Project Rebirth

by Dr. Robin Stern

  Karyn, the middle child of the Keenan family, approached her father late one night in December of 2001, shortly after Joe had started working at Fresh Kills, and complained—as she had so many times before—about her unfulfilling job in the business sector. She reminded him that she had passed the Police Officer Entrance Examination years ago, but she was too young to join at the time. “I think I’m ready, Dad,” she told him.

  Joe had conflicting emotions about his daughter’s decision: happiness and apprehension. On the one hand, he was proud to see how much his daughter craved meaningful work, and further, that she saw the same path he’d traveled for decades as one that truly mattered. On the other hand, he didn’t want his baby girl in any danger. His advice was simple: “If you want to do it, you have to really want to do it.”

  By the time that Fresh Kills closed on July 31, 2002, Joe didn’t want to “do it” anymore. He was sure that all of his co-workers felt the same: Everyone was glad about not having to come back tomorrow. He had not anticipated retiring so soon after finishing at Fresh Kills, but the long hours had piled up relentlessly, and Joe was exhausted and nursing a back injury. He officially retired on December 31, 2002, at the age of fifty-two.

  There is something to be said about how the uniqueness of the task at Fresh Kills united the people in charge of it. Psychoanalyst Dr. Heinz Kohut talks about the concept of “twinship,” which refers to the feeling of being drawn to other people whose circumstances and stories are similar to one’s own. The workers at Fresh Kills were part of a select crew entrusted with a grueling and gruesome but special task. They worked side by side. Shoveling. Sifting. They stared into the rubble and recognized that vacant look of postshock all too often. They got tired and complained. They held up with pride. They combed the debris together, shared moments of pride in finding any bit of remains. Most important, they shared an awareness; few people could know what it was like to be in their shoes.

  The need for twinship, this feeling of a shared and special awareness, is lifelong—often emerging in intense experiences, like that of post-9/11 recovery. It allows us to remember, to normalize, to contain the trauma in a collective, soothing way. The men and women who worked at Fresh Kills, performing the same jobs, carrying the same tools, bonded by the same purpose, were, in a sense, twins for one another. Their shared commitment provided psychological support as they worked their way through the wreckage.

  Joe and the other workers at Fresh Kills were bound not only to each other, but to the victims whose remains they were seeking. These victims had been dehumanized in the attacks, reduced to objects, to “things”—essentially no different from the towers themselves. The workers at Fresh Kills, sifting through the rubble for remains, sought to restore that humanity by providing the respect due to those victims, one small and reverent gesture at a time.

  The question of what to do with the remains continues, all these years later. The New York Times reported:In one of the haunting legacies of the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center, the remains of 1,123 of the victims, 41 percent of the total, have not been identified, leaving many of their relatives yearning for closure. At the same time, nearly 10 years later, 9,041 pieces of human remains—mainly bone fragments but also tissue that has been dehydrated for preservation—are still being sorted through by the city’s medical examiner for DNA, though the last time a connection was made was in 2009.

  The official plans for the September 11th Memorial and Museum include an effort to house all of the nearly 10,000 pieces of human remains still unidentified by the city seven stories below ground and behind a wall with a quotation from Virgil’s Aeneid etched into it: “No day shall erase you from the memory of time.” In this way, the institution honors its role as both museum—a place where meaning is made and history marked—and memorial, a place for actual mourning and sacred acknowledgement. The September 11th Memorial and Museum, after all, will literally be built on the hollowed ground where these lives were lost.

  For some of the families who lost love ones, the idea of incorporating the remains into the institution in this way is troubling. They would prefer a separate memorial space, clearly delineated from the hustle and bustle that is sure to fill the museum on a regular basis. For others, it is the perfect medley of uses—learning and honoring, marking and mourning—for such a conflicted space. Only time will tell how this complex and deeply emotional and spiritual conversation evolves, but Joe is proud knowing that he did his best to make sure that as many families as possible had an opportunity for at least a modicum of closure.

  Now that he’s retired, Joe is involved in another kind of detective work: trying to figure out why his family doesn’t know he is so funny. He’s always thought of himself as a funny guy, ready to crack a joke at any moment. But his family seems to be in the dark about this personality trait, or at least it seems that way to Joe. They do laugh at the joke he tells about his retirement: “My last day of work was New Year’s Eve, so the city threw me a big party.”

  His family might be wondering what is going on, but they are relieved to see a more relaxed version of Joe. For the first three months of 2003, his wife and children had to deal with a fidgety man not used to waking up late, not used to having no appointments or obligations.

  His friends warned him that the worst time to retire from police work was winter, being forced to stay home with an extreme case of cabin fever, and they were right. While Joe’s wife and children tended to work or studies during the day, he stayed home with the dog . . . reading, resting, and reflecting.

  Joe says, “Now I do normal things. The unknown has been taken away. The edge you are prepared for is not there. I’m not as high with that. Now I’m going half-steam.” And yet he knows Jane is happy that he’s calmer and that she doesn’t have to wait for him to come home. Now he waits for her to come home, and they worry together about their daughter Karyn, who graduated from the Police Academy and became a detective in the Organized Crime Control Bureau, Narcotics Division.

  As for his sense of humor, Joe is starting to realize why his family is pleasantly surprised that he enjoys a good laugh. He explains, “When I was still working, I came home and kept thinking about cases that were going on. It might have made me more serious and grumpier than I wanted to be.”

  To this day, Joe regrets a rare outburst at Jane after he came back from a particularly gruesome day as a vehicular homicide detective. She could tell that something was troubling him and pushed for an answer. “What do you want me to tell you?” he responded to her. “Do you want me to tell you about the dead babies I saw today?” he shouted, his large, expressive eyes opened wide and accusatory at his shocked wife.

  Now that Joe has gotten the hang of retirement, he offers, “It probably brings me more to the person I really am because I am relaxed, I can say what I want to say, do what I want to do, get involved with things that interest me.”

  It is an early afternoon in the spring of 2009, and Joe is leaving the house to go on one of his “little adventures.” Janine and Andy’s first child, Joe’s granddaughter Alyssa, is now four years old and goes to preschool four blocks away. He is headed to pick her up.

  Alyssa was born in May of 2005, an event that ranks among the most exciting in Joe’s life. “To see your child have a child . . . it’s a whole different feeling altogether than with your own children,” Joe reflects. “I didn’t think that, at this stage of life, we could enter another stage. It’s amazing how a baby can change the activities of a whole family.”

  Janine drops Alyssa off in the morning at her grandparents’ home; then Joe proceeds to walk her to school. He enjoys their conversations during these short walks and considers them quality time.

  She’s starting to become a little person, Joe thinks as he sees her walk out of her classroom, her small backpack strapped on tight. The girl has Grandpa’s big blue eyes. He grabs her tiny hand in his, and they walk down the steps, homeward bound.

  The grandchildren are more than
new lives to take care of; they’ve given Joe new life.

  When Alyssa was born, the exhaustion from the recovery effort at Fresh Kills still loomed large in his mind and his body. On one particular day when Alyssa was just two months old, when Joe was visiting at Janine’s house in nearby Valley Stream, he decided to take a walk to the park. Joe put the baby in her carriage and left the house. “Time started to slip,” he remarks. His phone rang. It was his wife, Jane.

  “Where are you?” she asked. Joe paused.

  “You’ve been gone for two hours! Where are you?” she repeated.

  “I’m just walking around town,” he chortled. “I’ll be right home.”

  Joe interprets the time slip as the baby becoming the new focus of his thoughts. When he talks about how Alyssa “cleared his head,” it is as if she was finally clearing away the mess of Fresh Kills.

  Joe’s physical health, however, hasn’t been so ideal. By 2005, he was sure he had the so-called World Trade Center cough that most first responders and workers were enduring. He went through periods of losing his voice as his infection worsened and had to contend with insomnia, a new experience for this hardened cop. Joe’s doctors have operated on his sinuses and throat several times, even removing parts of his throat and tongue in order to reduce the swelling along his breathing passage.

  Although Joe is a self-described coward for pain, he has been taking care of himself, keeping up with doctors’ appointments yearround. He talks about it as “going in for fine-tuning.” His nonchalance belies the wisdom he has gained: “Pain has a good effect on you. It slows you down a little.”

  During this past decade of Joe’s life, he has slowed down a lot, sometimes by choice, sometimes not. The slower pace, the reduced intensity of his endeavors, the larger chunks of time he can dedicate to his family—all of these are pieces of his life found after the work at Fresh Kills was over, and perhaps because of it.

  Budding poet Lauren Seaquist, the fourteen-year-old who won the Second Annual Fresh Kills Haiku Contest in 2010, writes: “Looking at the mounds / You are rolling down the past / Future brings us new.”

  Indeed. The World Trade Center recovery effort at Fresh Kills is the sad coda for the long-closed landfill. Still, just as the future held unexpected journeys for retired Sergeant Joseph J. Keenan, it also holds something new for this expanse of land almost three times as large as Central Park.

  The seeds for Fresh Kills Park were sown weeks before 9/11, when the world’s top architecture firms were scrambling to submit their proposals for developing the area into a large-scale urban park. After the attacks, the plans remained buried until 2003, when the competition was reopened.

  On a Sunday morning in October of 2010, a crowd gathers at a parking lot behind a strip mall in Staten Island. There is enough of a chill in the air for the throng of visitors to put on their jackets as they line up. A tram transports the curious families, some with very young children in tow, into Fresh Kills Park for the general public’s first sneak peek.

  There is now a welcome center near Fresh Kills’s heavily guarded entrance. Landscape architect Ellen Neises leads a “lecture” tour up the replanted northernmost mound, the second tallest on-site, standing 150 feet above sea level. As she walks up, she stops occasionally, pointing out the surrounding area while flipping through a large pamphlet of colorful plans. These plans were drawn up by her firm, James Corner Field Operations, which won the competition in 2003.

  It is hard to tell how far the hilly landscape spreads north, away from the nearby highway and toward the faraway outline of Manhattan. It is even harder to imagine what the fully developed park will look like, with the proposed amphitheater, marina, and golf course. At the top of the hill that morning, children happily flew kites lifted high by the strong wind gusts that once slowed down the work of Joe and his detectives.

  Fresh Kills has become a testament to a kind of fundamental truth—that we can’t ever predict, as individuals or as a nation, what the future holds. Joe’s life has changed so much. He reflects, “I miss my friends from work—only another cop truly knows how to relate to another cop—but I am not aching to go back. I am content with the way things are now. It’s simpler and much less stressful. Although things now are important in their own context, nothing really requires split-second life-changing decisions. Whatever comes, we deal with.”

  He goes on, “If I were twenty-five again, I would do it all over, but now someone else can do it. I’ll remember the good times and try to live with the bad.”

  Paul Hawken, an environmentalist and entrepreneur, writes, “Birth and death are each other’s consorts, inseparable and fast.” Joe’s story so clearly demonstrates this healing and universal pattern. Surrounded by death and destruction in its most gruesome form for months on end, Joe became intimate with the end of life and the worst of humanity’s destructive impulses. As difficult as this experience was, it opened him up in a way that allowed him to truly appreciate his granddaughter’s birth, and two new grandsons after that: Michael, born in October of 2008, and Joseph Jerome IV, born in August of 2010.

  It is not uncommon for families that have just lost someone dear to learn that one of their own is pregnant. The cycle of life seems at its most insistent following death’s unexpected arrival; it’s as if birth is just waiting in the wings, ready to fill the broken open hearts of those in mourning.

  Advancing Is Perfection

  Debbie Almontaser

  Debbie Almontaser was disappointed on her very first morning in America.

  “I went to the window, looked outside, and there was this huge blanket of white everywhere,” she remembers. Debbie, a curious three years old at the time, had just emigrated from Yemen. She ran all around the house and shouted out to the rest of her family: “You have to wake up! There’s sugar everywhere! We have to get the buckets! We have to get the pans!”

  Her parents giggled and explained, “Honey, it’s not sugar.”

  “What do you mean?” she asked.

  “It’s not sugar. It’s snow.”

  Her indignant retort: “No, this is America! This is where everybody comes. This is where you have everything you want.”

  Her father then led young Debbie to the window, opened it, and let her touch the snow. The child was not so easily discouraged. She asked her father if she could taste it, thinking it might just be cold sugar.

  “To my disappointment,” she recalls, “it tasted like nothing.”

  Debbie’s imagination, rooted in those early years, never really waned. It was part of what made her a fantastic teacher. One day, while giving a lesson to her fifth graders at P.S. 261 in downtown Brooklyn, she heard a knock on the classroom door.

  “Can I speak to you in the hallway?” asked a PTA representative, poking her head in.

  Debbie turned to her eager students and handed a marker to one of the boys, telling him, “Why don’t you finish the math problem with the rest of the group? I’ll be back in just a moment.”

  She stepped outside and was immediately struck by how grave the expression on the parent’s face was: “We have just found out that one of the World Trade Center towers has been hit by a plane. We don’t know how it happened, but we’re speculating it was an accident.”

  Debbie’s heart dropped into her stomach. The image of a plane crashing into a skyscraper played across her mind. The parent informed her that the administration was requesting that all children be kept in the classroom until further notice. “Don’t alarm them,” she added. “You can do it.”

  Left in the hallway alone, Debbie took a deep breath and then headed back into her classroom.

  Debbie left Yemen at the tender age of three, along with her mother, to reunite with her father, who had previously left for the United States. He had gone in search of a job and had found one, as a steelworker at the Ford Motor Company in Buffalo, New York.

  Debbie’s only recollection of Yemen is her departure from it. “I remember the steps of the plane being very hig
h, and in between them there was this hollow space, and it was really windy,” she describes. “And I remember my mother holding my hand and dragging me up.” Debbie was afraid that the wind would blow her tiny body right through the hollow spaces in between the steps.

  As an immigrant child in Buffalo during the seventies, she struggled to fit in. While the other girls wore name-brand outfits and played with the latest and most expensive toys, Debbie was usually dressed in one of her mother’s creations, with her nose in a book. Her parents encouraged her not to stand out as different among her classmates, and yet they sent her to Sunday school to learn Arabic language and culture. She knew that simply by virtue of being Arab, she automatically didn’t fit in, and in some ways, it compelled her to stand out even more deliberately.

  “One day in seventh grade, I decided to wear the hijab,” Debbie remembers. “I went to school and everyone was looking at me so strangely.”

  Upon spotting her in her headscarf, her girlfriends shouted, “You look silly! That’s not you! Take it off!”

  “Why are you wearing that?” asked one of her usually supportive teachers. “Did you know that women are oppressed by wearing that? You wearing it shows you’re inferior.”

  “Inferior”—the word reverberated inside of Debbie, causing confusion and shame. In her Islamic cultural class, she’d learned that wearing the hijab was simply a way of signifying modesty and a desire for privacy for Muslim women—something that Debbie often craved in the chaotic atmosphere of her junior high school. And here her teacher was shaming her into feeling as if she’d done something terribly wrong. It took at least a decade for Debbie, then living in New York City with her husband, to embrace the garb of her tradition with renewed confidence. Still, the sting of her teacher’s humiliation would stay with her for a lifetime.