Project Rebirth

by Dr. Robin Stern

  Brian believed that his brother would have been proud of him, that he would have seen the new job as a great accomplishment. “It’s something Michael and I would have talked about,” he said. “It’s like he guided me right here—the whole way through, the whole process.” When they placed the first beam in the temporary PATH train of the “bathtub”—what the workers called the pit of Ground Zero—in August of 2002, Brian wrote, MICHAEL LYONS, SQUAD 41, on it.

  The project wasn’t easy, as it was on an accelerated schedule. Brian had to face down some stress, deal with lots of conflicts along the way, work long, hard hours. On tough days on the site, he would give Michael a hard time in his head: I’m walking through the mud and the freezing cold. Jesus Christ, Lyons, look what you got me into. I’m down here because of you, you dope.

  On the final Friday of the project, Brian traded his usual construction outfit for a freshly pressed suit and tie. The crew was shocked to see Brian stroll in dressed in such fancy attire. “Most of ’em had never seen me not in my construction boots,” he says, smiling.

  In that last morning meeting, he talked about his personal journey of going from a guy just looking for his brother on September 11 to a leader in the rebuilding effort. He reviewed some of the highlights of the project from beginning to end. He talked about his favorite quotation from football coach Vince Lombardi: “I firmly believe that any man’s finest hour, the greatest fulfillment of all that he holds dear, is that moment when he has worked his heart out in a good cause and lies exhausted on the field of battle—victorious.” The workers had seen to it that Ground Zero—their “battlefield”—was no longer just a site of carnage, but one of new construction and new life.

  Ironically, the very day that they flipped the lights on in the PATH station, Brian began to feel the darkness of his own soul. A dread, an emptiness, an anxiety, began to creep in. Slowing down meant facing himself and the emotions that had been building up over the course of three years of all-consuming toil.

  “You can’t get emotional when you have jobs to do,” Brian explains. “The first couple of years, I felt like I had a job to do. We were doing recovery and then the initial rebuilding. To get emotional and show emotion would take away from the job at hand. Now I’m not there, it’s pretty quiet. Now some of this emotion is coming up.” Brian, in a sense, delayed his grief by doing such tireless, all-consuming work. It didn’t begin to hit him until the spring of 2004.

  Brian bravely got help from one of the agencies supporting Project Liberty, the leading organization in mental health services for those affected by 9/11 and the largest crisis-counseling program ever launched in the United States. Project Liberty hired close to five thousand New Yorkers and trained them to provide crisis intervention in all of the counties affected by the attacks. Running for three years, the program leveraged a total of $152 million from federal agencies and wound up seeing 1.2 million people. Dr. April Naturale, the trauma specialist who directed Project Liberty, explains, “The goals were to [teach patients to] develop resilience, to help people integrate what they’d learned into their lives, to strengthen communities and decrease isolation. We wanted to build hope.”

  So many people, particularly rescue workers, suffered the aftermath of September 11th years later. Naturale attests that it often takes someone a year to even begin to heal from a major loss.

  Brian described his feelings in 2004: “I can usually do eight things at once, but I don’t have enough ‘umph’ right now. Maybe it’s the depression coming on.” Indeed, he received a diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and began attending weekly therapy appointments to discuss his flashbacks of the carnage that he had witnessed during the recovery efforts and his ongoing symptoms of disassociation, depression, anger, and hypervigilance—startling, for example, at the site of a shoe on the floor because it triggers memories of severed feet lying around at Ground Zero in the immediate aftermath. The New York State Department of Health, which studied data from the World Trade Center Health Registry, found that one in eight first responders suffered from PTSD as a result of work done at Ground Zero.

  Brian’s PTSD manifested itself in a variety of ways. He would lose focus during conversations and sometimes not even remember what he’d said a few hours later. He and Lori fought far more than usual because Brian’s temper had gotten much worse. He sometimes tucked the girls in at night, hoping they would think everything was normal, and then head out to his truck in the driveway to sleep, intent on avoiding any more emotional uproars with his wife for the rest of the night. One day, shortly before Christmas, he fired his entire team at work because he felt they weren’t cooperating with his requests. He just lost it and let them all go. For cheerful, easygoing Brian, these changes were intolerable.

  Therapy was a new experience for him, but he faced it bravely nonetheless. “For me, its time to look inward, make sure that I’m fine,” Brian explained in 2004. “I have to make sure I don’t have any lasting problems, and if I do, I can deal with them appropriately.”

  Elaine, Michael’s widow, also struggled to heal. Brian explained, “Elaine is still hurting. They were childhood sweethearts. That’s very, very hard to get over. She still has the everyday task of raising the children.” Brian and his family visit Elaine and her children often. The cousins, all close in age, are good friends. Their ebullient energy helps keep the mood light, even when the adults reminisce about Michael.

  Elaine too felt like she saw signs of Michael in various strange coincidences that popped up—she would look at the clock right at 9:11, or she would think about Michael and a picture of him would fall from a shelf in the closet, seemingly on its own. Brian, hoping to affirm some of what Elaine was experiencing, told her about his strange sense that Michael was with him every time he tucked his girls into bed. “After I told her,” Brian explains, “I never felt that way again.” It was as if saying it out loud had stripped the experience of its mystical meaning.

  In the years that followed, Brian went through a lot. He suffered from a life-threatening case of diverticulitis that put him in the hospital three times, each time pushing him to contemplate his own mortality. He continued to struggle with the fallout of PTSD. He worried that he might never feel energized or happy-go-lucky again. Brian’s next construction project, away from the Ground Zero family, felt foreign and meaningless in comparison. He reflected, “It was a whole big change right there, leaving a job I was at for three years, moving to a new company. I didn’t know anybody there, had to learn new faces, make new friends. That’s a big change to swallow. It was tough to get acclimated with everyone.”

  But time did heal. By the end of 2005, after a year of therapy and plenty of downtime, Brian felt that his mental health was markedly improved. “I’m much better,” he explains. “Now my relationship with my wife is very, very good. We’ve become stronger as a unit. I’m more sensitive to my wife’s needs. We talk a lot about different issues. Our relationship has become more fulfilling.” One of the subtle successes of Project Liberty was introducing otherwise therapy-averse “tough guys”—like Brian and so many other rescue workers—to a new emotional vocabulary and the capacity to label and work with their own thoughts, feelings, and behaviors.

  Dealing with his PTSD also meant refocusing on some of his most dearly held values, foremost among them quality time with his family. When Brian’s eldest daughter made her Communion in May of 2003, and his youngest in 2007, he was deeply touched: “It was obviously a big thing,” he says, the trademark look of a proud father painted across his face.

  Brian also found great strength and solace in his annual camping trips with his wife and daughters. For ten days they would head out into the wilderness and spend quality time side by side. “There’s no phone, no TV, no electricity,” Brian describes. “We just sit by the beach, sit by the campfire. I go fishing. My family is more important than anything.”

  Eventually, Brian was able to get an assignment back down at Ground Zero, supervising
all of the electrical work for the Freedom Tower. Then he became the general superintendent of construction for Towers 3 and 4. The shift, which was a promotion of sorts, helped his emotional mental state considerably. He felt that after all the destruction of the past few years, he was really part of rebuilding something for the future. It also made him feel closer to his brother again: “Every day I’m working on the site, I look down at where I found Michael’s remains.” Two or three times a week, Brian made an effort to actually stand in the area where he found the Halligan bar and say a prayer for his lost brother.

  Being down at the site also helped Brian reconnect with what he perceived to be his new calling in life: contributing to the rebuilding of Ground Zero so that generations to come would see his brother and others memorialized and have a new symbol of patriotism—the Freedom Tower, just like the towers he had grown up with. “Patricia, my eight-year-old, is in third grade,” he explains, “and she says she can’t wait to go to school and tell everyone, ‘My dad is building the biggest building in the world.’”

  Brian realizes that he began working at Ground Zero when he was forty-one years old and probably won’t finish with the Freedom Tower until he is at least fifty-five. It has literally become “a life’s work.” When it’s finished, Brian explains, “I’m staying there until we can put that last lightbulb on top.”

  As Brian’s youngest daughter, Patricia, got older, her bedtime ritual changed. Instead of slinging her over his shoulder, Brian sits beside her as she struggles to make out the words on a page of one of her books. A new reader, she delights in sounding out a word she’s never encountered before. Brian explains with absolute reverence: “She reads for twenty minutes. I sit by the side of the bed. Last night I was thinking, ‘This is more important than building Ground Zero or making a good salary. You could have no money and be homeless, but your daughter is reading to you, struggling on one or two words that she needs your help on. You talk about the story. You finish two chapters and then it’s time for bed.’ That’s important to me.”

  Though this bedtime ritual no longer evokes the presence of his brother, he revels in it nonetheless. Even in the shadow of those two ghostly towers, even in comparison with the innumerable hours and backbreaking labor that Brian has put into what is truly a sacred site for him, nothing compares with the sweet smell and warm feeling of having his daughter’s arms and legs draped over him as the darkness sets in, listening to her little voice stumble mightily over new words.

  Losing Michael, his dearest friend and little brother, was—most of all—a clarifying experience for Brian. As is the case for so many others who are forced to mourn too soon someone who matters so much, Brian became acutely aware of what is most important in life.

  As we ride the roller coaster of mourning, we are compelled to steady ourselves by focusing in on what actually constitutes a welllived life. We know that we cannot prevent loss, having experienced it firsthand, but this only illuminates our incentive to make the most of the time we have with those who are most dear to us. We will mourn someday. There’s no preventing it. But today, we, like Brian, can choose to treasure the little moments that may seem insignificant but are in fact the marrow of a good life.

  Never Forget to Do Your Part

  Charles Cook

  As Helen Cook Price rode a train down south from New York City to her native Baltimore, her thoughts were with her husband in Italy, who was doing his part for his country. He was fighting for America in World War II. Helen was an attractive and independent woman of Welsh and Native American ancestry with long dark hair she wore in braids.

  Her grandson, Charles, sat beside her, a mere boy but taking it all in with his kind brown eyes. He was playing with the curtains, trying to get a glimpse out the window at the speeding landscape. “You can’t move the curtains!” Helen told the boy. “The curtains have to stay drawn.” Blackout rules during the war also applied to trains.

  After finishing her last cigarette, Helen picked up the empty pack and began smoothing out the foil from the inside of the box. “What are you doing, Tana?” Charles asked, ever the curious child and also mindful not to call Helen “Grandma” (she claimed that she was too young to be one so shouldn’t have to suffer the name).

  “Even though we’re not on the front lines, boy, we’re at war. We got to save these foils for the war effort. Never forget to do your part.”

  It was a lesson he would never forget.

  The morning of September 11, Charles Cook, now sixty years old, woke up at home in his Harlem apartment. The man known as “C.C.” to his many friends and acquaintances was born and raised in that very same neighborhood. His childhood there was filled with a sense of real community. During the forties and fifties, doors were open to friends up and down the block: “All my friends and I, we intertwined,” he wistfully recalls. “We just went from house to house without worrying about knocking on each other’s doors. We just walked in each other’s houses because we were all a close-knit family.”

  Things had dramatically changed over the years. The neighborhood had suffered decades of blight and devastation brought on by drugs and gang violence. But friendship, community, and good fun were still landmarks of his life uptown.

  On a normal day Charles could look forward to meeting up with friends at the park to challenge them to the highly strategic card game known as pinochle. He loved to challenge them to a higherstakes version of the game, “double-deck, cutthroat pinochle,” sometimes into the night and all through the weekend. His early retirement from driving trains for the Metropolitan Transit Authority (due to a herniated disc) meant that anytime was a good time to start another tournament.

  He could still remember Tana with a beer in her hand, cursing like a sailor and whipping him at pinochle. As an adult, when Charles would drive Tana back down to visit her cousins in Baltimore, they would team up to whip their southern relatives.

  On that fateful morning, however, Charles’s life would make a turn far, far from the leisurely pace of the past couple of years. He turned on the television to a local channel soon after waking up. He recalls watching an interview with a “probie,” a rookie firefighter, on his first day out in the Wall Street area. The camera panned to a shot of the World Trade Center. A moment later, a low-flying plane soared across the screen and crashed suddenly into one of the towers. Charles sat, stunned for a moment, his mouth agape, and immediately thought, That’s no accident.

  Charles also remembers the static distress calls that could then be heard on television from the firefighters’ scanners. “Alert! Alert!” was the summons, and then came the Pavlovian screams of a group of people trained to act without question: “We’re coming! We’re coming!” yelled the cavalry over the airwaves.

  Charles wanted as much information as he could gather, so he turned the radio on as well. A man was actually calling from inside one of the burning buildings, describing the unbearable heat. He was trying to find an exit but kept getting pushed back by flames. The man dropped the phone, but the radio host stayed on the line.

  In a few breathless moments, the man came back and said he’d found a woman amid the smoke. The man’s tone was much calmer now. He claimed that they were both fine and that they loved their families. Then silence. Not a second later, newscasters on the television reported that a man and a woman had jumped from a window, holding hands.

  We’re at war, Charles thought.

  “The only time I traveled out of the country was courtesy of the United States Army, 1959 ’til about ’62,” Charles states proudly. Charles was part of the 299th Combat Engineer Battalion. His military occupational specialties were water purification and demolition. During the heightened years of the cold war, he and his fellow soldiers were stationed near Frankfurt as defensive support for West Germany from the communist East.

  As part of their training missions, the military engineers perfected several types of bridging techniques, including building floating bridges out of inflatable rubber rafts
known as pontoons. Charles is proud of having helped his company break the record for fastest bridging across the Rhine River.

  Charles’s military service ended without his having seen actual combat. Not that he had wanted to. His grandfather, Tana’s husband, had not made it back from war. He was buried in Italy, where he had fallen.

  Once home, back in Harlem, Charles went through his belongings. He noticed that some of his clothes had been given away. Most of all he missed the blue and orange sweater Tana had knit for him as a present when he turned fifteen. He didn’t bother her about it, though. He already knew nothing lasted forever, with the exception of her generosity, which just went on and on. In fact, Tana let him move in with her then. There was nowhere else Charles felt more welcome.

  When the first tower collapsed, Charles stopped watching and started acting. He worried about his daughter, Vicky, an epidemiologist working downtown with the city’s department of health. He knew his two younger sons, Charles Jr. and Dwayne, were not near the towers, nor was their mother, Carol, from whom Charles had been separated for many years, but with whom he maintained a good relationship.

  His thoughts came back to the firefighters who had been rushing to the scene only to meet their deaths. The people would need help, and help had just died. He thought, in horror, of the victims, his fellow New Yorkers, and suddenly the island of Manhattan shrank in his mind. Harlem was not far north anymore, and all he needed to get to Wall Street was a pair of comfortable shoes. He put on an old pair of pants and rushed down the stairs. There was work to do “down there.”