Somehow, this time of year always seems to sneak up on me. I wasn’t personally involved with any of th events of that day in 2001. My mother used to work in NYC, but had retired. I hadn’t worked in NYC since earlier that year, so I would have been safely ensconced in my office in Morristown, New Jersey. I say “would have been” for a very simple reason. I was entangled with something else at the time.
See, my grandmother (my mother’s mother) – the only other close relative I had – had passed away the day before … on September 10th, 2001.
The last two or three years of her life were both troubled and troubling. My grandfather had died many, many, years earlier. She continued to live in their house in lower upstate New York. It was the house my mother grew up in (but wasn’t born in), and was a place we visited many times throughout my life.However, as she got older, she was clearly becoming less capable of maintaining the house and even providing for herself safely. Unfortunately, she was also being increasingly affected by dementia.
Needless to say, this left my mom and I extremely concerned. Neither of us was in a position where we could move in with her (especially since we had recently co-purchased a house in the New Jersey suburbs (“escaping” Jersey City in the process). After a reasonably short (and rational) conversation with her, my grandmother accepted that she couldn’t live by herself any more and consented to move in with us.
That’s when the extent of her dementia began to become extremely apparent. We would argue semi-continuously, most of which were based around either how we should have left her to die “in peace” or how tragic it was that my grandfather had died before she did.
For my mom and I, this became a monotony of heartbreak hearing her speak in this way. We desperately wanted to be able to care for her and she simply wouldn’t allow us to. It was especially bad for us as we had known her to be such a powerful, dynamic, and intelligent person. In the past, she was the head of her local Board of Education, and for many years had been the town tax collector (with most of the local residents visiting to pay their taxes and sit down to chat with her).
Eventually, we were able to have her agree to move into a small elderly care facility. It didn’t have the “typical” antiseptic smell of such places and the elderly population was around 25-30. My grandmother being who she was, she was instantly the social darling of the facility.
We hated not being able to take care of her ourselves. What was worse was how our visits to see her would send her spiraling out of control and back to whatever dark place existed inside her which harbored outright hatred for us “forcing” her to stay alive. We’d been cautioned by the on-staff mental therapist to visit less frequently as a result.
And then came the day, September 9th. when she was transferred to a hospital. I honestly don’t recall what had happened, but it was to be the final day of her life. She passed away on the 10th, not surrounded by her daughter and grandson, but in an antiseptic facility devoid of loved ones.
Of course, that was then immediately followed by the events of the 11th. I will simply say that trying to plan a funeral in the middle of a developing crisis is not an activity ANYONE should ever have to do.
I found out, later, that the events of that day and week were so traumatic for my mother that she felt compelled to write something about it.
Without further ado, I would like to include here French Braid: Interwoven Loss, written by my mother on September 24, 2001.
French Braid: Interwoven Loss
My mother, Bessie Siegel, died on Monday, September 10, 2001. She would have been 89 years old on September 26th. Her life was long and purposeful, filled with all the cliches we use in such cases good and bad, ups and downs, triumphs and tragedies, joy and sadness. Everyone who knew my mother knew that she was a control freak, a very effective one for the most part. So on Tuesday morning, when we became aware of what was happening at the World Trade Center, my son, Ben, and I independently had exactly the same thought:
My God, Bessie was really holding the world together!
We have ties to Lower Manhattan, not as dramatic and terrible as many others, but poignant in the juxtaposition of my mother’s death with the criminal tragedy of September 11th. One Liberty Plaza is just across Broadway from the World Trade Center. Years ago, when it was a Merrill Lynch building, I worked there for a long time. For almost a year, ending this February, my son, a software architect, was on assignment there at Goldman Sachs.
One Wall Street, at the corner of Wall Street and Broadway is Bank of New York’s headquarters. When I retired almost four years ago, that was my office. 101 Barclay Street, the Bank’s operations center, is immediately north of 7 WTC. Before One Wall Street, I worked there for many years. My son also worked there some years ago. Objectively, these are remote connections, but emotionally they seem close.
Going further back, to 1993, for some reason I got up the morning of the bombing of the World Trade Center and decided to take the day off from work, only to spend the day watching in horror what was happening in Lower Manhattan. Going back a bit further to a disaster that may be less widely known, there was the ceiling collapse at the Journal Square PATH Center in Jersey City. I lived in Jersey City then and was running slightly late that morning. As usual, I took a city bus to Journal Square and was just about to push through the glass doors into the PATH plaza area to take the escalators down to the turnstile level when the concrete ceiling started rippling over the escalators and came crashing down. Thirty seconds! That’s my estimate of the time it would have taken me to be on the escalators.
I know that these near misses have no direct relation to the events of September 11, but they get sucked into my personal sense of horror.
So my mother died on Monday, September 10th, and, regardless of how much we felt compelled to follow the events on television as they unfolded, on Tuesday we had to organize a funeral. The events of September 11 kept following us. At the funeral parlor, as we were leaving, our funeral director turned to consulting with his colleagues over how their professional association was going to organize to handle the large number of expected funerals. At the synagogue, as we finished with the Rabbi, he needed to consult with his Cantor, as they responded to the call for all houses of worship hold services that night.
On Wednesday I was on the phone arranging for food to be catered in Chester on Thursday, the day of the funeral. When I asked the caterer to go over a few things a second time, he reminded me how many New York police officers and fire fighters lived in the area, indicating that they were extremely busy with orders for families waiting to hear the fate of their missing loved ones. Needless to say, I wrapped it up very quickly.
When we made the usual phone calls on Monday, notifying people of my mother’s death and funeral arrangements, I left messages for an old family friend. When I finally got a return call, I discovered she was on vacation and only accessed her home phone messages when the World Trade Center news broke. Her brother is a New York fire fighter and he and almost his entire company were already listed as officially missing. The larger tragedy overwhelmed the smaller. Fifty years old vs eighty-eight. Prime of life vs. end of life.
My mother was the oldest of six siblings, three brothers and three sisters. In March, there were still five. With my mother’s death, only the two youngest remain. The youngest, my aunt and her husband live in Florida. They spent hours on the phone desperately trying to organize a way to get to the funeral, and they thought they had done it – a very early flight Thursday morning to Stewart Airport in Newburgh would get them to the synagogue with about an hour to spare, a bereavement situation would get them on the first flights out. Only the planes were not to start flying at all until 11 a.m. at the very earliest. Impossible to make the 1 p.m. funeral. So my phone rang at 8 a.m. Thursday morning with very sad regrets from a baby sister.
My uncle, the other surviving sibling, his wife, and another sister-in-law were driven by my cousin. We found out from him that his daughter worked on Rector Street, also very close to the Twin Towers – she was safe!
Even the remote “what if”s seem to loom large. My son recently started a new job. While he was job hunting, there were possibilities in lower Manhattan, even in the World Trade Center. But, of course, Ben would have been safe. His grandmother’s death on September 10th ensured that, because we would have been making funeral arrangements the next day!
At the funeral, Dr. Joe Birnbaum, among others, recalled my mother. Joe spoke of my mother’s early involvement with the Monroe temple, when she became president and pulled together a congregation in bitter disarray. He spoke of Bessie’s managerial and organizational abilities, and he left us with an extraordinary image of Bessie at the feet of her Maker – at a desk.
Maybe they needed my mother to help with the large number of new arrivals coming the next day!
Friday I cried, and could not stop. Whether or not my mother died, I probably would have cried that day, while watching the worldwide memorial services for the events of September 11th. While I cried, I couldn’t figure out how much I was crying for my mother and how much I was crying for all the people lost and affected by the attacks. I will never know.
My mother was at the end of a long, full life. She kept saying how tired she was. She was tired from her years, from the struggle just to keep living, and from missing my father for twenty-six years. My mother hated her physical and mental deterioration and wanted more than anything else to be with my father again. How can we regret my mother’s death on that Monday when it granted her dearest wishes? How can we not regret the thousands of incomplete lives snuffed out the next day in the terrorist attacks? At the prayer service on Sunday, September 23rd, one of the rabbis said that there were not 6,000 deaths on September 11th, but one death 6,000 times.
So entwined have events become that I have to keep reminding myself that my mother died on September 10th, not September 11th. It feels like my mother died on Tuesday, not Monday. In my mind, my mother’s death will forever be linked with the tragic events of the following day. Internal and external grief feed each other. We were and are urged to get back to normal as quickly as possible.
Our first bit of normal business was to arrange a funeral.
