On My Watch

by Virginia Buckingham

  Jack and Maddy were fast approaching middle school, and I was grateful the numbness didn’t extend to my feelings for them. They continued to be the source of whatever determination I could muster to find my way to who I had been and who I wanted to become. During this two-year period, I was promoted at work and, to all appearances, seemed to thrive. This ability to function, often at a high level, should be called the PTSD paradox. Paradoxically, I could feel nothing during periods of dissociation, or feel everything excruciatingly during times of being triggered. And at the same time appear to be “doing a life” successfully, as Andrea called it.

  But I knew much of the time something was missing; I was missing. When I read more on Van der Kolk’s view of trauma’s impact, “the fear of losing control; always being on alert for danger or rejection; the self-loathing; the nightmares and flashbacks . . . ; being unable to fully open your heart to another human being,” I wanted to swear, laugh, and cry at the same time. The book was describing the me—Ginny Buckingham—9/11—I had become. Yet it was also suggesting I could be more.

  The author recounted the story of family friends who had dropped their five-year-old son off for first grade at a school right near the World Trade Center. Noam, with his father, fled through the smoke and debris and made it home safely. Van der Kolk went to visit the family, who were able to process the trauma they had witnessed in part, he wrote, because they took an active role in escaping and saving their lives. Even young Noam, who had, horrifically, witnessed bodies falling, was able to find a way to process it. He showed the author a drawing he’d made of the burning towers, including rounded stick figures, the people jumping. But an unrecognizable circular image caught the author’s eye at the base of the tower. “What’s that?” he asked. “A trampoline,” Noam explained, “so the next time when people have to jump, they will be safe.” Noam was making sense in his own way of what had happened, finding his way forward from the horror he’d seen, by building a trampoline.

  How could I construct my own trampoline, all these years later? How could I make myself feel “safe” enough from the pain of being blamed, and blaming myself, to finally let myself bear it, to lift the fog and let myself feel the crushing anxiety, the self-loathing, the fear, the anger, and then—possibly, hopefully—peace?

  “Naming and claiming,” Andrea had said, was a start.

  “What do you mean?” I asked her.

  As she explained it to me, a key path to healing was to put words to my experience, every painful piece of it, and make it my own, acknowledge it. For starters, simply accept the truth of it. Similarly, the author of The Body Keeps the Score suggests “integration,” or “putting the traumatic event into its proper place in the overall arc of one’s life.” I remembered when Andrea had put it this way: “One day 9/11 will be part of the tapestry of your life, but just one thread.”

  Before that could even be a distant possibility, though, I had to find a way to break free of my mind’s automatic resort to dissociation, the numbing. I couldn’t “name and claim” my experience if I was so shut down emotionally that I couldn’t feel it.

  But how?

  By now, some years after I’d first met her and challenged her with the quest I was on—“Was I guilty or innocent?”—Andrea had grown used to my need for concrete answers and strategies. She had one for this challenge, too. Simply, she said, “Notice.” Notice first when I felt “not there” or dissociated. And then notice, on ever-deepening levels, what I was feeling and thinking, even smelling, or seeing. Putting words to my inner experience, she said, and asking myself “and what else am I able to feel?” held many possibilities. Not only the obvious one of coming to peace with the actuality of my feelings but also the possibility that, by witnessing myself without judgment, I could move toward the accountability required to accept me as me, with my “adaptations,” living with them, not in spite of them.

  “What can I be aware of?” she said was the question I should answer. And then, “What else can I be aware of?” and so on.

  I tried it and felt silly at first.

  I am aware I am sitting in my car.

  I am aware I feel like an idiot trying to be aware.

  Van der Kolk’s approach also involved “mindfulness,” even the simple act of noticing yourself sitting in a chair with your feet on the ground. I am sitting in this chair, I’d think to myself, feeling the wood or cushion underneath me, and as ridiculous as I felt, I would come back to my own body.

  I forced myself to keep noticing. And sometimes I’d just notice small things, like the warm breeze on my face, and the smell of dry leaves. But other times I’d notice that every time I wanted to cry, I’d forcibly stop myself; that crinkles appeared around David’s blue eyes when he smiled but also when he looked deeply in my eyes with concern, and that I often turned away when he looked at me that way. I noticed that sometimes I seemed to forget to breathe and would need to take a deep breath to remind myself that I was alive, and that, as I lay in bed at night, I listened carefully to the roar of an airplane overhead to see if it sounded normal, to see if I could detect anything wrong, my anxiety rising as I mentally wished it safely on the ground.

  The small “noticing” moved to this painful “noticing” quickly, and the intensity of the pain was not a bit lessened by the passage of years, having been pushed down in that “steel-lined emotional elevator.”

  I finally needed to try to let my emotions come back up and, beyond being simply aware of them, express them, “name and claim them.” I told Andrea about a Holocaust survivor whose obituary I had just read. Her son, as I remembered it, was quoted talking about how she’d lived a full, happy life when she came to America after being freed from a concentration camp. She got married, raised a family. She never spoke of what she had endured. Until she began to slip into dementia and in her nursing home bed would scream and cry out about the horrors she was seeing.

  “What was wrong with that?” I probed Andrea: “Why isn’t that a perfectly legitimate way to handle trauma?” I don’t remember Andrea giving me a concrete answer. She knew I had to answer that one for myself.

  “I am afraid if I start crying about 9/11, I will start screaming and never stop,” I had said to Andrea just a year after the attacks.

  “You know now that’s not true, right?” she said, more than a decade later when I repeated the same fear.

  Did I?

  Beyond the effort to be aware, I found another way to ease the grip of the painful images in my head. As much as possible, I surrounded myself with beauty. Fresh flowers on the counter and the coffee table in the winter, containers overflowing with annual flowers on the deck in the summer. I’d park by the shore and watch a seabird land on a rock jutting in the harbor, the sweep of the sea washing over the rock but barely disturbing the bird. I listened carefully to the wind rustling the leaves, covered myself in a blanket and watched the sunset from my back deck long after summer’s warmth had faded. My unscientific observation? Beauty, like trauma, did not just enter the eyes; it, too, imprinted itself on the brain, a gentler hand making an impression in wet clay.

  I was making dinner one evening, and Jack was doing his homework at the counter. I had a fire going in the kitchen fireplace and turned on the small TV on the counter. It was tuned to the evening news. I don’t remember the exact story, but there was a mention of 9/11, and Jack turned to me and said, “That must make you feel sad, Mom.” I looked at him, surprised and, unexpectedly, comforted. I had been “seen,” acknowledged, understood.

  Jack, barely a teenager, was aware.

  What else could I be aware of?

  Chapter Thirty-One

  I Am Other

  In early 2011, my lawyer, whom I hadn’t heard from in months, contacted me. “As we expected, you are on the witness list for the remaining 9/11 wrongful death case,” he said. “The trial date is expected to be set soon.”

  A trial. T
he focus of the first nightmare I’d had shortly after 9/11. I again pictured the courtroom in Manhattan. Walking down the center aisle. All eyes on me. Onlookers jeering.

  Now, years later, I tried to picture the reality of being seated in the witness box, the judge above me, a jury seated nearby, the plaintiff’s attorney, like he did at my deposition, accusing me of ignorance and worse. “Were you aware of al Qaeda?” “Did you know what a fatwa was?” “Why didn’t you do anything about the checkpoints?”

  I couldn’t do it. That much I knew. I could not walk into that courtroom.

  I could not take that stand.

  I could not be accused.

  I could not do it.

  The case against me personally hadn’t been pursued, but I knew that if Logan was found liable, I, as its leader, would be, too, where it counted most to me: in my heart, in my soul.

  At my lawyer’s request, I went to a meeting much like the ones I had to attend before the 9/11 Commission testimony and the deposition. Several lawyers were arrayed around a large table. They laid out the possible scenarios, the preparation I would have to undergo. They would make motions, they said, to remove Massport from the case, but if they were not successful, there would be a trial and I could have to take the stand. I answered their questions, an edge of emotion barely noticeable in my voice. I welcomed the numbing. We agreed to set up a schedule of meetings. Robotically, I nodded.

  No. I could not do it.

  That night, David tried to comfort me by saying he would come with me to the courthouse. By then he had been a trial judge for several years and was known as a stickler about decorum in the courtroom. So when he said not only that would he come with me, but that I could sit on his lap in the witness box while I was being questioned, I couldn’t help but laugh at the absurd image. A bit of the terror of the moment eased. We had learned a lot in the past years about reaching toward each other in the hardest times. The deep wrinkles around his eyes crinkled in concern. I didn’t look away.

  Jack and Maddy were in their rooms doing homework, and I sat with my legs tucked under me in the corner of my favorite couch in my favorite room, the one where I kept fresh flowers and, often, lighted candles. Beauty and pain. In my mind’s eye, I saw the sign Andrea kept in her office. “Sometimes courage is simply being able to say, I will try again tomorrow.”

  I would try again tomorrow.

  ***

  In 2003, David and I had traveled to Canada to attend the wedding of Anne Cellucci, the daughter of the former governor who had been named US ambassador to Canada. One of the guests at the wedding was the Canadian minister of foreign affairs, equivalent to the American secretary of state. David and he got into an in-depth conversation about 9/11, and David told him about my experience. “It was absurd to blame her,” the Canadian leader said, noting it was a geopolitical issue.

  David rushed over to me and excitedly related the conversation. “He’s the secretary of state of Canada, hon, and he thinks it’s absurd that you were blamed.”

  Rather than giving the pleased response to the comments that David expected, I shrank into myself and felt tears prick my eyes. I didn’t yet have the words to respond: “Just because he thinks it was absurd doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.”

  Why did it happen? Why was I blamed? The reality of the coming trial began to force me to look at questions I hadn’t had the ability—or courage—to face right after the attacks.

  Did it matter that I was blamed, beyond its impact on me and my family? “Everybody needs a scapegoat” had been said to me more than once with a shrug of acceptance. What purpose did scapegoating serve, and perhaps more important, was there a societal toll paid in addition to the obvious personal one?

  The author and speaker Brené Brown has suggested that blame is “a way to discharge pain and discomfort.” So, like a collective breath being exhaled by the body politic, maybe my forced resignation temporarily eased the palpable sense of anger and fear in Boston following the attacks. It didn’t matter that Massport had no authority over the security checkpoints under federal law at the time, not that this had any bearing on the hijackers’ simple plan of carrying small knives onboard and overpowering unsuspecting passengers and crew. It didn’t matter that security at Logan Airport was no different than at any other, as the 9/11 Commission eventually pointed out.

  But perhaps it did matter that by blaming me, leaders, the media, and the public were able to push away the debilitating fear that the attacks wrought and avoid addressing the deeply complicated issues we faced in aviation and national security after 9/11. Certainly blaming me didn’t make us any safer. I understood this bumper sticker approach to governing. At times I had been a practitioner of it. What I’d finally come to understand, though, was that blaming was not leadership, and certainly not in a world where the issues we faced were anything but simple.

  Why else was blaming destructive?

  I had never been able to get out of my mind a dream Andrea had told me she had right after 9/11. She dreamed, she said, that all the citizens of the United States had come together in the days after the attacks and worn head scarves in solidarity with Muslims. At the time she told me about it, I thought it was the craziest thing I’d ever heard, and I even wondered if our politics were so different that she might not be able to help me after all.

  It was years before I finally understood that what Andrea described as “othering” was at the core of our resort to blame. In the dictionary, othering was defined as to “view or treat a person or group of people as intrinsically different from and alien to oneself.” What did that have to do with scapegoating? Everything. It was the heart of it. It was the reason horrors like the Holocaust or the Armenian Genocide happened. Blame could be placed on one person, as was the case with me; the media was able to define me as “intrinsically different”—I was inexperienced, incompetent, a political hack, someone who put ambition above people’s safety. I was not a human being who could be related to, empathized with. I was other. So I could be blamed. But more societally damaging was when blame was placed on an entire people, with horrifying results.

  Andrea had also talked over the years about how assigning blame was an antidote to a natural fear of dying. “We are the only species that is mortal and conscious of it,” she’d said. I came to understand that I was blamed because the attacks of 9/11 shifted something fundamental in Americans’ sense of safety, and our belief that complete safety for us and our loved ones is achievable. The blame leveled at me in the immediate aftermath was later leveled at federal officials, including the president and intelligence agencies, for missing or ignoring signs of the attack. I realized this was not much different than a propensity to blame the victims of violent crime. If “she wasn’t wearing that,” or “hadn’t accepted that ride,” or “hadn’t been walking alone in that dark place at night,” she wouldn’t have been raped. Therefore, we’re safe because we don’t do those things.

  If the president had paid attention to the presidential daily brief entitled “Bin Ladin [sic] Determined to Strike in US” delivered to him in August of 2001, or if I had acted when I received a memo on terrorism and aviation, similarly vague and unactionable, in April of 2001, and later reported as evidence of my guilt, the intimation was that 9/11 could have been stopped. I, for too many long, painful years, held on to this possibility as well. Could I have stopped it?

  No.

  Finally, I not only believed it, I knew it. I could hear my inner voice. It was no longer being drowned out by the noise of the crowd, of a culture, telling me that I had to have done something wrong or I should have done something more.

  I could finally hold on to what I knew was true. It was not my fault. It never was.

  We rely on blame—by others and of ourselves—to avoid the truth that our lives and those of our loved ones are fragile. What if, after we came together to address, to the extent humanly possible, our vu
lnerability to terrorism, we acknowledged our mortality, the fragility of our lives? Would we live differently? How would it change us and our choices, and our leaders’ choices? Those were big questions that I didn’t pretend to have the answers to. I only knew they were worth asking.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  The Resilience of Sea Glass

  Suit: 9/11 Logan Screeners ‘Unaware’

  —Boston Herald, June 21, 2011

  Massport Seeks to Head Off 9/11 Suit

  Victim’s Family Says Airport Liable for Security Lapses

  —Boston Globe, July 7, 2011

  July 27, 2011—La Jolla, California

  “The ordeal is part over.” I stared at the words in the email from my lawyer. Could they mean what I thought they did?

  On July 27, 2011, federal judge Alvin Hellerstein dismissed Massport and Logan Airport from the last remaining wrongful death case stemming from the Logan hijackings. I received the news via an email from my lawyer while I sat in a windowless conference room at a business meeting in California. If my colleagues noticed the heightened color in my face and the slight tremor in my hands as I gave my presentation, they didn’t give any sign.

  As soon as I could, I rose and walked quickly to the hotel driveway outside. I could smell the rosemary growing alongside the pavement and briefly closed my eyes and turned my face up to the sun. I pressed the numbers for David’s cell phone into my BlackBerry. “He did it,” I said, referring to Judge Hellerstein, as soon as he picked up. “He did it.”

  David didn’t need any further explanation. “Oh, honey,” he said.

  ***

  “The ordeal is part over.” I puzzled over the phrase chosen by my lawyer. He likely was referring to the fact that other litigation involving the World Trade Center’s owners and their insurance companies was ongoing. But I think it stood out to me because of the truth in it. The “ordeal” would never be “over” for me.