John Quelch, chair of the Massport board of directors, came to the podium. The Harvard Business School professor had been appointed to Massport after I left. He was hailed in the media along with my successor as part of new leadership bringing needed changes to Logan. Quelch moved the microphone down slightly, clearing his throat. I tried not to let my face betray anything as he began to speak, stiffening as I expected a reference to be made about all the improvements he and others had implemented to make Logan safer after my departure.
“For the past seven years,” he said, “there have already been in place two memorials at Logan Airport, dedicated to the 147 men, women, and children who perished the morning of September 11, 2001, on American Airlines Flight 11 and United Airlines Flight 175. One stands outside gate 32 in American Airline’s Terminal B. The other stands outside gate 19 in United’s Terminal C.”
I gazed up at this man I did not know as he summoned the sense of pride and heartbreak that marked Logan personnel in those early days.
“Both memorials,” he said, “appeared spontaneously, raised by airport and airline employees without fanfare or ceremony. These two memorials are one and the same. And there is no grander memorial. That memorial is the flag of the United States of America. The flags fly proudly to this day, and will likely fly forever. They symbolize the determination of this airport, this nation, and the community assembled here to recover from the grievous wound of 9/11. Today, we dedicate a third memorial as a remembrance of that day and its impact on all of us.”
I gripped my arms tightly, trying to contain my emotion. Betty Desrosiers reached over and placed her hand gently on my arm.
“The weight of September 11 also bore heavily on the entire Logan airport community who were devastated to learn that two of our flights—our Flight 11, our Flight 175—were instruments in the tragedy that unfolded. We at Massport and the entire Logan family hope that you—and we—will find comfort in this place.”
The light had shifted slightly and the memorial seemed to glow from within as Quelch continued to speak.
“Changing our own lives will be the greatest gift we can give to the departed. They surely expect more from us than to merely memorialize their names. They surely want us to do more, work harder, be better, to be inspired by remembering them. So, for the sacrifice of those we honor here today, may this memorial make us better fathers and mothers, sons and daughters. For their sacrifice, may we be better custodians of the public trust, ever vigilant for the public safety. For their sacrifice, may we be better citizens and neighbors. And in the morning, with the rising of the sun, and with the sounds of freedom in the sky, in this place we shall remember them.”
As if on cue, a departing jet took off from a nearby runway, its roar like an exclamation point on Quelch’s exhortation “to be better.” For the first time in years I wanted to do as he said. I wanted to “be better.” I wanted my life and my experience here to mean something.
Once upon a time, well before 9/11, I’d thought about the possibility that a new terminal or the new runway would be completed on my watch and there would be a dedication ceremony, a plaque placed there in perpetuity like those in the older terminals naming a long-past governor and Massport leader. It was not an unusual political vanity, but now it seemed like it was from someone else’s life, someone who naively, even arrogantly, but mostly innocently, thought her path would be seamless, straight, empty of flags adorning two gates and a list of names etched in glass.
After the ceremony, the speakers filed off the stage and began to walk to the entry to the memorial grounds. Joined by Betty, I followed behind.
Carved at our feet by the entrance were the words “Remember This Day.” And then “This memorial is intended as a place of reflection for all those who were forever changed by the events of September 11, 2001.”
“Forever changed.” I, of course, knew I wasn’t the only one at Logan forever changed by 9/11, but sometimes it had felt like that, that I was alone on this journey. Betty quietly explained that there were two paths to choose from to approach the memorial. “They are supposed to represent the two flight paths of the planes,” she said. “But to me they represent the different journeys taken to move forward from 9/11.”
“I like your interpretation better,” I responded.
As we approached the glass cube, I saw the entrance on the corner. I stopped abruptly, staring at the first glass panel facing the entrance. “7:59” were the numbers etched there. “The time,” Betty said, in a whispered explanation. “The airline people on the memorial committee really cared about the time, because that is so important to their work at the airport.” I knew before she said it that 7:59 was the time that American 11 had left Logan.
As I walked into the structure, I heard, rather than saw, the news photographers kneeling on the ground, circling the inside of the cube.
Click, flash, click, snap, click.
They surrounded me as I stood there, yet I was completely alone. On two glass panels that faced each other in the center were the names of each of the 147 innocent people who had died on the planes. The TV videographers jostled for position as I looked upward. Overhead were small square-shaped glass panels hanging at various heights representing “the fractured sky.” One photographer knelt quickly at my feet as I approached the panel listing the passengers and crew on United 175. She aimed her camera up, as I searched for Marianne MacFarlane’s name.
When I finally found it, I clutched my hands tightly at my waist. The memorial began to feel too small. I felt trapped. I have to get out of here, I thought.
I started to leave the glass enclosure but stopped again at the final glass panel. “8:14.” The time United 175 had departed.
Losing the effort to maintain my composure, I began to quietly weep.
“Ah, Ginny,” one former colleague said, reaching over to hug me. I could tell by the tone of his voice that he was taken aback by my intense emotion.
The governor hesitated and then moved toward me, reaching for and squeezing my hand. “Thanks,” I said quietly to him and began to move down one of the paths.
“Excuse me,” a voice called from my right. I stopped and turned to the young journalist with his pen and notebook. “Can I have your name?” he asked. “Virginia Buckingham,” I answered, automatically spelling my last name before he asked. As I started to move away again, he called out one last question.
“And what’s your connection to the event?”
He had no idea why I was there or that there were those who had once said it was my fault we needed a memorial at all.
My connection? My connection to 9/11?
How to answer? A second, maybe two, passed. I looked at the newly planted trees alongside the path. I am as rooted to 9/11 as these trees will be to the soil, I wanted to say.
His question hung there in the quiet air. He waited expectantly, pen poised to write “widow” or “friend” or “coworker,” filling in the blank that might correspond to my overwhelming grief.
“I was the CEO of Massport on 9/11,” I said quietly, and as he wrote it down, I continued to walk down the path.
September 11, 2008—Goldthwait Reservation, Marblehead
The morning of the seventh anniversary was bright and beautiful, just as every anniversary had been. David took the kids to school. I drove to the beach and sat on the edge of a picnic bench, my arms crossed protectively across my chest. As 7:59 a.m. and then 8:14 a.m. went by, my cries of anguish were swept up in the salty wind and captured in the roll of the crashing surf. I watched the distant planes landing and departing from Logan and then turned my gaze to the horizon.
“Be better,” I said in a whisper, to the ocean, to myself.
“Changing our own lives will be the greatest gift we can give to the departed. They surely expect more from us than to merely memorialize their names,” John Quelch had said.
Be be
tter.
Be a better mother, a better wife, daughter, friend. I closed my eyes and tried to implant the words in my brain, in my soul, where the image of the burning towers lived.
I stood and turned away from the water. As I reached the top of the wooden walkway that led from the rocky bluff to the parking lot below, I turned to take one last look at the planes on the horizon. My eyes then automatically swept the ground for a telltale sparkle of sea glass. Seeing none, I walked slowly down the path.
Unbidden, the lyrics to the Springsteen song “Waitin’ on a Sunny Day” played in my head, just like it had years earlier the day Jack started kindergarten with its promise that everything would be okay.
I put the car into reverse. Backed out of the parking lot. Headed toward home and, I hoped, the start of something, someone, better.
Chapter Thirty
An Elevator and a Trampoline
What has happened cannot be undone.
—Bessel van der Kolk, MD
2008–2010
My job at Pfizer increasingly took me in and out of New York and Washington, DC. Each time I flew out of Logan, I sought a view of the 9/11 memorial. I’d keep my eyes on it as I moved along the walkway connecting the airport’s central parking garage to the terminal until it was long out of sight. Was I doing a kind of personal penance? Yes, at first. But over time, seeing the glass structure also became a comfort, like an old friend who could acknowledge a shared painful experience, no explanation needed.
From my higher vantage point on the moving walkway, I looked down at the suspended glass panels at the top of the structure, much like looking down on cumulus clouds from the window of an airplane. Each panel caught the light individually and, with this perspective on the symbolic fractured sky, I saw all that was lost on 9/11 but also the possibility of beauty.
Could beauty and loss coexist?
With this fresh perspective in mind and with the passage of time, I began to hope it was possible that the shift from the blame being assigned to me and Logan would be permanent.
It did not take long for that fledgling hope to be destroyed.
9/11 Kin Seek Release of Secret Documents
9/11 Kin to Judge: Hold Massport Accountable
3 Victims’ Kin Demand 9/11 Justice
This Brings It All Home to Logan
In real time, the appearances of the headlines in the Boston Herald were intermittent; months could pass before new developments in the Logan wrongful death cases prompted another bout of scathing coverage. But to me it felt like a constant barrage. I also never knew when to expect the next story, and I felt assaulted by them anew every time. Massport lawyers didn’t keep me informed of developments because I wasn’t personally a party to the lawsuits. I understood, but the lack of communication deepened my isolation and heightened a sense of inner shame. Why had I been so shattered by what others clearly considered finished for me?
Each headline was also an instant trigger for a post-traumatic stress reaction—not unlike, I’d learn, Fourth of July fireworks or a backfiring car could be for military veterans.
Andrea had over the years tried to explain the science behind PTSD to me, but I resisted trying to fully understand it. I wanted it not to be true. I wanted to be okay, just like the lawyers and others assumed I was.
Ginny Buckingham—9/11. I still didn’t want to be her.
As the years had passed, though, and veterans from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars came home, many suffering from PTSD, the media began covering the issue more and more. And I tentatively, hesitantly at first, started to learn more about it.
Later, in a wonderful book called The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk, MD, I finally read more than I ever had about PTSD’s cause and impact.
The book echoed much of what Andrea had explained to me in years past: that your brain had an alarm system or “smoke detector” that helped you identify and respond to danger; how this led to the release of stress hormones, and the fight, flight, or freeze response; and how, if you were unable to flee or otherwise react or escape, the stress hormones kept being fired even after the danger had passed. How the very same reaction could be triggered by something as commonplace as a smell that brought you back to that traumatic moment. And how the stress reaction even years later was often the same as if no time had passed at all. Andrea spoke about a “steel-lined emotional elevator” and how when we are unable to process or experience feelings in the moment, we use our “dissociative skills” to push them away. She’d say that once feelings had been “sent down that elevator” they incubate, remain static, unchanged. And that when they are triggered or catapulted back to the surface by whatever stimuli set them off, they haven’t matured at all. Thus, she said, “it’s as if they come up just as they were when we originally sent them away.”
This wasn’t on purpose, not conscious, she assured me, probably seeing the shadow of shame flicker on my face. “It’s an essential part of our species’ ability to cope,” she said. These were “adaptations,” and she said it was my work to learn to see them as the absolute best I could do at the time, that learning to be grateful for whatever it was that enabled me to get through and continue to live, to parent, to do as much of my life as was possible, was essential. She told me again and again that learning to make decisions in my own life that were respectful to those adaptations was an essential and potentially wonderful part of the recovery process.
In The Body Keeps the Score, I also read about the discovery of so-called mirror neurons in the frontal lobes of the brain that were the basis for human empathy. Andrea had explained this in the past, too, and had pointed out that when someone is not “mirrored” or understood, or is treated as “other” after trauma, PTSD was far more likely to occur.
“Why?” I asked.
“A lot of it is how you are received after the trauma,” she said, drawing a parallel between many Americans’ rejection of Vietnam veterans and my being scapegoated. “This was one of the reasons Vietnam veterans suffered PTSD so profoundly,” she said. The comparison made me extremely uncomfortable because I certainly didn’t fight in a war, but I came to understand what she was saying. I was traumatized, like many others, by the horror of 9/11 itself and then by being singled out and blamed, and finally by being dismissed with the oft-repeated “you weren’t really blamed, it was just politics.” Van der Kolk similarly explained, “Trauma almost invariably involves not being seen, not being mirrored and not being taken into account.” In other words, being blamed left me feeling completely isolated and vulnerable to even unexpected triggers of post-traumatic stress.
***
“Mom can’t watch violence,” I had overheard Maddy, then about seven or eight, say when arguing with Jack over what TV show we would watch that evening. The exchange made me sad, rather than grateful. I’d done my best, however misguided, to shield Jack and Maddy from the worst of the impact of PTSD on me, but they knew anyway.
“You don’t want to,” Andrea would explain, prodding me gently to understand that avoiding violence was a choice, not a “can’t.” Maybe someday, I thought, but at the time it felt like it was a definite “can’t.”
The worst was when violence in the media snuck up on me when I was least expecting it. “Cover your eyes, hon,” David would say, quickly moving to change the channel when a violent scene appeared in an otherwise calm documentary we were watching. The evening news was off-limits. Reading the newspapers in the morning became akin to tiptoeing through a visual minefield—avoiding this headline, looking quickly away from that picture. Even my favorite pastime of reading fiction was fraught. I became absorbed in Loving Frank, the bestseller about Frank Lloyd Wright and his great love, Mamah Cheney. I couldn’t put it down, enjoying the relaxation and escape I’d almost always found in reading since I was a child. And then, without warning, at the end of the book, Mamah was vividly, violently murdered by a hatchet-w
ielding madman. The machete split her skull, and instantly I felt as if my own skull had been split. I couldn’t get the image of the blood spewing out of my (her) head out from behind my eyes. That’s what it felt like, that the image sat there for hours, coming back over the following days, as real as if I were experiencing it in person. And here was the thing: what I knew and tried to describe to Andrea was that I didn’t just see violent images or upsetting scenes through my eyes; I actually felt them in my brain, sometimes like a vise gripping either side of the front of my scalp. But sometimes it felt like the violent act or image of destruction or pain also imprinted itself on me, like an impression made by pressing a hand down in wet clay to make a handprint. My brain tissue the clay, the impression the horror.
Besides violent images and news coverage of 9/11 anniversaries and the litigation, the other main PTSD triggers for me were obvious ones, like seeing a plane flying near a tall building, the orange “go bag” or emergency kit my colleagues based in New York headquarters were required to keep in their offices, or the sight of a building partially collapsed at the hands of a wrecking crew. But the triggers could be unexpected, too, like seeing a toddler inconsolably crying on the sidewalk or a puppy being harshly handled by its owner. Were these triggers for me because vulnerable creatures were being hurt, like the vulnerable people on the planes or in the Towers? I didn’t know.
What I did know was that while the nightmares began again with each headline about the lawsuit, the numbness, the feeling of floating through space without emotional connection, surrounded me like an airbag, keeping me from harm. Van der Kolk explained that trauma “compromises the brain area that communicates the physical embodied feeling of being alive.”
I understood instinctively what he meant, but when my adult niece Kaitlin asked me to describe what it felt like to be “shut down,” I struggled to find the words. “It’s like not being in your own body,” I tried, “like you’re not there at all.”
On My Watch Page 23