Like everyone else, 9/11 had a profound impact on me. I live in Massachusetts, the departure point for the two planes the terrorists hijacked and crashed into the WTC, and I work in the security community. Through those two worlds, I know many people who lost loved ones or were called into action that day.
Mood music:
This isn’t about where I was and what I was doing that day. You can read that post here. This is about six lessons I’ve taken from my own experiences of losing loved ones. May it offer you some measure of peace, whether you’ve suffered from the impact of 9/11 or lost people under more natural circumstances.
Let it suck. Don’t be a hero. If you’re feeling the pain from losing your grandmother, let it out. You don’t have to do it in front of people. Go in a room by yourself and let the waterworks flow if you have to. Don’t worry about trying to keep a manly face around people. You don’t have to pretend you’re OK for the sake of others in the room.
Don’t forget the gratitude. When someone dies, it’s easy to get lost in your own grief. There’s even a self-pity reflex that kicks in. Try to take the time to remember how awesome your loved one was. Share the most amusing memories and have some laughs. You’ll feel more at peace when you remember a life that was lived well.
Take a moment to appreciate what’s still around you. Your girlfriend. Your friends. If death teaches you anything, it’s that you never know how long the other loves of your life will be around. Don’t waste the time you have with them.
Don’t worry yourself into an anxiety attack over possible loss. Yes, God could take your loved ones at any moment. He holds all the cards, so it’s pointless to even think about it. Just be there for people, and let them be there for you.
Take care of yourself. You can comfort yourself with all the drugs, alcohol, sex and food there is to have. But take it from me, giving in to addictions is nothing but slow suicide. You can’t move past grief and see the beauty of what’s left if you’re too busy trying to kill yourself. True, I learned a ton about the beauty of life from having been an addict, but that doesn’t mean I’d ever wish that experience on others. If there’s a better way to cope, do that instead.
Embrace things that are bigger than you. Nothing has helped me get past grief more than doing service to others. It sounds like so much bullshit, but it’s not. When I’m volunteering for my kids’ school and Scouting events or taking time to talk to people who have read this blog and have their own issues to sort through, I’m always reminded that my own life is so much better than I realize or deserve.
This isn’t a science. It’s just what I’ve picked up from my own walk through the valley of darkness. I’ve learned that Life is a gift to be cherished and used wisely. I’ve also learned that it hurts sometimes, but that’s OK.
Like so many other times in my life, music made the difference between sanity and insanity. I focus a lot on the metal. But in the weeks after 9-11, I turned to a broader group of musicians to help me along. They did their jobs well, helping us all see that it was OK to go on living.
Let’s start with Neal Young, whose version of John Lennon’s “Imagine” was both haunting and inspiring:
Nothing said “fuck you” to terrorists like this P.O.D. song, which begame something of a hit after the attacks:
The Foo Fighters weighed in with this song, which wasn’t necessarily about 9-11 and the aftermath. But the lyrics somehow worked for me:
During that same 9-11 tribute concert where Neal Young played “Imagine,” Bon Jovi did this powerful version of “Living on a Prayer.”
Finally, there’s Bruce Springsteen, who put out an entire album inspired by 9-11. Yesterday’s post included a live performance of “The Rising” but this song also resonated for me:
Peace be with you all this 9th anniversary of the attacks.
Everyone has a memory of that day. I wrote about mine yesterday. Today, on the actual anniversary, I choose to sit back and let the music do the talking, especially that last refrain of “Come on Rise Up” from the Springsteen song above.
Firefighters raise a flag late in the afternoon on Tuesday, Sept. 11, 2001, in the wreckage of the World Trade Center towers in New York. In the most devastating terrorist onslaught ever waged against the United States, knife-wielding hijackers crashed two airliners into the World Trade Center on Tuesday, toppling its twin 110-story towers. (AP Photo/The Record, Thomas E. Franklin)
I remember the photo well. It was a man falling to his death in a zen-like pose that haunted me for a long, long time. It haunted us all.
Mood music:
Yesterday, I came across an entire documentary based on that one photo. The program, like the photo, is called “The Falling Man.” Associated Press photographer Richard Drew snapped a series of pictures of a man falling from the North Tower of the World Trade Center at 9:41:15 a.m. during 9-11-01. He was one of about 200 people who jumped from the upper floors, presumably choosing to die this way because it was better than a slower death by smoke and fire.
The program includes all the haunting footage you would expect. But there was something more, something that shook me to the core:
The family of Norberto Hernandez, the man initially identified as the man in the photo, couldn’t accept that it was him, because as Christians, they believe suicide in any circumstance is a mortal sin — a ticket straight to hell.
Though the identity is still not 100 percent certain, it is now widely accepted that the falling man was Jonathan Briley, a 43-year-old employee of the Windows on the World restaurant.
The stigma around suicide is something I’ve wrestled with for nearly 15 years, since my best friend took his life. As a devout Catholic, I’m well aware of what the church says about suicide.
Then there’s the matter of people who know they are going to die and decide to go out there own way, as many 9-11 victims apparently chose to do.
Were they suicides, fitting the criteria of that mortal sin?
I would say no. I’m sure most of them didn’t wake up that morning with plans to die, especially by their own hand.
Terrorists sealed their fate, and, knowing they were going to die, made a choice on how to end it.
The episode:
We’ve heard a lot about courage that day, and there was plenty of it all around the world. Obviously, there were the firefighters, police officers and civilians who kept climbing the towers knowing they would probably die. They got other people out before thinking of themselves.
But there’s another kind of courage people often don’t think about. It’s the courage of accepting your fate and and dying with your dignity intact.
In the program, one survivor recalled looking up at the people hanging out the windows of the upper floors. She looked up, made the sign of The Cross, then lifted her arms and let go.
That’s not someone giving up and choosing suicide.
That’s someone with enough Faith to decide it’s ok to let go and let God.
When my OCD was at its worst, fear, anxiety and paranoia crippled me. People who didn’t share my ideas were enemies out to destroy me. It was never true, but a damaged mind concocts crazy shit.
Mood music:
http://youtu.be/IQHqJiebKKA
I call this Nixon-itis. Richard M. Nixon trusted no one. He saw conspiracies everywhere. Opponents were enemies to destroy before they could destroy him. It’s the stuff the enemies lists and the Watergate cover-up were made of. A favorite book on the subject is Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America by Rick Perlstein.
Here are four personality traits of Nixon-itis and ways I try to fight it.
Inanimate objects attack when I enter the room.
Whenever my car broke down or I stubbed my toe walking into a chair, those objects were, in my eyes, sentient beings out to fuck with me. My solution has been to yell at the objects or punch them. I put quite a dent in the roof of my first car, a 1983 Ford LTD station wagon with a constantly flooded carburetor.
Attempted remedy: These days, when a device malfunctions or I stub a toe, I remind myself that these aren’t living things and therefore can’t possibly be out to hurt me. There are still days I forget, but only momentarily.
Co-workers are back-stabbing SOBs.
Work environments all have their stresses, and when colleagues are tasked with competing objectives clashes happen. If you work in sales or marketing at a newspaper, for instance, goals often conflict with the ethics drilled into editorial people. Or you might work for a tech company and come up with an idea that your bosses shoot down. Over time you see these folks as co-conspirators out to make you fail.
Attempted remedy: When someone goes against me in a work setting, I try to look at their own pressures and mandates and realize they’re not out to get me. They’re simply trying to fulfill their own tasks. By seeing their side of things, I find ways to compromise with them. Then we all get something accomplished.
The government’s out to get me.
When life sucks, it’s easy to blame the government for your every misery. You can’t make it because they make you pay taxes. Regulations exist to beat you. I once followed political events as if my life depended on it. As I get older, I become more convinced government affairs have little to do with my day-to-day life. But I know people for whom politics and government are very personal, dangerous matters that lead to hatred.
Attempted remedy: I stopped watching news programs. I no longer subscribe to Time or Newsweek. I still scan headlines so I have a general sense of what’s going on. But I’m largely detached from it all — and much less paranoid.
My family wants to kill me and take my money and kids.
In every family there’s dysfunction. When loved ones can’t reconcile their differences, emotions boil over and fry the brain, leading to all manner of irrational behavior. Parents who go through a bad divorce are a good example. They’re so bitter with each other that they see every differing opinion as a plot. Maybe it’s a scheme to leave you homeless and destitute. Maybe it’s to poison you so you’ll die in your sleep. Maybe it’s to poison everyone against you. As ridiculous as those notions are, they become feasible if you are at odds with a former loved one. Then you try to hurt that person back, using the children as weapons.
Attempted remedy: Like the second remedy, I try harder to see the other person’s side of things. I try to be more forgiving and accepting and no longer see family I don’t get along with as enemies. But the art of compromise in this arena is something I haven’t even come close to mastering.
People are always shocked to hear I used to be Jewish but became Catholic. They want to know how the hell that happened. Here’s my story — an important part of which is how my conversion actually gave me a better appreciation for my Jewish roots.
Mood music:
Truth be told, I didn’t appreciate being Jewish when I was a kid. Our family observed the Jewish holidays on a secular level that had little to do with spirituality. Each December, we put up a Christmas tree (my father jokingly called it a Hanukkah bush) because most other people did so. That was a secular, cultural act as well.
In recent years, my father has grown in his faith, probably because of the three strokes that left him sitting in a rehab center in Swampscott, Mass. It’s a Jewish rehab with a room for services, and those Friday and Saturday services became the big thing he looked forward to all week. I’m glad to see his deepening faith, because it was always hard to tell where he stood during my younger years. He has always believed in God, but other than the high holidays and some of the obligations of childhood, God usually didn’t have much to do with our upbringing.
On the high Jewish holidays, we did attend service at an old temple in Lynn, Mass.
When my brother Michael had his Bar Mitzvah in 1979, it was a big, huge deal. The reception was bigger than most wedding receptions I’ve been to. I was 9 and he was 13, which is typically the age when a kid undergoes the rite of passage. But I was 13 when Michael died, so having a Bar Mitzvah was the last thing on earth my angry, rebellious younger self wanted.
My father eventually made me do the Bar Mitzvah when I was 16. It was done in the old Lynn temple. The rabbi pointed at a few sentences that were Hebrew but written out so I could say them.
“Just recite these when I tell you to,” he said.
“What do they mean?” I asked.
“Don’t worry about it. Just read it at the part of the ceremony when I tell you to,” he said.
The rabbi was cutting me a lot of slack. He knew I was embarrassed to be doing this so late and wanted to make it as painless for me as possible. I appreciated that immensely. But by the time I entered adulthood, the Jewish faith had failed to permeate my soul.
Fast forward to 1993.
Erin and I start dating, and on the day she takes me home to meet her family, pork chops are on the menu. My future father-in-law takes Erin aside, and, somewhat panicked, asks: “Wait a minute. Isn’t he Jewish? He can’t eat pork shops.”
I ate the pork chops, and, about a month later, attended a Mass at what is now my home church. Something about it interested me, because I frequently came back.
I spent the next decade in the religious wilderness. I went to the occasional Mass, but usually when Erin went, I stayed behind.
Meanwhile, between 1994 and 2003, my great-grandmother, grandfather and both grandmothers died, and their funerals soured me on the Jewish faith more than ever. There was no family rabbi, so we hired one for each funeral service. They’d come and ask about the newly deceased, and during the funeral would talk about everything they had been told about the person.
I thought it was all a bunch of bullshit, not seeing at the time that the problem wasn’t the faith, but how my family observed it, which was not much.
I started going to church regularly when Sean was born, and sometime between 2001 and 2005, something struck a chord and made me decide to become a Catholic. Erin never forced it on me or made it a condition of our getting married, though we did agree to bring the children up Catholic.
I slowly inched toward my Faith over time, and my battle with OCD marked a turning point. Somewhere in the summer of 2001, I started to feel the need to explore my faith and see where it would lead. By 2005, I was going through the Right of Christian Initiation for Adults (RCIA). In 2006, I was Baptized a Catholic.
Part of my OCD therapy involved relentless self criticism and loathing. Self-hatred is not too strong a description. I was so convinced that I was flawed beyond repair that I simply plowed along with my self-destructive behavior. I couldn’t get out of my own way.
Catholic conversion entered the picture because, as I was peeling back layer after layer in the struggle to find myself, I found that I simply couldn’t get there without help from a higher power. In 12-step programs like Overeaters Anonymous and Alcoholics Anonymous, a central theme is that you need to put all your trust in a higher power.
Through the struggles, my beliefs have come into sharper focus. And something unexpected happened: I came to appreciate my Jewish roots in ways I never could as a kid.
One of the reasons is that my conversion involved a deep dive into The Old Testament, the first five books of which — Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, book of Numbers and Deuteronomy — comprise the Torah. The struggles of the Jewish people is something I appreciate and identify with more than ever. Without the education I had on the road to Catholicism, I’m not sure if that appreciation would have materialized.
I’ve learned that some of the central virtues of Christianity are rooted in Jewish teachings, particularly justice, truth, peace, love, kindness and compassion. I try to live by those virtues every day, though I admittedly come up short some days.
People always ask how my parents felt about my becoming a Catholic. My mother didn’t seem to mind, but then she married an Irish Catholic more than 30 years ago. My father didn’t seem to mind. His view of God has always been broader than the Jewish teachings he grew up with and tried to pass on to us kids. One day the subject of religious denominations came up and he said, in his typically unfiltered manner, “Won’t people be shocked after they drop dead to discover it (the different denominations) all comes from the same place.”
Some people want to debate me on my beliefs, but I don’t give in. I’m fully comfortable with my faith and don’t need to explain it to anyone.
For the most part, though, people show the proper respect. My friends are all over the place when it comes to religion. I count atheists, Protestants, Mormons and Wiccans among my closest friends.
Sometimes, it leads to some enlightening discussions. One of my closest friends did the exact opposite of me and converted to the Jewish faith. We’ve talked at length about the differences and similarities between our faith and have found much in common.
Jewish and Catholic guilt, for example, are pretty much based on the same things.
One time at lunch, I asked my friend the question that was burning in my head:
“So, for an adult who becomes a Jew, you have to get circumsized, right?” I asked.
“Well,” he said between bites of his sandwich, “They just sort of poke it.”
I’ve written previously about how my OCD gives me the tendency to latch onto certain subjects and research them obsessively. Examples include the history of the Manson and Amityville murder cases, to the point of getting a closer look at sites related to those cases.
I’ve always considered this obsession harmless. It makes me read a lot of books on the subjects and visit places when the travel schedule permits, but what’s wrong with that? The obsession expands into other areas of America’s past, including White House history. That one got me in trouble once but also led to a West Wing tour for Erin, the kids and me.
Now I find myself captivated by the history of Whitey Bulger, his associates and their arrangement with the Boston FBI.
Mood music:
I’ve always had more than a passing interest in Whitey and his brother Billy, who ruled the Massachusetts statehouse with a corrupt iron fist for decades. But the recent trial of Whitey rekindled my interest. I recently read Black Mass, probably the best one on the subject, and now I find myself Googling everything related to the subject.
Since I live and work in the Boston area, I now have the compulsion to drive around to every place connected to the case: the Lancaster Street garage Bulger and his associates used as a front, the South Boston liquor store he extorted from a husband and wife immediately after they opened for business, the places where his victims were exhumed.
These outings are always more fun with friends, especially those with photography talents.
People often ask me if I get offended by jokes and movies about OCD. The answer is usually no, because I think it’s healthy to see the humor in one’s afflictions, and the movies, when done right, educate the masses on what it’s like to suffer from this scourge. But one thing does piss me off.
It’s when people say they “went OCD” after doing such routine tasks as cleaning their house, cooking or completing a work project.
Mood music:
http://youtu.be/72rWAe0pUdQ
When someone says they “got all OCD” with particular tasks, I usually keep my mouth shut. In most cases no one gets hurt from such talk and everyone I know who has tossed around the acronym so casually have done so without malice, and are good people I’m grateful to call friends, colleagues and family.
But I also think if someone is going to say they have OCD, they should know what the disorder really entails. Having a Type-A personality doesn’t cut it.
Sure, there are parts of my own OCD that look like Type-A activity. I tend to swing for the fences when a task is before me, and I have had a lot of career success that was in part fueled by the freakish drive I get when the OCD runs hot.
But there’s more to it. Much more.
For me, OCD also means crippling obsessions and compulsive behavior: worry that has spun out of control and made me physically sick. The itching urge to check doors over and over to make sure they’re locked or check my laptop bag multiple times to make sure the computer is in fact in there. The nagging itch to go on a binge or spend money on something I can’t afford.
I’ve learned to manage these darker aspects through therapy, medicine and life experiences. But I never forget the fear and anxiety I lived with for years as the OCD spun furiously beyond my control.
I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy. Obviously, I sure as hell wouldn’t wish it on friends and loved ones.
So next time you describe how OCD you are, think about what that really entails.
