Project Rebirth (21 page)

Now that he's retired, Joe is involved in another kind of detective work: trying to figure out why his family doesn't know he is so funny. He's always thought of himself as a funny guy, ready to crack a joke at any moment. But his family seems to be in the dark about this personality trait, or at least it seems that way to Joe. They do laugh at the joke he tells about his retirement: “My last day of work was New Year's Eve, so the city threw me a big party.”

His family might be wondering what is going on, but they are relieved to see a more relaxed version of Joe. For the first three months of 2003, his wife and children had to deal with a fidgety man not used to waking up late, not used to having no appointments or obligations.

His friends warned him that the worst time to retire from police work was winter, being forced to stay home with an extreme case of cabin fever, and they were right. While Joe's wife and children tended to work or studies during the day, he stayed home with the dog . . . reading, resting, and reflecting.

Joe says, “Now I do normal things. The unknown has been taken away. The edge you are prepared for is not there. I'm not as high with that. Now I'm going half-steam.” And yet he knows Jane is happy that he's calmer and that she doesn't have to wait for him to come home. Now he waits for her to come home, and they worry together about their daughter Karyn, who graduated from the Police Academy and became a detective in the Organized Crime Control Bureau, Narcotics Division.

As for his sense of humor, Joe is starting to realize why his family is pleasantly surprised that he enjoys a good laugh. He explains, “When I was still working, I came home and kept thinking about cases that were going on. It might have made me more serious and grumpier than I wanted to be.”

To this day, Joe regrets a rare outburst at Jane after he came back from a particularly gruesome day as a vehicular homicide detective. She could tell that something was troubling him and pushed for an answer. “What do you want me to tell you?” he responded to her. “Do you want me to tell you about the dead babies I saw today?” he shouted, his large, expressive eyes opened wide and accusatory at his shocked wife.

Now that Joe has gotten the hang of retirement, he offers, “It probably brings me more to the person I really am because I am relaxed, I can say what I want to say, do what I want to do, get involved with things that interest me.”

It is an early afternoon in the spring of 2009, and Joe is leaving the house to go on one of his “little adventures.” Janine and Andy's first child, Joe's granddaughter Alyssa, is now four years old and goes to preschool four blocks away. He is headed to pick her up.

Alyssa was born in May of 2005, an event that ranks among the most exciting in Joe's life. “To see your child have a child . . . it's a whole different feeling altogether than with your own children,” Joe reflects. “I didn't think that, at this stage of life, we could enter another stage. It's amazing how a baby can change the activities of a whole family.”

Janine drops Alyssa off in the morning at her grandparents' home; then Joe proceeds to walk her to school. He enjoys their conversations during these short walks and considers them quality time.

She's starting to become a little person,
Joe thinks as he sees her walk out of her classroom, her small backpack strapped on tight. The girl has Grandpa's big blue eyes. He grabs her tiny hand in his, and they walk down the steps, homeward bound.

The grandchildren are more than new lives to take care of; they've given Joe new life.

When Alyssa was born, the exhaustion from the recovery effort at Fresh Kills still loomed large in his mind and his body. On one particular day when Alyssa was just two months old, when Joe was visiting at Janine's house in nearby Valley Stream, he decided to take a walk to the park. Joe put the baby in her carriage and left the house. “Time started to slip,” he remarks. His phone rang. It was his wife, Jane.

“Where are you?” she asked. Joe paused.

“You've been gone for two hours! Where are you?” she repeated.

“I'm just walking around town,” he chortled. “I'll be right home.”

Joe interprets the time slip as the baby becoming the new focus of his thoughts. When he talks about how Alyssa “cleared his head,” it is as if she was finally clearing away the mess of Fresh Kills.

Joe's physical health, however, hasn't been so ideal. By 2005, he was sure he had the so-called World Trade Center cough that most first responders and workers were enduring. He went through periods of losing his voice as his infection worsened and had to contend with insomnia, a new experience for this hardened cop. Joe's doctors have operated on his sinuses and throat several times, even removing parts of his throat and tongue in order to reduce the swelling along his breathing passage.

Although Joe is a self-described coward for pain, he has been taking care of himself, keeping up with doctors' appointments yearround. He talks about it as “going in for fine-tuning.” His nonchalance belies the wisdom he has gained: “Pain has a good effect on you. It slows you down a little.”

During this past decade of Joe's life, he has slowed down a lot, sometimes by choice, sometimes not. The slower pace, the reduced intensity of his endeavors, the larger chunks of time he can dedicate to his family—all of these are pieces of his life found after the work at Fresh Kills was over, and perhaps because of it.

Budding poet Lauren Seaquist, the fourteen-year-old who won the Second Annual Fresh Kills Haiku Contest in 2010, writes: “Looking at the mounds / You are rolling down the past / Future brings us new.”

Indeed. The World Trade Center recovery effort at Fresh Kills is the sad coda for the long-closed landfill. Still, just as the future held unexpected journeys for retired Sergeant Joseph J. Keenan, it also holds something new for this expanse of land almost three times as large as Central Park.

The seeds for Fresh Kills Park were sown weeks before 9/11, when the world's top architecture firms were scrambling to submit their proposals for developing the area into a large-scale urban park. After the attacks, the plans remained buried until 2003, when the competition was reopened.

On a Sunday morning in October of 2010, a crowd gathers at a parking lot behind a strip mall in Staten Island. There is enough of a chill in the air for the throng of visitors to put on their jackets as they line up. A tram transports the curious families, some with very young children in tow, into Fresh Kills Park for the general public's first sneak peek.

There is now a welcome center near Fresh Kills's heavily guarded entrance. Landscape architect Ellen Neises leads a “lecture” tour up the replanted northernmost mound, the second tallest on-site, standing 150 feet above sea level. As she walks up, she stops occasionally, pointing out the surrounding area while flipping through a large pamphlet of colorful plans. These plans were drawn up by her firm, James Corner Field Operations, which won the competition in 2003.

It is hard to tell how far the hilly landscape spreads north, away from the nearby highway and toward the faraway outline of Manhattan. It is even harder to imagine what the fully developed park will look like, with the proposed amphitheater, marina, and golf course. At the top of the hill that morning, children happily flew kites lifted high by the strong wind gusts that once slowed down the work of Joe and his detectives.

Fresh Kills has become a testament to a kind of fundamental truth—that we can't ever predict, as individuals or as a nation, what the future holds. Joe's life has changed so much. He reflects, “I miss my friends from work—only another cop truly knows how to relate to another cop—but I am not aching to go back. I am content with the way things are now. It's simpler and much less stressful. Although things now are important in their own context, nothing really requires split-second life-changing decisions. Whatever comes, we deal with.”

He goes on, “If I were twenty-five again, I would do it all over, but now someone else can do it. I'll remember the good times and try to live with the bad.”

Paul Hawken, an environmentalist and entrepreneur, writes, “Birth and death are each other's consorts, inseparable and fast.” Joe's story so clearly demonstrates this healing and universal pattern. Surrounded by death and destruction in its most gruesome form for months on end, Joe became intimate with the end of life and the worst of humanity's destructive impulses. As difficult as this experience was, it opened him up in a way that allowed him to truly appreciate his granddaughter's birth, and two new grandsons after that: Michael, born in October of 2008, and Joseph Jerome IV, born in August of 2010.

It is not uncommon for families that have just lost someone dear to learn that one of their own is pregnant. The cycle of life seems at its most insistent following death's unexpected arrival; it's as if birth is just waiting in the wings, ready to fill the broken open hearts of those in mourning.