The As It Happens Files (22 page)
Read The As It Happens Files Online
Authors: Mary Lou Finlay
Even then, weeks after the event, it was not uncommon for people talking to us from New York suddenly to be overcome by emotion and unable to speak. Jan Hoffman was helping to write the
New York Times
obits—their “Portraits of Grief”; she said she often ended up in tears as she interviewed friends and family of the victims of 9/11.
ML: Ms. Hoffman, how did this page come about, these Portraits of Grief? Did you decide right away that every single victim was going to be remembered?
JH: A few days after the disaster, a number of reporters and editors were sitting around trying to figure out what we could do to commemorate the victims, and … finally consensus was achieved that we would try to do little almost jewel boxes about as many victims as we possibly could.
ML: How did you start to collect the names?
JH: We started in a very crude fashion, by sending reporters and interns out to look at flyers on bulletin
boards all over the city. Then, as we began to publish some of the portraits, corporations would contact us, unions would contact us. We combed the Internet, where a lot of people had posted the loved ones they were seeking, and we began to collate this vast list.
ML: Is there an official list now?
JH: It keeps floating up and down; it’s not really nailed down. We have the
New York Times
list that we’ve been working from.
ML: Yes. And how many names are on your list now?
JH: Right now we have, I would say, about 2,700.
ML: When you have a name and a contact number, who writes the stories?
JH: There are a team of reporters who are given a series of these. I’ll be given the name of a victim, and often just a phone number, so I’ll have no idea whether I’m calling a mother, a son, a cousin, a friend—literally, it’s a blind phone call.
ML: Right.
JH: And it can be extraordinarily awkward, particularly if I think I’m calling about a man and I find out it’s a woman. I’ve reached children unknowingly, elderly parents—I’ll say, “Hello, this is Jan Hoffman from the
New York Times,”
and I’ll just launch into my tentative speech, hoping that I have not hurt somebody inadvertently.
ML: And what do you tell them?
JH: I tell them the truth, which is, we’re trying to write an appreciation of as many victims as possible, and I want to know if they have a few minutes to speak with
me to share some of their thoughts about someone they loved … and a lot of people don’t want to talk.
ML: They just can’t bear to talk about it?
JH: They can’t bear it. More people do, but a lot of people don’t want to talk.… And I don’t want to press them, because this is obviously not a traditional news story. If I feel that it’s just not the right time, I may make a phone call a week later, and in some of those situations, it’s been more successful. Particularly in one instance, when I called a woman—it turned out to be a mother—and she said they were still looking for her daughter. I thought that she clearly had not come to terms with what had happened, and so I waited a week and talked to her again and got a full story.
ML: They’re heartbreaking to read.
JH: Yes.
ML: They must be very difficult do.
JH: It’s true, but I keep remembering that I don’t have the hard job, because I don’t have to live with the memories and the nightmare. And I have to tell you that more often than not, I end up weeping on the phone with people. It’s chilling, it’s heartbreaking, it’s sad.
It’s also quite beautiful. And I also feel honoured to be doing it, to help to celebrate some of these wonderful people.
Part of the problem with the job is that some people are articulate and some people are not. There are sometimes language barriers. So what I try to do is figure out—if I can’t get a full sense of someone from the person I’m interviewing, I gently inquire if I can speak
with somebody else, if there’s a friend or another family member … someone from the business. I remember once I asked, “Well, is there someone from the business that I can speak to about your husband?”
And the woman said, “They’re all dead.”
ML: That was [financial firm] Cantor Fitzgerald probably.
JH: Right. And so I do the best I can. My goal is to try to get a sharp and distinct sense of the person as an individual.
ML: Are there any that have stood out particularly in your mind?
JH: … There’s one man—when I heard about him from his brother, I couldn’t stop crying. He was a very quiet, unassuming man who was Jamaican-born, in his late 30s, divorced—and he lived all of his life, unbeknownst to his family, working with African-American underprivileged youth. They did not know.
He would leave his work, twice a week, in Manhattan, and drive out to Queens to counsel young men, get them jobs and drive all the way back home to New Jersey—I mean this was quite an extensive commute. And at his memorial service, more than 30 young men came up to the family to say how the victim had graced their lives.
ML: And they had no idea.
JH: They had no idea. They knew that he coached inner-city basketball, that he had coached football—they knew a lot of stuff about him, but this kind of thing they had no idea about.… And all the man really wanted in his life was to be married again and have children of his own. So I just wept as his brother described that to me.
This particular man was also the neatest person on the planet. He had his closet organized by length of shirt sleeves; his khakis were organized by shade of khaki. You know it’s all these kind of wonderful details that make people come alive.
ML: Yes. Sometimes people are making an impact, obviously, that has nothing to do with their position or how they are seen by those people.
JH: I have to say, one of the ironies of doing this is I’ve learned that almost nobody, in speaking of the dead, speaks of their work. They speak of their connections to others. We hear small, wonderful, intimate moments—what someone did for someone else, what they did for the community at large—but I almost never hear, “You know, he really did a good day’s work” or “He was brilliant at achieving such and such.” It really makes you pause and think about what you’ll be remembered for … and what’s important.
No one should forget the frightful cost of September 11
,
2001. As Jan Hoffman said, the numbers don’t begin to reveal the true cost—but the numbers are terrible all the same. Cantor Fitzgerald, the firm that had occupied the top floors of Number One, World Trade Center, lost 658 of their people—more than two-thirds of the company. When all the bodies, and parts of bodies, were counted, the number of people killed in the attack on New York came to 2,750, including 343 firefighters, 23 policemen and 24 Canadians.
That was just New York. Another 184 people died at the Pentagon, and 40 people were killed when United Flight 93 crashed in a field in Pennsylvania. Flight 93 is presumed to have been heading for the White House or the U.S. Capitol Building until some passengers foiled the attempt. They all died anyway.
In November, Kathie Scobee Fulgham came on
As It Happens
to tell us about a public letter she’d written to the children who lost their parents on 9/11. Dying in such a public way, she told us, creates special problems for the ones who are left behind. She spoke from experience: Kathie was 25 in January 1986, when her father, Dick, flew the space shuttle
Challenger
on its last, fatal mission.
… It should have been a moment of private grief, but instead it turned into a very public torture. We couldn’t turn on the television for weeks afterward, because we were afraid we would see the gruesome spectacle of the
Challenger
coming apart a mile up in the sky….
My father died a hundred times a day on televisions all across the country. And since it happened so publicly, everyone in the country felt like it happened to them, too. And it did. The
Challenger
explosion was a national tragedy. Everyone saw it, everyone hurt, everyone grieved, everyone wanted to help. But that did not make it any easier for me. They wanted to say good-bye to American heroes. I just wanted to say good-bye to my Daddy.
I asked Kathie Fulgham how she got through finally. She didn’t get any grief counselling, she said; she didn’t accept that anyone else could understand what she was going through. But every time someone called or wrote to express sympathy, she asked them for a story about her dad so that the memories of how he
lived
might gradually supplant the all-too-vivid images of how he died. In her letter to the children of 9/11 victims, she suggested they do the same.
You need stories about your Mom or Dad from their friends, co-workers and your family. These stories will keep
your Mom or Dad alive and real in your heart and mind for the rest of your life. Listen carefully to the stories. Tell them. Write them. Record them. Post them online. The stories will help you remember. The stories will help you make the decisions about your life—help you become the person you were meant to be.
“There are still hard times,” Kathie told us. “It’s been 15 years and I still miss him, but the grief is not as raw.”
Eight months after the terrorist attacks on Washington and New York, we learned about a strange little offshoot of the disaster: David Travis, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Wisconsin, told us that as a result of there being no planes in the air over the United States in the days following September
11,
2001, scientists observed that temperature differences between night and day had increased. The reason for this, they surmised, was that the contrails of the thousands of aircraft normally in the sky tend to moderate temperature differences by blocking out the sun during the day and blocking the radiation of heat from the earth’s surface at night.
Six years after 9/11, Al Gore has helped put climate change,
aka
global warming, near the top of the agenda for many national and international institutions and got himself a Nobel Prize to boot (though not for science), so he’s gone some way to ensure that when they write the whole history of this time and place, he’ll be remembered for more than just being the failed presidential candidate of the beginning of this chapter. It’s too early to say how President George W. Bush will be remembered; much depends on how things turn out in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Air India
I regret to advise you that one of our aircraft, VTEFO, Flight 182, of June 22, 1985, from Toronto and Montreal to Delhi and Bombay via London, was reported lost at sea off the coast of Ireland in the early hours of the morning.
I
t was Air India’s early morning announcement on June 23, 1985, that alerted the world to the loss of 329 lives in an airplane accident in the North Atlantic. Only it was not an accident; it was a deliberate act of terrorism.
Every
As It Happens
producer is a generalist, dipping into many and varied subjects every day, five days a week. Each of them also has favourite stories, or stories that haunt him or her. Mark Ulster loves American politics and culture. Robin Smythe keeps an eye on health and science matters (and Don Cherry). The problems of Vancouver’s Downtown East Side would not have got the scrutiny they did without the nagging of Max Paris. Meagan Perry had a passion for Japan, Sarah Martin for France—and Datejie Green spent more hours than we had any right to expect trying to get decent phone lines to Kenya.
After the dramatic events of September
11,
2001, I developed a kind of obsession with the Air India debacle. My interest was a bit late coming. Air India Flight 182, en route from Toronto and Montreal to Delhi, disappeared from radar screens off the coast of Ireland early in the morning of June 23, 1985. There’s never been a worse act of terrorism involving Canadians—prior to 9/11 there had never been a worse act of
aviation terrorism
anywhere
—and yet we seem never to have taken it seriously enough. The investigation of the crime took nearly twenty years. The trial, when it finally occurred, was an exercise in frustration. Worst of all, the surveillance of at least two of the people involved
prior
to the bombing failed to see what, in retrospect, were clear signals that an attack was in the offing. In other words, with better police work, this tragedy might have been averted.
For many Canadians, it’s hard to escape the suspicion that there would have been a greater outcry over these lapses had the victims been more, um,
Caucasian
-looking. The victims were mostly Canadians, but Canadians of Indian descent.
I don’t plead any special case for myself here. When Air India went down, I was packing up the house in preparation for a year at Harvard as a Nieman Fellow, taking a leave from the CBC TV programme
The Journal.
Air India barely registered in my consciousness. Of course, I was shocked when I heard the news. I grieved for the victims and their families—and then I moved on. Which is what most everyone else seems to have done, too.
