Project Rebirth (20 page)

The time had come for Joe to do something difficult yet important for the families he'd been interviewing for the past two weeks. “I was completely drained by the experience at the victims' center,” Joe remembers. “I just could not bear to be with people suffering and crying from broken hearts. It still affects me.”

Because it is a Wednesday at Fresh Kills, Joe expects visitors. A few months after the site was established, the Office of the Mayor's Community Assistance Unit had started arranging for 9/11 victims' families to visit once a week in groups of twelve. Some of them bring flowers, hoping to pay their respects to loved ones. Without the comfort of a funeral or memorial service, complete with their loved ones' bodies, mourners are forced to make ad hoc rituals to find comfort and, possibly, a sense of closure at Fresh Kills.

Joe feels added pressure to prove that their work has been thorough and conducted with utmost respect, but his no-nonsense Irish American upbringing, as well as twenty-five years as a seasoned cop, tell him he shouldn't expect any praise. In fact, he expects the opposite. Police work is usually thankless. Joe knows that to the general public, the police are never “good news.” They show up when there's crime, injury, and death. They bust down doors, ask intrusive questions, and take nothing for granted. They leave expensive fines, legal charges, and loss in their wake. Joe says that in order to be a good cop, “you need to understand where you stand in relation to people; you need to understand that as a cop, you're really dealing with people when they're having problems.”

He's heard rumblings about families being upset with the work going on at Fresh Kills and the handling of the recovery more generally. Staten Island, long the butt of New Yorkers' jokes, is not known for being a pleasant haven, and here the city is, shipping the delicate remains to a former landfill on a daily basis. The recovery effort is slow, simply because it is so painstaking. This leaves some families waiting for their loved ones' remains, frustrated.

And yet, this Wednesday in early 2002, he's met with public recognition and appreciation, not frustration. A group of visitors bears a special gift for Joe and his team. The two groups run into each other around lunchtime, as Joe's team is about to take the bus up to the local mess hall, known to the workers as Hilltop Café. “We brought you cookies. Thank you for all the hard work you are doing for us,” a young woman says as she hands over a tin box.

Joe and his team are stunned. The detectives don't eat their lunch at the mess hall, like usual. They share the cookies, relieved to have a sweet break from all the sadness of their eighteen-hour daily grind.

Once the summer of 2002 arrives, work is winding down at Fresh Kills. On an early July day, Joe wakes up at two thirty in the morning, his regular time, and tiptoes around the bed, careful not to wake Jane up.

As he drives from Brooklyn into Staten Island via the Verrazano Bridge, he remembers the first days at Fresh Kills. Before the debris of 9/11 crept in, it was a barren land of peaks, valleys, and creeks, just off the highway and yet disconnected from civilization. “The city on the hill,” as they've come to call the site, was built of the trailers and laboratories, the cafeteria and rest center, the lampposts and roads, the sweat off their brows.

Fresh Kills served as a main New York City landfill for fifty years before it closed down in March of 2001. At one point in its history, it was also the world's largest. Residents of Staten Island were never thrilled by the dubious honor. If anything, it promoted the already discriminatory association of Staten Island with the city's dumping ground. That chapter had closed, and months later Fresh Kills began a new one: as the site of the city's largest crime scene ever.

Like archeologists digging into Pompeii's tragic past, their task was to recover as many personal effects and human remains as possible. Unlike the victims of that ancient volcano's eruption, the destruction here was man-made, at first requiring inspection for forensic evidence. To Joe's surprise, larger objects he would have assumed loomed among the debris were for the most part pulverized, not spared from destruction. They were more likely to find smaller objects, scraps of metal and bone fragments, rather than squashed desks or human limbs. The official tally would cite 4,257 pieces of human remains and fifty-four thousand personal effects recovered.

For Joe this had been an assignment like no other. For one, there was the unbelievable and sometime horrific scale of the task. Most important, it was the opportunity to bring hope to grieving families, something he often wished he could have done during all those years as a police officer in his neighborhood.

Joe also experienced his own dose of hope from other police departments around the country who made good on their promise of pitching in. After a massive fund-raising effort, members of the San Francisco Police Department got their wish to be present at Fresh Kills. Joe was also impressed with the officers from all over the East Coast who would drive to Staten Island during their own off-duty hours. They worked with Joe for two or three days before traveling back to their regular shifts. He would send them to Father Ryan, a Jesuit in charge of Staten Island's Mount Manresa retreat house, who was generous enough to host these off-duty cops and provide their meals. “It felt great to know that we had friends everywhere,” Joe explains.

Joe was also proud to have given tours of Fresh Kills to President Bill Clinton and the royal chief medical examiner of Great Britain, who asked if Joe would be able to replicate a similar operation in England should anything, God forbid, similar happen there. Joe joked that he would have to ask his bosses, President Bush and Mayor Giuliani.

By seven thirty at night, Joe is already driving back home. Dinner with Jane awaits. Jane doesn't work summers, and Joe wonders what it will be like when they are both able to just up and leave, travel the world. Joseph and Karyn will probably be home too. Heading back to Brooklyn as the sun starts to set, Joe feels ready to move forward with his life. He can confidently describe his work at Fresh Kills as the “crowning jewel” in a career that he already loved. He says, “I'll never have to worry again about whether I did my job. That's important to guys like us. No matter what else I move on to, it'll never be as fulfilling as working here was.”

Karyn, the middle child of the Keenan family, approached her father late one night in December of 2001, shortly after Joe had started working at Fresh Kills, and complained—as she had so many times before—about her unfulfilling job in the business sector. She reminded him that she had passed the Police Officer Entrance Examination years ago, but she was too young to join at the time. “I think I'm ready, Dad,” she told him.

Joe had conflicting emotions about his daughter's decision: happiness and apprehension. On the one hand, he was proud to see how much his daughter craved meaningful work, and further, that she saw the same path he'd traveled for decades as one that truly mattered. On the other hand, he didn't want his baby girl in any danger. His advice was simple: “If you want to do it, you have to really want to do it.”

By the time that Fresh Kills closed on July 31, 2002, Joe didn't want to “do it” anymore. He was sure that all of his co-workers felt the same: Everyone was glad about not having to come back tomorrow. He had not anticipated retiring so soon after finishing at Fresh Kills, but the long hours had piled up relentlessly, and Joe was exhausted and nursing a back injury. He officially retired on December 31, 2002, at the age of fifty-two.

There is something to be said about how the uniqueness of the task at Fresh Kills united the people in charge of it. Psychoanalyst Dr. Heinz Kohut talks about the concept of “twinship,” which refers to the feeling of being drawn to other people whose circumstances and stories are similar to one's own. The workers at Fresh Kills were part of a select crew entrusted with a grueling and gruesome but special task. They worked side by side. Shoveling. Sifting. They stared into the rubble and recognized that vacant look of postshock all too often. They got tired and complained. They held up with pride. They combed the debris together, shared moments of pride in finding any bit of remains. Most important, they shared an awareness; few people could know what it was like to be in their shoes.

The need for twinship, this feeling of a shared and special awareness, is lifelong—often emerging in intense experiences, like that of post-9/11 recovery. It allows us to remember, to normalize, to contain the trauma in a collective, soothing way. The men and women who worked at Fresh Kills, performing the same jobs, carrying the same tools, bonded by the same purpose, were, in a sense, twins for one another. Their shared commitment provided psychological support as they worked their way through the wreckage.

Joe and the other workers at Fresh Kills were bound not only to each other, but to the victims whose remains they were seeking. These victims had been dehumanized in the attacks, reduced to objects, to “things”—essentially no different from the towers themselves. The workers at Fresh Kills, sifting through the rubble for remains, sought to restore that humanity by providing the respect due to those victims, one small and reverent gesture at a time.

The question of what to do with the remains continues, all these years later.
The New York Times
reported:

The official plans for the September 11th Memorial and Museum include an effort to house all of the nearly 10,000 pieces of human remains still unidentified by the city seven stories below ground and behind a wall with a quotation from Virgil's
Aeneid
etched into it: “No day shall erase you from the memory of time.” In this way, the institution honors its role as both museum—a place where meaning is made and history marked—and memorial, a place for actual mourning and sacred acknowledgement. The September 11th Memorial and Museum, after all, will literally be built on the hollowed ground where these lives were lost.

For some of the families who lost love ones, the idea of incorporating the remains into the institution in this way is troubling. They would prefer a separate memorial space, clearly delineated from the hustle and bustle that is sure to fill the museum on a regular basis. For others, it is the perfect medley of uses—learning and honoring, marking and mourning—for such a conflicted space. Only time will tell how this complex and deeply emotional and spiritual conversation evolves, but Joe is proud knowing that he did his best to make sure that as many families as possible had an opportunity for at least a modicum of closure.