Before sunrise on September 11, 2001, my rowing partner, Mary, and I, were already on the water for our morning workout. As darkness imperceptibly gave way to light, the bay was calm, the air was clear—an absolutely beautiful day dawned. We glided past herons and egrets, enjoying the quiet peace of Nature.
A couple of hours later, I was driving to a 10 a.m. meeting when I heard something on the car radio about a small plane crashing into the World Trade Center in New York City. By the time I reached my client’s office, all of her co-workers were standing around a radio. Both towers of the World Trade Center were hit, and the announcers were talking about a terrorist attack.
“What do you want to do?” I asked my client. Neither one of us knew the office protocol for terrorist attacks.
“I guess we’ll have the meeting,” she said.
So we did. But from the expansive plate glass windows in her conference room, I had a clear view of the flight paths into Atlantic City International Airport, which was about eight miles away, right in the middle of the busy Northeast corridor. Jet after jet was landing. None were taking off.
I rushed home after the meeting and turned on the television, shocked at the images that played over and over on the screen. A huge jet, loaded with fuel, crashing into the tallest building in New York. One tower fell, then the other. It was horrifying.
Was my family safe? One brother had an office in Lower Manhattan. My other brother was managing a construction project at Newark International Airport. My sister had flown to Hawaii a few days earlier. Gradually, when cell phone calls finally went through, I learned that my family was okay.
Thousands of other people weren’t so lucky.
Thousands of other people, through no fault of their own, had their lives ripped apart. People on their way to important destinations, people starting their day at work, were suddenly gone. The people who loved them were left to ask why.
Why did this happen? What had they done wrong? What did I do wrong? How am I going to survive?
They clung to hope, and then there was none.
I knew what that felt like.
A year earlier, I was forced to give up hope. I had been pursuing my $1.25 million judgment against my sociopathic ex-husband, James Montgomery. I was convinced I would find the money, and it would right my life that had been so wronged.
Before meeting my ex, I had been going to work every day, having fun when I could, and hoping, along the way, to make a romantic connection. James Montgomery presented himself as the love of my life. In truth, he was a terrorist who intentionally crashed into everything I had built, and brought it down.
I was outraged. I was an upstanding, responsible human being. I had done many things right and nothing wrong, yet my life was ripped to shreds.
I sought justice. The court said I was right, and the judge in my divorce awarded me everything that was taken from me—$227,000—plus $1 million in punitive damages. I pursued the money until 2000, when I had no choice but to admit failure. I was not going to recover what I had lost.
I collapsed. I raged. I demanded answers from God. What had I done to deserve this?
On September 11, 2001, and in the following traumatic days, I couldn’t breathe. I viscerally felt the nation’s collective horror. I knew the outrage, the confusion, the fear, the hope and then the hopelessness. I felt like I was reliving how my own life had crashed, magnified by a hundred, or perhaps a thousand.
A couple of weeks after the devastating tragedy, I wrote a poem. It was all I could do.
One Day In September
By Donna Andersen
Tuesday the eleventh dawns like any other day
Sunlight breaks the grayness as we row upon the bay
Herons, gulls and egrets barely glance as we glide by
They’re the creatures, at this hour, that rule the brightening sky
These mornings are a treasure, Mary and I agree
Ten o’clock my meeting is all scheduled to begin
Everyone is staring at a radio as I walk in
The peak of New York City has exploded into fire
Thick, black smoke is billowing from our economic spire
Do we work? Do we stop? Are they getting out?
Message light is blinking where are you? Are you there?
Are your brothers in New York today? Is your sister in the air?
Cell phones are not working have you seen the awful news?
What on earth is happening? Has anyone a clue?
Yes, the TV’s on, but I can’t absorb the scene
News uninterrupted, it’s bad and getting worse
Crash into the towers the idea is so perverse
Ten thousand in each edifice had just begun their day
Now a pile of rubble and all I can do is pray
Let there be survivors, please; God, we need you now
Jet slams into shining glass
The hundredth time today
Another angle, another shot
Let’s review that play
But this is not a game
Fires burning, twisted steel, it’s such an wrenching sight
Sweetheart, please come over, I can’t be alone tonight
Earlier this morning it was birds that ruled the sky
Now it’s raining jet fuel why did they have to die?
All those lonely pillows in so many empty beds
Family and friends are safe, but I can’t catch my breath
Two degrees of separation keep me from knowing death
Mary’s childhood classmate was one who called his wife
From up above the fire, hoping vainly for his life
Never did I know him, yet still I feel the loss
Countless private tragedies just add to my distress
How can I stop crying, ease the tension in my chest?
My brothers at ground zero passed buckets hand to hand
The president promises that America will take a stand
I am just a writer, searching desperately for words
Holes punched in our confidence, life forever changed
But this I know from experience: Good can come from pain
Our hearts have been ripped open, yet open hearts can feel
Compassion for each other may be the gift of this ordeal
Pray it is a turning point in our human history
Search for justice underway
Portends a mourning dove
In the end, there’s love and fear
And fear is lack of love
Our caring may be our hope
Donna,
A very moving article. I am sure each of us also remember every moment of that day when we heard the news…
Your poem (a stanza copied here) I think sums up the event for us all 10 years out.
Holes punched in our confidence, life forever changed
But this I know from experience: Good can come from pain
Our hearts have been ripped open, yet open hearts can feel
Compassion for each other may be the gift of this ordeal
Pray it is a turning point in our human history
Thank you for posting your poem, Donna. and for reminding us it was sociopaths who terrorized us on that day.
At that time I was surrounded by sociopaths and didn’t know it, but I remember the reactions from them. They milked it.
My spath woke me up, “Wake up, the US has been attacked.”
I looked at the drama queen skeptically, “Yeah, where?”
“EVERYWHERE!” he replied.
But of course, where else? As I turned on the TV and watched, I remember the feeling of wonder. When am I going to find out this wasn’t real? But it just kept getting more substantiated. In the following weeks, I watched the news reporting the atrocities of the taliban on women. The brutal execution of women in a soccer field is the one that is recorded most indelibly in my mind. The spath said he had to tape it, so he could show it to people who doubted that we should go to war in Afghanistan. Now I know he had to tape it to watch it over and over because he got off on it.
My spath brother in law, called to tell me how he couldn’t help breaking down in tears throughout the day. He was hoping to feed on my emotions as well. He cares nothing for anyone and refers to human beings as “garbage” and “sheep” and he refers to himself as a “wolf”.
Though we are human and must respect our emotional reactions, it’s important that we don’t allow spaths to feed on them. They will pretend to commisurate, just to get our emotional spigots turned on. Watch for it. In your family, in your friends and on the news.
The spath fake killed the fake boy on September 12, 2009. ever the drama queen, perhaps she thought she wouldn’t get enough emotional response from people on the 11th…waiting until the 12th (starting the ‘it’s about to happen’ on the 10th, drawing it through the 11th when people were more emotionally vulnerable, and trumping the emotional level in the wee hours of the 12th.)
She has often claimed (in her various scams) to have been raped, traumatized, abused and molested by family members, pimped out by family members and lovers; suicidal, dead of cancer, and other diseases. And each time she does this she denigrates the true experiences of ‘real’ people.
She killed him when she did so that she could get the biggest bang for her buck – and leave her dupes with a twinned memory. She denigrates the memory of those who died on 9/11.
OneJoy,
seems to me she was worried that the focus of attention would shift from her to the real tragedy of 9/11. Can’t have THAT!! She tried to upstage 9/11. spaths. they love drama and they have to be at the center of it.
Too bad they weren’t all at the trade center that day….
hmmm… that gives me an idea. A spath convention!! We’ll finally have them all in one place….
Edit:
oh wait, I misread your post. She killed him off in 2009. I see. She wanted to commemorate the anniversary of the initial scapegoating on 9/11. So she brought her own imaginary substitute sacrificial lamb. Just like communion at church.
😛
oh sky, you don’t know how many memories you tweaked, ‘So she brought her own imaginary substitute sacrificial lamb. Just like communion at church. ‘
no idea.
i just listened to this radio show. it’s about sacred ground as it relates to 9/11.
i hope that you can listen to the the podcast: http://www.cbc.ca/tapestry/episode/2011/09/11/sacred-ground-part-1-1/
Donna, That was a powerful poem.
One Joy,
for me to find meaning in the experience of living with so many sociopaths, I had to look for something much much larger than myself.
I found it in Rene Girard’s philosophy. He wasn’t really a philosopher. He was looking for a commonality in the great works of literature. He wanted to know what they had in common. There is no soundbite to explain what he found, but if I HAD to say one thing, I’d say: spaths.
Girard doesn’t write about spaths. I don’t think he has a clue about them. He writes about mythologies and primitive societies.
I stumbled upon his works because I was looking to understand why my spath wanted to punish me for his hatred of his mother. What I found was a description of primitive people, their mythology and their behavior, which ABSOLUTELY mirrored the behavior of spaths! I can see no difference.
When you described what your spath did on 9/12 – you confirmed it, once again. It’s hard to describe, and many people may not quite see the corrolation. Rene Girard is not the only one to describe it. Lloyd Demuse calls it the hysteroidal cycle. They become hysterical in cycles and they need drama so that they can reach catharsis. The sacrificial lamb is brought in. Sometimes it is real, sometimes imaginary. It doesn’t matter too much, so long as the trauma is commemorated. A dramatic re-enactment brings the crowds to hysteria and catharsis, then they mellow out and go home again. The sacrificial lamb redeems them, by being a scapegoat. Their sins are on the scapegoat and they feel relief by blaming the innocent.
Sick huh? it’s human history re-enacted over and over again.
sky – and although i have not had the life experiences of the fake boy, perhaps i identified with him because he was the scapegoat, loved him and wanted to care for him because he was the scapegoat. how terribly abnormal of me.
btw – i see no evidence of the scapegoat existing in buddhism…where there is no diety (the buddha is an internal concept, not an external one: ergo, no sin to be created, punished and absolved by scapegoating). I will ask my root teacher about this one also.)
morning onejoy,
that would be very interesting to research. I might do a quick google on buddhism and scapegoats or sacrifice.
Girard’s theory about the sacrificial lamb is that Jesus came to reveal this hidden scapegoat mechanism and put an end to it by allowing himself to be sacrificed, though obviously innocent. But, it didn’t work. The spaths, just inverted it and kept right on going.
But supposedly, the Gospels are all about revealing what was hidden. I can see that Jesus continually spoke about hypocrites – almost non-stop.
There is something about the scapegoat which tugs at our heart strings. I am that way too.
Spaths, on the other hand, when they see a scapegoat, they get bloodlust.
My spath brother tugged on my heartstrings since he was a little boy. My spath mom tried to make him the scapegoat and abused him worse than the rest of us. I think she was trying to get revenge on my N dad for cheating on her.
Ironically, the only reason I know about the cheating (believe me, I would never have IMAGINED my father doing such a thing) is because my brother remembers my mom saying to him (as a 4 year old), “look at your father, he comes home with his underwear on backwards”. I asked my mom if this was true and she laughed and said, “yes”.
Because she is a spath, my mom transferred her hatred of my dad towards his son. Now the son is a spath too.
I’m not sure, but I think her issue with me is that I loved my spath brother so much (we were only one year apart).