Project Rebirth

by Dr. Robin Stern

  This is also not just a book about grief. It is, first and foremost, a book about resilience. It is about that miraculous process by which people whose lives have been shattered in an instant, manage to find the strength to pick up the pieces and put them back together again—not in the same way as before, but in a new, reintegrated form.

  Resilience is often assumed to be a personality trait, something you are either lucky to be born with, or doomed to be born without, but it is actually more accurately thought of as a process. A resilient person essentially draws on inner resources and calls on community support in order to move forward after disappointment, failure, or trauma. Research confirms that the presence of resilience is encouraged or discouraged by the communities and environments of which we find ourselves a part. When difficult things happen to us—divorce, illness, death, job loss, etc.—we are able to weather those changes based on a unique combination of our own hard-wiring and psychological resources in consort with the protective factors that our families and communities, social policies, and schools create for us.

  Resilience has been a widely discussed topic as of late, identified by educators, mental health professionals, and researchers as one of the key ingredients to living a long, happy life. Bonanno, among others, has found that resilience, rather than some rarified quality, is actually quite common, and that there are “multiple, unexpected pathways” to get there. In fact, resilience researchers warn, what might sometimes look like a short-term decline in mental health can actually be a sign of the human psyche rallying its resources for ultimate recovery.

  Hardship does have the capacity to make us hardier. A recent study in The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, for example, found that some of those who have experienced multiple stressful events in life become more robust—picking themselves up and integrating their lessons faster than those who haven’t experienced many losses or life changes. Resilience, it turns out, can be like a muscle, growing stronger with use.

  Another recent study, this one aptly titled “That Which Doesn’t Kill Us Can Make Us Stronger (and More Satisfied with Life)” and appearing in the journal Psychology & Health, found that identifying oneself as a “survivor” is actually positively correlated with life satisfaction. In other words, those who have been through hell and made it out feel like life is a bit more heavenly than those who never have to struggle through such darkness.

  In this book, we look at the ways in which these resilient people took their grief and remolded it, bringing new meaning into their lives. They mourned, and continue to do so in various ways, but also carried on as an affirmation of life’s preciousness and the heart’s capacity for renewal.

  But they didn’t do it alone. So often, the eight survivors featured in this book were and still are deeply supported by caring communities—both informal and formal. Their families, friends, and extended networks stand as testament to the healing power of simple and profound presence and love. One hand held after the next, one hug given and received after the next, one sad or angry sentiment articulated and heard after the next. In Bishop Stephen Paul Bouman’s moving book, Grace All Around Us: Embracing God’s Promise in Tragedy and Loss, he relays relying on the powerful wisdom of a South African bishop post-9/11: “In our culture, when tragedy happens, we don’t all visit at once. We come a few at a time so that each time the person in sorrow has to answer the door and tell the story again of what happened and shed the tears. As the story is told again and again, healing can begin.”

  The survivors’ caregivers, therapists, support groups, and spiritual mentors also show up in these pages—people whose commitment to their work and engagement with the people they care for is deeply moving, particularly in the face of such destruction. Disaster, as a subject, has been around, at least in the American context, since we first took stock of what was lost—so many lives, rigid social roles, a sense of abundance—following World War II. The idea of disaster mental health, more specifically, was first put on the conceptual map with Erikson’s 1976 book, Everything in Its Path: Destruction of Community in the Buffalo Creek Flood, in which he asked, “What is ‘disaster,’ anyway?” and then answered in a way that reads as eerily prescient when considering our subject, an event that wouldn’t take place for twenty-five years yet: “a sharp and furious eruption of some kind that splinters the silence for one terrible moment and then goes away.” Erikson, like us, centered the voices of the victims of that tragedy, arguing that they deserved a more researched and skilled response from professionals in the mental health field.

  Great caregivers, psychologists, sociologists, and the like have heeded his call ever since, creating institutes, field guides, journals, and coalitions in order to constantly perfect our capacity to respond in moments of crisis to those who need it most. As Laura van Dernoot Lipsky, author of Trauma Stewardship: An Everyday Guide to Caring for Self While Caring for Others, writes, “Many of us who do frontline work to ease trauma and bring about social and environmental change understand that bearing witness, amplifying the story, and taking right action are our most important tasks. But how do we witness, and what is right action?” These questions, like all of the wisest inquiries, are unanswerable, to some extent. And yet, those whose life work is located in the trenches of human suffering continue to explore ever more skillful ways of helping healing along.

  It’s not just about the individual professional’s capacity, of course, but also about the capacity to coordinate a response among professionals working in a variety of realms. An unprecedented partnership was forged following September 11th between two very different organizations: Disaster Psychiatry Outreach and New York Disaster Interfaith Services. They were able to work together to acknowledge that healing the whole victim is not just about emotion, nor is it just about spirit, but about the combination of the two.

  In a critical, co-edited new book, Creating Spiritual and Psychological Resilience: Integrating Care in Disaster Relief Work, Grant H. Brenner, Daniel H. Bush, and Joshua Moses write: “These partnerships have the potential to help societies harness the transformational capacities disasters hold for resilience—for how we might redress chronic, long-simmering ills in new ways, comfort the bereaved, rebuild with the survivors, and perhaps even help people better situations they were in prior to disasters.” Indeed, Dr. April Naturale, who directed the disaster mental health response called Project Liberty, found that many of the people her organization served reported that they never would have sought mental health services prior to September 11th, but felt that the experience had deeply enriched their lives in many different areas.

  Project Rebirth is ultimately a book about the power of the human spirit to rebuild itself—within and among community. Those who lost loved ones in the World Trade towers or barely escaped from the wreckage themselves had their lives instantaneously devastated. Who they were on September 10, 2001—how they spent each day, how they saw the world, what they expected from the future—was entirely dismantled. They were put in the unenviable position of reconstructing their very lives. And therein lies the miracle. They did it. They took the most malicious misfortune imaginable and transformed it—tear by tear, day by day, dawn by dawn.

  They are not alone. It wasn’t just those directly affected by the events of September 11 who felt their lives forever change. We all got a taste of destabilization. Further still, even if in a drastically different context, we all mourn. We hope that in these courageous stories you will find echoes of your own experiences of loss and recovery. We hope that this book will serve as comfort amid discomfort, these words as reconnection to hope, these flawed and fierce examples as a reminder of the universal human capacity for resilience.

  In a world in which so many of our days are filled with the minutiae of existence—the cable bill, the carpool schedule, the bureaucracy at work, at school, at the doctor’s office—it’s more important than ever that we take a moment to focus on the most essential elements of our existence. At a time when 140 char
acters and thirty-second sound bites have become our dominant forms of communication, this book offers the depth that comes from decade-long stories and painstaking reflection.

  Tragedy like the kind faced by the people profiled in this book forces that quality of focus. It inspires us to ask the most basic questions that we face as human beings: What is my life about? What’s important? How can I use my energy for good? Have I loved well? What is my legacy? What’s more, it compels us to not settle for the easy answers. Instead, we honor the complexity of our lives and losses by stepping away from the cacophony of modern life and really listening to the wisdom in these long-developing stories.

  If these survivors’ struggles teach us anything, it is that we all have an opportunity to ask these questions of ourselves on a regular basis. Trauma and loss may be our most profound motivators, but we don’t need to wait on them to start seeking out our true path or valuing the people we love.

  Ultimately, the biggest tribute to the survivors featured in this book is not the anniversary ceremonies that occur each September 11, beautiful as they may be. It’s not feeling sorry for them or dramatizing their very real loss. The ultimate tribute to the survivors of September 11, 2001, is bearing witness to the stories of their recovery, and incorporating some of their wisdom into our own lives—today. It is recognizing how wildly precious and fleeting our lives are, that we have no other viable choice, really, but to make them as courageous and loving as possible.

  A Note on Project Rebirth

  Just as there are stories within this book, there is a story of this book.

  It all begins, interestingly enough, in Hollywood. Jim Whitaker, a filmmaker, lost his beloved mother in the spring of 2001. One of five brothers, he watched with great intrigue and no small amount of sadness as his siblings all processed his mother’s death differently.

  Following the World Trade Center attacks, Jim saw even more evidence of how grief and resilience manifest in so many different forms, and realized that he was being offered a historic opportunity to document its variable unfolding. So Whitaker and his filmmaking team, including director of photography, Thomas Lappin, set up 35-millimeter motion-picture time-lapse cameras throughout the Ground Zero site to document the physical rebuilding and, along with a talented team of producers, found a small but diverse group of people who had been directly affected by the terrorist attacks of September 11 and set about earning their trust. He interviewed them each year on the anniversary of the attacks and used their words as the basis for a powerful documentary film.

  Over the years, Project Rebirth—as it would come to be known—grew and grew. The filming of the physical site now constitutes the largest time-lapse project in human history. The challenges and opportunities involved in documenting the rebuilding of the human spirit appealed to educators, museum curators, philanthropists, and artists alike. Soon it became clear that a book created out of the rare and rich footage would be both a wonderful complement to the film and a worthwhile resource all on its own.

  The film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival to great critical acclaim in January of 2011 and was subsequently released in theaters in August, by Oscilloscope Laboratories, and will be shown on Showtime in September. The film, as well as other original programming created by the team that worked on it, will eventually be housed at the National September 11 Memorial & Museum located at Ground Zero.

  The film, it should be noted, features only five of the original subjects. The book captures the recovery of eight of those people who dedicated themselves for the duration of the filming process. We are proud that it allows the stories of these individuals—both those featured in the film and those whose stories did not make it onto celluloid—to be fleshed out, filled in, and mined for even more instructive and inspirational moments from the front lines of resilience.

  Rather than summarizing the film, the book serves as a completely new lens through which to see the courage that followed the tragedy of September 11th. We all drew from the same unprecedented source material—hours and hours of interviews—but emerged with different creations. In this way, the entire project is also a powerful study in collaboration and historicization. In pursuit of the many truths about tragedy and the survival of the human spirit, we have also discovered how many ways there are to look at the same powerful human story.

  Finally, readers should know that a portion of the proceeds from the book will be donated to the subjects herein, September 11th–related organizations of their choosing, as well as the Project Rebirth Center, to develop and provide new multimedia tools to aid the therapists, academics, first responders, and others working with people dealing with grief.

  A Little Bird Told Me

  Nick Chirls

  Nick Chirls sits down at his desk and powers up his computer. As his hand manipulates the mouse to scroll through the plummeting stock prices of 2008, he imagines his mother’s hand doing the same. A co-worker stops by his cubicle to share a story, and as he chuckles, he imagines his mother’s laugh reverberating off the windowed walls. As he sips his coffee at midmorning, starting to fade as his late night with friends finally catches up with him, he imagines his mother sipping her coffee as she tried to get through another long workday.

  This is how Nick stays connected to his mother—though she has been dead for seven years now. It is through the daily, sometimes mundane tasks and interactions of a Wall Street trader that he feels her presence. The morning meetings. The elevator banter. The office chairs. Most people would consider it odd for a kid to seek out a maternal presence in the masculine hubbub of a finance firm, but for Nick, it makes perfect sense. He explains, “I feel like I’m doing something that she absolutely would have wanted me to do . . . something that will continue her work, her legacy.”

  Before Nick had ever weighed the heavy nature of legacy, before he’d ever heard of Al-Qaeda or Osama bin Laden, before his mom ever took a job with Cantor Fitzgerald on the 104th floor of One World Trade Center, the Chirls were a happy, seemingly conventional family living in Princeton, New Jersey. Nick, the eldest of three, loved to help his mom clear the dishes and talk to her about everything under the sun—financial markets, politics, girls. Unlike a lot of his friends, aching through the rebellions of adolescence, he had a genuine friendship with his mother, a real respect for her bright mind: “She had a view on everything and she would say anything.”

  Whenever Nick confronted obstacles—whether it was on the squash court, in the classroom where he faced mountains of homework at his rigorous high school, or in his buzzing social life—he would go to his mom for guidance. Nick remembers a particular exchange that stuck with him:My mom and I were talking and I came up with the question, “Why try?” I was frustrated over something and I just wanted to say, “Forget it. I don’t feel like doing it. Who really cares about this one thing, or anything really?” And she said something that I’ll never forget: “We try to open doors for ourselves. It’s not a matter of what’s going to come of it. It’s a matter of giving yourself options.” That had an incredible impact on me. I try not to limit myself.

  Indeed, Catherine Ellen Chirls refused to accept conventional limitations. She was devoted to her family—always spearheading adventures and rich dinner table conversations, organizing raucous birthday celebrations, and even filming them with her state-of-theart camcorder—but she was also a dedicated career woman. At home, she was the warm center of the Chirls’s universe, the sun around which the three kids—Dylan, Sydney, and Nick—and her loving husband, David, orbited. At work, she was known for being tough and brazen and for maintaining an eye-on-the-prize mentality at all times. Though the juggle of home and work must have been stressful, Nick remembers only the sheer passion that his mother exuded about both her family and her portfolio. “Wall Street, she enjoyed,” he remembers. “Her family, she loved.”

  Which is partly why Catherine and David decided in early 2001 that it was time for the family to move from their beloved home in Brooklyn Heights
to Princeton. They figured that by moving to the suburbs, the kids could spread out a little more, and Nick could go to a top-notch high school—the kind that would inevitably open the doors Catherine had referenced. City living was a cacophonous joy, but it was time to slow down a little, get some space, make life a little easier.

  Nick was not happy about moving. All of his friends were in Brooklyn Heights, everyone he had ever known and loved, plus his favorite spots—Grimaldi’s, Hot Bagels, the promenade, with its cobblestones and breathtaking view of Lower Manhattan. These people, these places, made up his small, happy world, and he didn’t want to disrupt that. He couldn’t figure out why his parents insisted on moving to a state that was the consistent butt of New Yorkers’ jokes.

  But when you’re fifteen, of course, your opinion counts only so much. Eventually, he packed up his little room like everyone else in the family and headed across the Hudson to his new home. The only consolation was that he got a new dog and named it . . . what else? Brooklyn.

  Nick was in the library, doing some research for an assignment, when static signaling an impending announcement crackled from the intercom. All students. All faculty. Don’t go to your next class. Meet in the assembly hall in fifteen minutes.

  He shuffled to the assembly hall like everyone else, numbly letting the river of students take him to their collective destination. The worried buzz washed over him. He stood in the back, wondering what all the fuss was about. The headmaster stood before the student body and informed them that an airplane had flown into the World Trade Center. Nick’s stomach dropped. He went instantaneously numb. His legs were shaking. He explains, “I went through my whole life thinking nothing could ever happen to me. Even at that point I thought, My mom can’t be dead.”