The Moment When The World Changed
by John M. Schneider, Ph.D.
A friend sent me an email two weeks after the horrifying events of September 11, 2001. Like many others, I have been shocked and deeply moved many times since those moments when the world changed once again. I had found comfort in my profession as a psychologist, which allows me to focus on the needs of others, anticipate what might lie ahead for them and for me as the realities of this major paradigm shift slowly sink in. Episodically I begin to feel strong again, feel the need to get my life back in order after the personal chaos caused by preoccupation with TV images, powerful and poignant stories. I am on a steep learning curve about terrorism, the extent of change taking place around the world. I was waiting with dread for a war to start . . . I wasn't prepared for this email.It contained a photo of a young man with a backpack and sunglasses standing on a tall building, with the sun shining brightly on a horizon broken by many tall buildings and the glistening of a distant river. Typical tourist photo-- except for one stunning detail. There was an American Airlines plane just to the right of his shoulder that, within a second would hit the building he stood on. In the corner, the camera had a record of the time: 9:00.
The picture reportedly came from a camera found in the wreckage of the World Trade Center. It had captured the last moment of an innocent world, the last moments before this man in the picture, his photographer and all those on the plane would die, perhaps only momentarily aware of what was happening, of their impending deaths. But I was once again aware, staring in horror at this frozen moment just before the world itself changed.
I was shaken as I began to write this a few hours later. I still feel enormous sadness that wells up in my throat. I've wanted to share this picture with others, and yet I also want to protect them from seeing it. Anyone who believes its veracity will be traumatized by viewing it.
It is important to know that being traumatized does not create a pathological health condition in need of medical and psychiatric treatment. The term "post traumatic stress disorder" is being tossed about these days. It was used from the beginning of this tragedy. It is a diagnosis that cannot be made until at least a month after the traumatizing event ceases. For many at the scene, for example, the workers removing ruins mixed with vestiges of human existence the ongoing traumatizing may last for months, even years.
Most people who have been traumatized do not develop the disorder, which is characterized by difficulty sleeping, diffuse anxiety, recurrent nightmares, edginess, preoccupation, just not being ourselves that lasts longer than a month. For most people those responses are there initially but will diminish within a few days or weeks&emdash;unless, like has just happened for me, something new comes in and reactivates it. Then it will happen again and diminish again. This is a stressful time, and we react to stress normally with these symptoms. Some will have greater problems and will need help. Some&emdash;the "worried well" will need validation&emdash;what happened really did happen, your responses make sense in light of what you are experiencing, you are not alone in feeling this way.
Frozen images do form. We can be paralyzed. We can overdo heroic responses to the point of jeopardizing our own health. We can also be cowards, running from the scene, forever ashamed. That is the basis of several useful techniques, intended to debrief and desensitize. With these techniques, frozen images begin moving. People can deflect and distract themselves from the horror witnessed. Fight and or flight can take place. We can sleep or rest in order to keep on. We can find and give forgiveness for moments of weakness.
The bursts of tears and grief, the need to be in touch with loved ones is the start of our grief--what have we lost? How bad is it? It is helpful to talk with others, even strangers on the street. It will continue to be helpful as we experience the new little traumas from unexpected emails, as new information comes in that causes us to reassess the extent and the limits of what has changed.
What remains is the stressfulness and the unpredictability it introduces. There have been losses--of innocence, of security, of predictability. Yes, we are more irritable and kinder, easier to anger and to forgive. Who hasn't tossed and turned for several nights? Who hasn't stared at the TV and listened to the radio far too much? Who isn't still frightened about flying, biological warfare and other acts of unconventional warfare? Who doesn't fear that opportunists won't destroy our civil liberties, exploit victims and the frightened, use this crisis as an excuse to exploit and destroy our environment?
Was this a defining moment in life? Was a sense of innocence lost? Are some things never again taken for granted? Does life have to be lived differently from that moment forward? Are priorities shifted in ways that those that have greater meaning aren't so likely to be postponed?
Many of us are still waiting for the answer to these questions. When I see a picture of an innocent man in the moments before his death, I cannot help but wonder: if I were in his shoes, would those last moments be spent in regret for not forgiving, for not saying I love you, for not completing something that I consider my gift, my reason for being here? In not being him, can I take from his death, his total innocence up to the very moment of the crash, of its possibility. Could I too die so quickly that only a moment will be given to me to assess my life. Can I sustain the awareness of how important living each moment fully is, never knowing when it might be my last?
I know many of the emergency service people will never be the same; a few will enjoy the fifteen minutes of fame we accord heroes; some will use their status to teach and inspire; too many will leave their work, haunted; others will drink themselves into oblivion. There will even be suicides, professionals tortured by what they saw and could not/did not do. It is their grief, their suffering that will need in time to be treated, not as a pathological response, not as a disorder, but as an event so meaningful no one, save others who have walked the same path, can understand or validate its enormity or its significance. No technique, however potent, can ever shake loose the meaning of that moment and the ones that follow.
In the early weeks I have grieved by identifying with the survivors, the families and the emergency service people who must pick through the rubble and continue to risk their lives. Their torture is to live lives so drastically disrupted and permanently altered. When I can go back to normal they cannot. I will struggle with survivor guilt, of being able to choose to move on, knowing others cannot make that choice. They will struggle with being seen as heroes, yet knowing they failed in the most essential tasks of their lives&emdash;to save lives. Some will take that failure as personal&emdash;I should have been the one going in World Trade Center instead of my best friend . . . if only I had dug faster, listened better, not been frightened or exhausted…. Some will eventually accept that all that was humanly possible was done&emdash;and can forgive themselves for being human.
Instead of worshiping or envying them, we need to hold the hope for their healing and comfort&emdash;that some day, perhaps as long as the fifty years it takes for veterans of war, the integrity of these moments will be a measure of a life well lived. We need to hope that we, too can find meaning and purpose out of the ashes.
We grieve because we have loved; we grieve in order to love again. Grieving is a powerful way to find wisdom, to transform a way of life into something more. In grieving, it is possible to be more, despite losing what once was considered essential to our way of life.
Now I am challenged to grieve losing me, with only a moment's notice&emdash;and wonder if I could ever be so fully in the moment that there will be no flashes of regret for not living fully. Perhaps that frozen image of man, backpack, tower and plane will continue to remind me of the necessity of staying awake and appreciating what I am about.
John Schneider is a psychologist in private practice on the Old Mission Peninsula working with people in major life transitions. He is a retired Professor from the medical schools at Michigan State University who has written extensively about grief as a transformative process.