More from the interviews with the authors of “Project Rebirth”, psychoanalyst and educator Dr. Robin Stern and award-winning author and journalist Courtney E. Martin. The book examines the survivor stories of eight different individuals who all experienced loss in their own way on September, 11, 2001. Those include Nick Chirls, a high school student who lost his mother, Brian Lyons, who lost his firefighter brother, and Tanya Villanueva Tepper, who lost her firefighter fiancé referenced in this interview excerpt.
Kafi Drexel: Robin why did you get involved with this project?
Dr. Stern: When we wrote the book we really hoped people who were reading it would not only feel inspired by the courage of the people we wrote about but also walk away with hope there is a light at the end of the tunnel. We really wanted people to know that grief and recovery and resilience are very individual experiences and there is no template. Whatever is your personal journey is unique to you. The support of family and friends is part of the healing process. Whatever it is you feel you need to do during that healing process is your personal stamp on recovery.
Drexel: Have the different ways some experts have already defined grief put a lot of inadvertent pressure on how we cope with tragedy?
Dr. Stern: It has put pressure. It has put pressure on us to get over it and put pressure on us to keep it to ourselves. It has put pressure on us to get on with our lives. ...We take our love with us. We don't as Freud wanted us to know early on when he wrote 'Mourning and Melancholia', we don't give it up and walk away from it. He talked about the grief period ending and we don't think of it that way anymore. And actually he didn't think of it that way when he lost his daughter. He re-calibrated what he has put out to the public but he never re-wrote about it interestingly enough. We believe it is important people have the message that it is fine and appropriate and it does happen that you carry your love with you.
Drexel: In 1969 psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross popularized the idea of five stages of grieving: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance and her theories? How has September 11th changed what we thought we knew about the grieving process and what we know now?
Dr. Stern: I think people at this point, the public does really understand that Kübler-Ross' theories, although she was a pioneer in the field, are not really the experience of people who are grieving. She constructed her theory based on a population of people who were facing death. She talked about five stages of grief. Denial, anger, acceptance...her five stages of grief, it is a linear model. We know now that it is not a linear model. As I said, people grieve in their own way and there are a lot of ups and downs. We talk in our book about grief being more like a roller coaster, and the process of recovery being up and down as well. George Bananno in his book, 'The Other Side of Sadness' also talks about how that model doesn't hold up to research.
You sometimes go through a prolonged period of sadness which actually is quite adaptive because it gives you the chance to go inside of yourself and heal and be quiet with yourself. And then you can go into a period of feeling completely disconnected from the world and throw yourself into the world and come back to that period of sadness. There's no road map.
Drexel: It seems like you both come to a conclusion that if you are still grieving it is okay.
Dr. Stern: It's okay. Grief is not pathology. Grief is a normal and universal experience. As we say in our book, we all love and we all lose. We all go through periods of grief. ...Grief is not just about losing your loved one, grief can be about as one of our stories indicate losing a dream that you had. It can be about losing your home like Hurricane Irene. It's about how we take those moments of trauma and moments of grief and the love we've had and bring it forward into our lives and what meaning we make of it once we bring it forward in our lives and we see that through every story.Some of the lessons we've learned...have to do with carrying your love forward, have to do with knowing that resilience is a process we all go through. And as a matter of fact we as human beings are wired to be resilient and that's something that George Bananno and other psychologists have made more public in recent years that it is not the unusual person who is resilient and goes forward. It is the capacity that we all have.
Drexel: What do we learn from looking at the stories of eight different people over a decade?
Dr. Stern: It was important to us to tell the story as regularly as possible because it is a story about ordinary people. I think we wanted to show the 10 year progression for all people in a story everyone could relate to.
We found that each one of the people we interviewed had their own way of spiritually relating to the loss. After the trauma as in any trauma people really opened themselves up to parts of themselves that they might not have been aware were there and to possibilities in the world that they might not have been aware are there. For example Nick when the bird flew on his head during his mother's memorial there was a moment when the minute he uttered the word "Mother" a small bird landed on his head. And he is a young man who didn't have any spiritual practice but as a result of that he said "It's not explainable but I believe my mother was there with me." Brian who grew up in a religious household yet opened up to another kind of spiritual experience when he began to have synchronous experiences, we talk about synchronicity in the book as those meaningful moments that come together for people and when Brian on a platform at a train station met a man who had the same name as his brother who had just passed, something magical was in that moment, something spiritual. And he looks down now at Ground Zero and says it is a spiritual place down there. And there were many other stories we heard like that.....stories that allowed them to touch open themselves in healing that was unavailable. Tanya walked into the experience with an openness to spirituality. We also found people had faith, beyond spiritual beliefs, faith in their own process --faith that they would get by, faith that they would move on. Faith in their purpose in life.
Drexel: Courtney, why was getting involved with this project so important to you?
Martin: It was such an honor to work on this material. I was so struck from the very first moment that the project came into my sphere that to have ten years, a decade worth of a human being's story is to have such an incredible treasure trove that we've only seen in the British series ‘Seven Up’ which followed people every seven years or other. Really rare exceptions have we had this kind of material. So in terms of story it really is a gem. Also for me personally having been in New York on September 11th, I was just sort of coming out into the world. I was 21 years old. So I had this deep, personal connection to what happened. But I also had this sense that none of the current art and culture that had come out of it really reflected that depth. It was this attempt to make clean, quick stories about what September 11th meant to Americans. And in fact having these ten years we were able to say something much deeper and longer and for me something that really mirrored my own feelings in a way that kind of just dignified it that makes sense. It was such a cinematic thing at first when in fact for many Americans it's been a much longer thing to metabolize for us. It's been a real journey. The stories really represent that.
Drexel: That we are still metabolizing in a way.
Martin: Yeah. I think the this book and the film both speak to the challenge of memorializing this thing right? It wasn't just the picture of the Towers we've seen or even the picture of the light afterwards. There have been so many different symbols and attempts to represent it and I think for me, my deep belief is that story is transformative and story is what really allows us to kind of integrate and absorb the depth of what we all experience to some extent and what some people of course experienced in a much more potent way. Those are the stories we focused on in the book. I think you think about the thousands who died and it is an abstraction, it sort of glosses over because it is too hard to latch into emotionally. But these eight stories are each so beautiful and so specific. For me they are a way into the depth of what thousands of stories actually mean.
Drexel: There’s often been a focus on the “heroes” of 9/11 and their families. It's a reminder that 9/11 happened to all of us.
Martin: Even the heroes didn't really feel like the pure, perfected heroes that they were portrayed to be in the media. I think one of the things that was really clear for us diving very deeply into these stories was that each of these individuals has a really conflicted relationship with even how 9/11 has been depicted and how their story has really been from a negative perspective kind of co-opted. I think it was well intentioned in terms of people turning firefighters into heroes or the widows of the firefighters into heroes but for each of those individual people that felt kind of objectifying on some level even as it was honoring. I think one of Robin and my attempts in this book is to really make those stories round and complicated and take some of the purity out of it. We really wanted to respect the stories of the people themselves and the people they lost by showing the nitty grittiness of it not just sort of the pure story with the music booming in the end.
Drexel: Can you talk about how you both became involved in this book? As you both mentioned the documentary the book compliments is something filmmaker Jim Whitaker had been working on for quite some time.
Martin: Jim Whitaker very bravely has shared pieces of his film along the way and so Robin's husband who is an expert on technology and education [at Teacher's College at Columbia University] had some access to the film and been involved in trying to help promote it. So I got a chance to talk to Jim about how notable I thought it was that he was vulnerable in process as an artist to show this work and get feedback. As someone who has written other books of profiles I recognize how sensitive that mid-process point can be. So he and I connected on a storyteller level. I think Jim had a real insight that the story needed a psychologist. The story needed someone who really had that background in the way in which the psyche works around grief.....Robin brought this depth to it that was very important for people to understand.
Drexel: You feel you can especially relate to Nick’s story?
Martin: I connect really deeply with Nick's story I think in particular because he was 15 at the time. I was 21 but I think there is an experience of younger people who grew up with this at such a formative moment. Each generation has its thing. I think it is sort of undeniable that for many of us, millennials or whatever you want to label it, this was really a moment when the future was sort of brought-in in a rush. We had to process and cope with what does this mean more generally. And Nick of course, someone who lost his mother who worked for Cantor Fitzgerald at the age of 15, it influenced so much of the way he perceived his path from there on out. I think he's handled it with such grace. It was really so moving to be up close to a story of such a young person which to me is just the most horrifying thing possible which is to lose your mother that quickly, a mother you are very close to, with just a lot of grace and wisdom.
Drexel: What are some of the biggest lessons you've learned from this project?
Martin: In some ways the lesson is negated by the necessity of writing a book that has a beginning, middle and end. I think the deep lesson is there is no end. We had to sort of contrive an end because it is a book with only so many pages, but each of these stories continues on. And each of these stories is so clearly being influenced by the people that were lost. So in the case of Brian his brother is this ongoing person in his life literally. Even though his brother a firefighter was killed on that day and there is no denying that or making light of it, the truth is Michael's voice is still in Brian's head. Michael's inspiration is still moving Brian in different directions. That's actually a beautiful thing. I think Americans have been led to pathologize the idea of a continued relationship with people who've died. I think what's so clear in these stories is these people will never die in the hearts and minds of those who are grieving them. That's true for all of us. 9/11 will never be wrapped up in a little bow for Americans. We will never understand exactly the implications of that on us as a nation. But we are going to continue to absorb it. It is going to continue to sort of be this part of who we are and what we are trying to be in the world. Who is America based on that day?
Drexel: Not wrapped in a bow and once again the message seems to be “That's okay.” It's an existing thing for us, it doesn't end with a 10th Anniversary. You cite a great quote in your book “We never get over great losses. We absorb them.”
Martin: I love that quote. When I found that I thought that is exactly what we are trying to say here. I also think one of the most resonant quotes for me is by a Buddhist who we quote pretty frequently Pema Ch—dr—n and one of the things she says is "You do not deserve resolution." And it is hard as a human being when you see that you go "No I need resolution!". We all want to sort of clarify "Why did this happen to me? How did it change me? And what's the next step?" Because we are Americans. We're industrious. We like to work through things and be done with them. I think what Pema Ch—dr—n is saying about "You do not deserve resolution" is actually you don't deserve it and it is actually not dignifying in a certain way. The human experience is so complex that if you are trying to boil it down to five steps and then you are done, you can sort of cut off that part of your life and move on with all happy things. It just betrays the complexity of life. So I think that is a really hard lesson for all of us because it feels better for us to think there is a moment it will all be done when in fact life is just this complex. It is that roller coaster as opposed to that clear, five step plan.
Drexel: You wanted to say something about the significance of this 10th Anniversary.
Martin: I do want to say about the anniversary I think as prescriptive as it is and in some ways as artificial as it is I do think there is a real place for this kind of moment, this sort of memorialization. I think we all need these rituals whether it is private grieving or public grieving to acknowledge "This did happen," particularly for people who were very directly affected to acknowledge we see you, we know you are still absorbing your grief, we honor the process you've gone through. Funerals, all of these rituals in our lives play a really important role even if they feel like they are a little bit contrived. It's important to hold on to those things as random as they can seem in some ways are really a moment for Americans to sit back and reflect a little bit about how this has changed us both personally as a nation.