute or two. Nobody was stirring. Nobody was moving. Everyone was in shock. Everyone was trying to move their parts to see if they still worked.”

Tim managed to follow a shaft of light to find his way out of what was left of the Marriott lobby and began scaling rubble—sometimes three and four stories high. “I was in flight mode at that point,” he remembers. “I just wanted to get as far away as possible.”

Responses like Tim's are well documented by psychologists. Our fight-or-flight instinct, as it's popularly known, was first noted by neurologist Walter Cannon in 1929 while observing the ways in which animals confronted threatening situations. Now we understand that both animals and humans have diverse responses to threats—everything from throwing a punch willy-nilly to freezing up so as to observe every detail of the perilous situation before making a decision about what to do next. In almost all cases, however, the physiological effects are similar: When we perceive danger, hormones are released via a signaling process in our brains that preps our bodies for fight, flight, or freeze. Our hearts beat faster, our lungs take in more oxygen, and our digestion slows down. It's a rapid and reliable process that pushes us to take self-protective action, even before we are aware of what's really going on.