Project Rebirth (5 page)

The three siblings, armed with an ice cream cone each, headed down Montague Street and toward the Brooklyn Heights Promenade. The small stretch of walkways, benches, and parks from Remsen Street to Orange Street had an unparalleled view of many of New York City's most famous landmarks: Staten Island, Governors Island, the Statue of Liberty, Ellis Island, South Street Seaport, Fulton Fish Market, the Brooklyn Bridge, and, indeed, Lower Manhattan's forever-altered skyline. As Nick, Dylan, and Sydney settled onto a bench, their gaze stretched across the glittering water of the East River and to the huddle of skyscrapers beyond. The two missing towers loomed like ghosts.

“Nick, is there any chance that our daddy will need to be replaced?” Dylan asked, eyes wide with fear. Dylan was adopted, so he knew that he had, at first, had a biological mom, then his mommy, Catherine, and now a stepmom.

“Daddy's not going anywhere,” Nick reassured him. “And your mommy wanted to be your mom for the rest of your life. If there was any way that she could have gotten out, she would have, because she wanted to come home to you.”

Unlike many who lost loved ones on September 11 who preferred to stay away from the media coverage and analysis regarding the attacks, Nick was deeply curious about the events that led to his mother's death. He studied 9/11 documentary specials on television, of which there were dozens within the first few years, looking for clues as to what his mother may have been through in those fateful minutes. “I watch like a detective,” he explains. “The saddest part is that I don't get anywhere. I don't know anything more about what might have happened to my mom.”

Nick examined the facts over and over again, postulating as to where his mom might have been at exactly 8:46 a.m. eastern standard time—the bathroom? Grabbing a cup of coffee? Sitting at her desk? That was when American Airlines Flight 11 collided with the North Tower, scouring off the thermal insulation on the core columns at temperatures of upward of 1,292 degrees Fahrenheit. But the facts didn't add up to any more comprehensive understanding. Nick still felt at a loss. There was no one left to give an eyewitness account of what it was like on the 105th floor, where his mother had been. “My best guess and my best hope is that it was instant for her,” Nick says, definitive and sad.

The alternative—that she suffered, or had some inkling of the magnitude of the violence she was about to face—is too much for him to handle: “You never want to think of your mom being scared. That's the hardest thing for me.”

In the early years, Nick dreamed about his mother or the events of September 11 about once a week. His nightmares were filled with terrorist attacks, missed connections with his endangered mom, airplanes, and fire. One night, he was blessed with a wholly different scenario: “I had this one dream where I just hugged my mom for a really, really long time,” he remembers. “It was a little scary, because she looked weak, kind of frail, which I think relates to me not knowing what happened to her. But it felt so nice to grab her, to put my face in her hair and just smell her. For those ten minutes, it was real.”

Nick was surprised at how visceral his mourning really was. Though he wasn't able to cry, he felt a physical ache. “I think about my mom and my heart literally hurts. It's a very weird sensation,” he explains, putting his right hand on his chest. “Right here, my heart hurts.”

He also struggled with anxiety—a sense, as he put it, that he had “perpetually forgot something, like something is always missing.”

Nick, a self-described “technical kid,” initially thought that his acute sadness would last about a year or two. When the second anniversary came and went, he realized that mourning has a far more messy and unpredictable texture than he had once guessed. “I put a time frame on my healing. It's been a big wake-up call, this whole process. You can't work to heal faster. You should let it happen. You shouldn't be forcing anything. Let your body do what it has to do, bit by bit.”

Most of us have an inaccurate idea about the grief process. Perhaps no one is as tied to the word “grief” in the public consciousness as Dr. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, a Swiss-born psychiatrist known for creating the field of thanatology, or near-death studies. After moving to Chicago with her husband in the midsixties, Kübler-Ross was shocked to find that Americans were so conflicted about death as to appear indifferent when she observed them in the hospital setting where she was working. Determined to blow open the conversation about death and dying, Kübler-Ross started interviewing patients who faced an imminent death about the different emotions they were experiencing.

What emerged was the Kübler-Ross model, five distinct and sequential stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. The model traveled far and wide via her 1969 book,
On Death and Dying,
which transformed the way we understood grief. For decades to come, Kübler-Ross's model was the accepted wisdom, influencing psychologists, doctors, clergy, and the public at large.

It turns out that as well intentioned as Kübler-Ross was, she was also off the mark. More recent, scientifically rigorous research has proven that grief is less a sequential path through distinct stages and more a process of oscillation—up and down, up and down. In other words, we don't move from one stage on to the next, never to return to that way of relating to our loved one's death. Instead we experience a constant combination of emotions, sometimes feeling lighter and liberated from our grief, and sometimes heavier and more mired in our sadness. The light times make the heavy times bearable.

The pioneer of this new model for understanding grief, Dr. George Bonanno, based his findings on longitudinal studies of people who had lost loved ones—probing their emotional and behavioral reactions over a substantial period of time. What he found was heartening as well as surprising. Our grief doesn't metabolize as we “work” through the stages, like alcoholics recovering from an addiction; our grief dissipates over a period of time as we ride the necessary waves—as Nick so aptly put it, “bit by bit.”

A child who loses his or her mother, of course, is in a unique grieving situation. Three thousand kids lost at least one parent in the attacks on September 11. Their average age was nine years old. Tuesday's Children and other organizations were created to help these thousands of young mourners deal with their loss and find camaraderie in one another, but Nick was a bit older than most of the kids who participated in groups like these and was fiercely independent, besides. Instead, he found solace in a group of tight-knit friends, in his new Cantor family, and in his late-night writing sessions, where he resurrected his mom on paper to keep him company in his newly quiet house.

Nick finished high school in 2004 with a stellar academic record and a reputation as one of the best squash players in the country, earning him admission into Yale University, his first choice. He promised Sydney and Dylan that, though he couldn't continue to take them out for ice cream every week, they could expect regular phone calls from their big brother.

His third day at Yale happened to coincide with what would have been his mother's forty-ninth birthday. Nick felt a terrible sense of déjà vu. Here he was, at a new school, among people who didn't know him, experiencing a deep, inexplicable sadness unfit for the casual conversations typical of getting-to-know-you banter.

Deciding when and how to tell people about his very personal connection to the events of September 11 was consistently difficult for Nick. He didn't want to be known as “that kid who lost his mom on September 11,” yet he didn't overlook the importance of cluing new friends into a huge part of who he was. “It's one of the hardest parts of meeting new people,” he says. “It feels like this secret.”

Nick hesitated telling people, in large part because he was tired of dealing with the awkwardness of the interaction. “I almost feel embarrassed for them,” he explains. “Not that I would do any better, but I don't want to hear any more ‘I'm sorrys.'”

This ongoing struggle was put into stark relief when Nick decided to take a small seminar at Yale called Narratives of 9/11, in which students read and discussed novels, articles, and obituaries and watched films related to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Though the professor knew that Nick had lost his mother in the attacks, none of the other students did. Nick wanted it that way. “It was so valuable to be able to talk to a group of twenty other kids, who are basically my age and don't know my situation,” he explains. “I learned so much that I never would have been able to learn if people knew. Some of the things that were said would not have been said.”

One day, for example, the students discussed a few selections from the
New York Times
' powerful Portraits of Grief series, in which the
Times
published roughly two hundred words—impressionistic, rather than comprehensive—on every human being who perished in the World Trade Center attacks.

Reading an obituary of one of the Cantor workers, a student expressed that he was sick of hearing about another rich broker. Nick realized that someone could have the same thought reading his mother's obituary. (Her portrait, incidentally, focused on Nick's encounter with the bird while giving his mother's eulogy.) He held his tongue and was strangely grateful to be exposed to this kind of thinking: “Some comments really made me angry: ‘These rich traders only care about money. They're a symbol of this capitalist structure. They had it coming.' It was still refreshing to be able to talk about September 11th without people being careful about it.”

It was as if, through his anonymity in the Narratives of 9/11 class, Nick was able to experience what it would have been like to relate to the event as just another American—someone with an important connection by nationality, but not a crushing connection by blood.

This was not the only English class that Nick took. Though he majored in economics and spent his summers interning at finance firms, he still felt deeply drawn to writing. “The more I want to get into the financial industry,” Nick explains, “the more I want to take classes that have nothing to do with it. I really like to write. I wouldn't mind working on Wall Street for however long and then starting a writing career.”

As the years wore on, Nick was increasingly torn about the direction in which his future was moving. On the one hand, he experienced his summer internships in the financial sector as times of powerful reconnection with his mom. In the summer of 2005, he was back at Cantor, this time on the trading desk (a step up from previous years). The head of the trading desk had worked with Nick's mom for ten years, and others on the floor knew her well. They would stop by and check in with Nick, sometimes telling him stories about her no-holds-barred approach to her work. “I knew my mom was successful, but it was so nice to hear little stories,” he explains.

The stories, however, paled in comparison to what it would have been like to have his mother around. “It sucks. I'd love to sit down with her and talk about sales, the trades she's done, tricks of the trade . . . it sucks,” Nick explains, adding one more time, “It sucks.”

As much as he felt drawn to the financial sector—to be close to his mom and to continue her legacy, Nick was slowly realizing that his favorite classes weren't in the economics department, and his moments of feeling most alive involved not numbers, but words. A poetry class during his sophomore year got him writing and remembering his mom in a different way. In the summer that followed, he wrote every single day, getting most of his ideas from his personal journal.

Nick began wrestling with these two sides of himself. Should he go into the fast-paced, high-earning world of finance that his mother had inhabited from nine to five each day, or the more intimate world of words? As graduation approached, he admitted, “I don't really know what I want to do, so that's kind of terrifying.”