Portraits of Grief

Death as a Constant Companion

Art: In Memoriam

I was reading Winnicott this morning on art. “Much of the pleasure of the experience of art in one form or another arises from the nearness to unintegration to which the artist’s creation may safely lead the audience or viewer. . . . The appreciation of art thus keeps people on a knife-edge, because achievement is so close to painful failure.”

Carrying the audience right to the edge of disintegration and bringing them back again — that to me expresses art’s significance spiritually, intellectually, emotionally. It explains why I could mourn for Diane through and with Mozart’s Requiem, because that music carries the listener right to the edge of destruction but, in its sublime order and meaning, also consoles for the terror and loss it expresses. (I’m saying this very badly, and I said it badly the other day, discussing the Rolling Requiem.)

So here are some ways to consider 9/11. Some artists’ eyes to take us right to the edge and bring us back again.

An exhibit at the NY Historical Society The online version shows only a few of the works on exhibit.

“The Day Our World Changed: Children’s Art of 9/11″ Very powerful, direct, some extraordinary skill and insight.

Photography of Ground Zero by Joel Meyerowitz

The New Yorker. An archive of articles, poems, images on 9/11. Also, read this article by Art Spiegelmen on how he created the stunning black-on-black New Yorker cover of the twin towers.

One Year Ago

Just over a year ago I flew back East to pack up the rest of my belongings, ship my books west via Media Mail, and get ready for the temporary technical editor job awaiting me (due to start September 19). I came to California with a cat, a laptop, and a suitcase, but I still had hundreds of boxes of books, clothes, kitchen junk, financial records, and so much else left in somewhat leaky storage. Now I had to deal with it all.

At first I gave myself a week. I would fly out September 4 and return on the 11th. And since my brother-in-law had been bumped from a flight and was giving me his free pass, I had to fly United.

“Hey, I could fly through Boston! They have a flight that leaves just after 8AM.”

No, it went through LA, and I didn’t want to change planes again to get home. But I did make one set of reservations to fly home September 11; a week or so later I changed them to Friday, September 14. Lisa knew I would need a few extra days to finish packing. She was right.

I didn’t know I would spend September 11 in utter shock, packing, listening to the towers collapse on the radio. I didn’t know that I wouldn’t be able to ship my many boxes of books Media Mail because the post offices all closed down. I didn’t know I would spend those few extra days in the east desperately worried about my friends in New York — those who worked at Ground Zero or lived near enough to be vulnerable — and my friends at the Pentagon. Dreaming of rescuing one friend, a high-level financial fund manager, from her burning office at Ground Zero. Trying to find my husband, who had just left the job he’d had in Massachusetts and moved to the DC area. I didn’t know I would have to wake Michele up on that Tuesday, calling from the east: We’re under attack. They’ve flown two airplanes into the World Trade Center. I love you, but I don’t know when I’ll get home. Or how.

Every possible way to get back to California was blocked. The airlines shut down. Amtrak shut down. Greyhound shut down. I was trapped at my sister’s house in upstate New York, not quite home, 3,000 miles from home.

I was able to leave on the first flight out from Ithaca. On the way to the airport I stopped and bought myself a used paperback: The Little Drummer Girl by John LeCarre. That book — a brilliant, multifaceted, profoundly humane look at the Arab/Israeli conflict, the techniques and motives of terrorists, and the use and construction of bombs — was my gesture of defiance and challenge. I read it most of the way home, in a plane so jammed I could barely breathe. I had read and reread the book before, but if there was ever a time to be willing to face it all, the humanity and desperation and fear of both sides, all sides, in that conflict, then that crowded Friday was the day.

I had my cross-stitch in my carryon bag, along with the book and a lot of other miscellaneous things. When I unpacked the cross-stitch bag, I found I was carrying an eight-inch pair of scissors.

A Sacred Duty

I still read the Philadelphia Inquirer online to stay in touch with events back east. Also, frankly, the Inky is one of the great newspapers. Today’s edition included this story. I can’t say anything that would illuminate it or make it more significant. These actions — and the words of this new liturgy — speak for themselves.

Phila. priest tends a 2d flock – 9/11 victims

As chaplain for the N.Y. Medical Examiner’s Office, he must comfort those with faith and without.

By Larry Fish

Inquirer Staff Writer

NEW YORK – In a way, Episcopal priest Charles T.A. Flood has had two parishes for the last year – one at St. Stephen’s on 10th Street in Center City Philadelphia, and the other at a cluster of refrigerated truck trailers near Manhattan’s East River.

The 58-year-old rector of St. Stephen’s has been one of two primary chaplains working at New York’s Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, which is the way station for all the human remains recovered from the World Trade Center site across town. The thousands of bits of remains are given identification numbers and stored in the trucks, parked in an off-limits space outside the Medical Examiner’s Office on First Avenue, awaiting DNA tests and eventual burial.

Ministering first to the huge team of specialists that received and analyzed the remains, and then to the family members who regularly visit the site, Mr. Flood said the experience had deepened his faith and spirituality, despite the fact that the guidelines for the interfaith chaplaincy require that the symbols and language of his Christian background be kept out of this work.

“We’re here as a symbol of the presence of God in the worst of circumstances,” Mr. Flood said. “We are not here acting as Episcopalians.”

On Wednesday, the anniversary of the attacks, Mr. Flood will preside over services at St. Stephen’s at noon, then head to New York and the Medical Examiner’s Office for the rest of the day.

Being a chaplain under almost any circumstance is a very different kind of ministry from being a parish priest or imam of a local mosque, said Jo Schrader, executive director of the 3,800-member Association of Professional Chaplains, based in Illinois.

Most chaplains work in hospitals or other institutions where people face crises but may share no religious understanding. The chaplain must be able to deliver a message broad enough to include everybody, but still be meaningful to those with well-formed beliefs.

“They have to have the ability to minister to anyone of any faith, or of no faith,” Schrader said. “It puts a lot on their plates. There’s a difference in skills. There’s a difference in knowledge” compared with clergy who deal primarily with those of their own traditions.

Mr. Flood, who also briefly worked directly atop the rubble pile of the World Trade Center shortly after Sept. 11, admitted that at first he found it a little unsettling to be representing not a specific church or even faith, but God.

“You’re stepping out as a religious shaman almost – as a stranger outside the tribe,” he said.

The chaplaincy at the Medical Examiner’s Office was begun in mid-September by another Episcopal priest, Betsee Parker. Mr. Flood joined her in late October, and they have had volunteers come and go throughout the year.

They were funded by the American Red Cross through April, and operated from a trailer office parked near the refrigerated trucks. Their “parish” consisted of the hundreds of specialists working daily at the site, and Mr. Flood said people of all faiths, and those with no real beliefs, were there.

“It’s hard work” to find the words to speak to such a diverse group, he said.

“It’s really an attempt to find common religious iconography and identity. It is not an attempt to bring everything down to mooshy pap. It’s an attempt to make things so simple that everybody understands.”

Mr. Flood wrote the litany that is now used at the services held outside the trailers every Friday.

“We give thanks,” the litany says in part, “for those in our own time who have inspired us, for Mother Teresa, for Martin Luther King Jr., for Gandhi who showed us the path of peace.”

After a moment of silence, the litany continues:

“We bless with our tears the ground which has been made holy by the blood of the innocent. The hill of Calvary where Jesus was crucified. The gas chambers where the innocent of God’s chosen people were slain. The killing fields of Cambodia. The City of Oklahoma – ground consecrated by the blood of children.”

In the litany’s concluding prayer, the leader says that “God asks us to leave this place and take up the cause of our own lives.”

“If an artist was lost, then some of us must find a creative spirit within ourselves and fill the void. If a person of faith was lost, then some of us must become deeper people of faith.”

It ends with a call for God to “hold those who died in your arms… . May these souls and the souls of all the departed rest in peace.”

Mr. Flood said some families who now attend the services, which are closed to outsiders and the press, want to light candles or leave flowers. Others want no religious observance at all, he said.

Since April, when Red Cross funding ran out, Ms. Parker and Mr. Flood have essentially operated out of their own pockets. Though they are officially attached to the medical examiner’s staff, they are not paid. Mr. Flood has been buying his train tickets to New York.

He said he and Ms. Parker were prepared to keep the chaplaincy running for as long as three years, which medical examiner Charles S. Hirsch said might be the duration of the operation.

Even if families should stop coming, Mr. Flood said, he felt he should be here to represent the presence of God with the dead whose remains rest in the trailers.

“Our presence here is a sacred duty,” he said.

Lumps in the News

Spent far too much time Friday at Kaiser, getting the Lump looked at. The result was (after all these days of frustration, waiting, and unreasonable delays) that the doctor looked at it, felt it, listened to the history. . . . and offered me a prescription for my eczema while I wait for the next month or so for a dermatology appointment to open up.

Oh, and sometime in the next two weeks I can expect a call from a surgeon, who will grope the Lump; transfix it with needles; order various blood tests (gotta stock up on orange juice); scrutinize it magnetically, radiographically, and sonically; and then slice open my thigh and yank it out. No question, it must be removed; given its size, the trouble I’m already having with that leg, and the slight but interesting possibility of liposarcoma, they need to take it out. I can expect surgery probably around the end of September, maybe mid-October, and a pathology report within a month of the surgery.

It was clear to my doctor (as it has been to me these ten days) that this is not an infected cyst. So the ten days of antibiotics (with consequent faint nausea, the omnipresent taste and smell of mold, and the disagreeable gastrointestinal symptoms) were a waste. I never had the feeling that I had an infection — and I’m sorry, but that does matter. I know my own flesh.

One of the hardest things for me to convey to people is that I’m not worried about the outcome — the possibility of cancer isn’t what bothers me. In fact, the possibility is low. Lipomas run in my family, so I’ve seen them and I don’t fear them. Anyway, they’re the most common kind of soft-tissue tumor, and they’re benign by definition. I’m pushing for medical treatment on this one, though, because I had that liposarcoma scare nine years ago, and I’d rather get it out and make sure it isn’t a problem.

All this I face with calm. What distresses me about this is the medical process itself. I’m not worried about the lump. I am suffering from it, and telling me it will turn out all right is no consolation for the present misery: being stripped and handled; telling the same story over and over again to indifferent ears; being pierced, sliced, dissected; being weak and in pain.

I feel like a woodchuck being dissected. That was one of my father’s hobbies when I was very small, four years old or less. He approached the task with an unholy glee, and he made me watch as he cut it open and then touch the insides. I always knew that next time it could be me he was opening. My skin ripping under the scalpel, my ridged trachea sliced into silence, the gush of slime and blood as he cut into my guts (such vivid and beautiful colors), my secret internal stench of viscera. I would never eat a chocolate rabbit, fearing what I would see and taste when I bit the head off.

So no wonder I loathe being subject to medical procedures. I know they are necessary. I’m willing to do the work to endure and understand my own reactions. But this is, to me, a worse nightmare than cancer. Cancer in that context is a code word for death, and death at least offers surcease. One of the irrational reactions I’ve had about this lump has been that I’m going to have to go through a lot of wretchedness and I won’t even get to be dead at the end.

When I tried to explain this today, Paul said, “Death isn’t a consolation prize.” It is, though, sometimes. If you’re being tortured.

And it’s a measure of how much better my life is these days that I am not willing to die. I would rather live, even if I have to endure a lot of horrors.

Oh, All Right, Another Internet Quiz

What revolution are You?
Made by altern_active

But I have never dropped acid. Honest. My major vices are Diet Dr. Pepper, books, and the occasional new skein of overdyed silk floss.

Toys for Tots

Do check out Neil Gaiman’s blog for September 4. Then follow his advice. I was amused.

Not Just Cats, Either

From a web tutorial on taking photos of cats.

There are four sorts of cats:

* Friendly cats, that want to achieve maximum transfer of fur to your clothing.

* Scaredy cats, that have a zone of tolerance and as soon as you enter, they run away.

* Indifferent cats, that have seen it all before and are not interested in you right now.

* Hungry cats, tend to want your attention a whole lot more than normal. Note: this is a temporary state.

There are many more kinds of cats than this. Actually, one of the things that always amazes me is how similar each of us is to our individual cats.

Michele’s Little Bit wants nothing more than to be in someone’s lap, being petted, and happy in the knowledge that a pinned-down human cannot possibly go anywhere or do anything. She wants her people *right there* and *paying attention* to her. Though Michele herself doesn’t wander around the house meowing when she isn’t getting her share of attention, she is fundamentally happiest when she has her family snuggled around her.

Sonja’s Ivan is easily the most beautiful of all the cats, sleek and elegant and always soooo well-dressed. Though he’s taking a little time to relax and get comfy with everyone, he is at heart very affectionate. Especially at night. I have never understood why he gets jumpy in the daytime but is perfectly happy to be petted after dark. Sonja is basically a warm and playful person, though she can withdraw when she’s startled. And she has the best sense of style of us all.

Gabriel, Spawn of Satan, AKA Fuzzbucket, is considerably more elegant than I am, but we’re both essentially wild animals who come in sometimes for food and petting. Not that she permits much petting of herself; she’d much rather lick and groom the person she has chosen to sit down on. When she’s done, she lets you know with a brief valedictory bite. We both need a *lot* of space, but we can be cozy, too. At least I don’t stroll around on the tops of eight-foot bookshelves, though I’ve always loved high places best.

Paul’s late cats — Simon and Sinbad — were both very like him in different ways. Simon was cool, calm, and massive — one of the least excitable animals I have ever seen. Sinbad was clearly a scientist, constantly doing experiments in gravity, the breakability of glass, and the spill patterns of liquids. The results had to be reproducible, too. He used to get up on top of the fridge and carefully nudge things off with his paw to see if they would really fall this time. What better cat for a chemist?

Arrest Those Men — They’re Fiscal Terrorists!

NEW YORK (Reuters) – The economic cost New York City suffers as the result of the Sept. 11 attacks will range from $83 billion to $95 billion, partly depending upon how many jobs are shifted out of the city, a new report said on Wednesday.

City Comptroller William Thompson also estimated in his new report that it will cost $21.8 billion to replace the buildings, infrastructure and what he called “tenant assets” lost as a result of the attacks that toppled the World Trade Center.

Think about that. Those guys stole more than three times what it would cost to replace the World Trade Center, including desks, computers, carpeting, and Muzak. They stole nearly as much as NYC lost in the aftermath of that disaster.

I’ll have to look up the numbers for the amount stolen in the S&L scandals of Bush Mach I.

Heyyyyyyyy, these guys are pikers! According to this summary, the S&L scandal will ultimately cost the taxpayers $1.3 trillion — which might have been only $20 billion if the government had started to face facts before the 1988 election.

These numbers are from a book called Inside Job. I don’t know how reliable that book is, so I checked with another capitalist bastion: Forbes. In a recent article, they mentioned that just the Lincoln S&L collapse cost “billions” in investor money. (That’s the one that Charles Keating was involved in.) They also mentioned the insider-trading scandals of the early 1980s and the Wedtech scandal.

It’s easier and more fun and a hell of a lot more dramatic to blame outside agitators for attacking America. And there’s no question that September 11 was a terrible tragedy. Words can’t begin to do justice to the heartbreak of ordinary people dying at their desks, or the courage of those firefighters toiling up the stairs, trying with their last breath to save lives. But I think we need to look at the less easily televised tragedies of small investors, people who have worked all their lives, whose pension funds and retirement savings have been plundered by clean-cut American citizens who already have more money than they can possibly spend.

And Now, For Something Completely Contemptible. . .

The not-so-secret dirty secret of the crash is that even as investors were losing 70%, 90%, even in some cases all of their holdings, top officials of many of the companies that have crashed the hardest were getting immensely, extraordinarily, obscenely wealthy. They got rich because they were able to take advantage of the bubble to cash in hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of stock–stock that was usually handed to them via risk-free options–at vastly inflated prices. When the bubble burst, their shareholders were left holding the bag. But, hey, they had theirs.

The top 25 include some big and obvious names: Cisco (CEO John Chambers: $239 million), for instance, and AOL Time Warner, parent of FORTUNE’s publisher (chairman Steve Case: $475 million). But they also include companies you would be surprised to find on a top-25 list of any kind. Executives and directors at a software maker called Ariba raked in $1.24 billion even as its stock was falling from $150 to around $3. Yahoo executives reaped $901 million in stock sales while the company’s shares fell from $250 to about $11.

Somebody, please send these guys to jail.

And they say we don’t need government regulation of business — that market forces will ensure Truth, Justice, and the American Way.

I would also like to point out the source of these numbers. Is it a notorious left-wing hippie do-gooder magazine like Mother Jones? Nope, though they have an interesting editorial on the potential political effects of corporate scandals. Is it a brilliant social satire from Mad? No, though they feature a devastatingly funny story of the Martha Stewart insider-trading scandal. It is a classic list from Fortune, one of the most respectable business journals and a bastion of free enterprise.