20 Years: A September 11th reflection

20 Years

Upon the 20 year anniversary?of 9/11, I am thinking about mourning, about trauma, healing and recovery. 20 years is a period long enough to give birth to, raise and educate a child, and for them to leave home as an adult. A complete cycle of infancy, childhood, young adulthood.?

I, like so many others, remember that day vividly, painted as it is upon my memory. In first period English class, held in the library because there were so many students at my school, classmates were poached, one by one, out of class by frantic parents. School ended and we were bused home early, in confusion. I walked up my driveway, of my childhood home where I am now writing this, and saw first my Dad, raking our hilly lawn, his face awash with solemn grief, quite stern. Above him, I then noticed the gigantic plumes and trails of smoke from the towers, floating south to us in New Jersey.?

The below piece in?The Atlantic?details one family's struggle to move on after losing their son that?dark day. There's no shame in grief or mourning. But what is grief, if not the perseverance of love??

The shame is allowing grief to stifle you, in a shell of fear, living out a hollow life from that point onward. Every therapist, family member or friend can support you and show you routes toward healing, but no one can walk through that door for you. You have to choose to do it, pass through the threshold and continue walking until you transcend your own grief, watching it from a far (witness consciousness) rather than being engulfed by it.?

Undermining and minimizing one's grief doesn't help; gratitude does help, massively.

A loss reconfigures your identity: Are you still a parent if your child has passed? Are you still a spouse if you're separated or widowed??

Our worth is inextricably linked to our identity, for many. Identities are centered around work (career achievements) or around relationships (family achievements). Thus losses are so shattering as they threaten us existentially, and force us to confront unblinkingly the painful confusion of who we are now, without that beloved person or job or role.?

We see conspiracies take hold- like the father's 9/11 fixation amidst his bereavement- when our brains are so rattled by shock, fear and uncertainty that this brainwashed obsessiveness is a distraction and relief. It is no coincidence the rise of QAnon and Alt Right fanaticism corresponded with Covid, a period?of prolonged global grief.?

Our task ahead is to rebuild better, which requires one heck of a reckoning, looking squarely into our flaws and faults and having the bravery not to look away. Can we muster?the compassion and patience to listen without judgment and criticism? This is only one step.?

We all?know many people who've endured trauma. I've had to repeatedly hedge and check my own views about healing, for which I recommend meditation, yoga, journaling, church and faith life, retreats, traveling solo in nature, leaning upon friends and family, for which I discourage choosing a pill or drug. Regardless of the tools employed for healing, there's no quick fix or magic bullet. One way past grief is to dive in and go directly through it. How excruciating this can be, and re-traumatizing, so it's essential it happen at one's own pace, with whatever methods are best and healthiest for each individual. I choose not to ever use pills or drugs, but they have helped friends whom I love dearly. I'm thankful for anything that helps.?

Following a tough loss, the People Who Want Something come out of the woodwork. "Are you ready?? Are you better?!" they ask. "Move on already!" they judge. A pressure release valve to people's poking, which can be in turn entitlement (to your time, attention, body, work), coercion, or guilt-induction, is my Boulder friend's rallying cry: Do you know what you owe all these f-ing people? Absolutely?nothing.?

Whatever you do "owe," it's to yourself, to not give up on yourself, to push yourself, to be fiercely unremittingly devoted, to keep trying-adapting-changing-acclimating-pivoting, until you are back to the best version of yourself, thriving and flourishing rather than stagnant or languishing. Who else has found themselves gobsmacked when people matter of factly take it upon themselves to tell you what you can't or shouldn't do? This also is a rallying cry, a challenge to prove detractors wrong.?

The limit does not exist.?

www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/09/twenty-years-gone-911-bobby-mcilvaine/619490/?