Months after the twin towers collapsed, Thomas Fiffer’s life imploded. It took him years to figure out why.
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I didn’t know it at the time, but 9/11 was my breaking point, the day I found my North Star and as a result, changed course.
It didn’t happen suddenly, the way the towers fell, but the collapse, the implosion, hit with the same devastating impact.
The day after, all I could think of was getting back on the train. I had to … because I knew full well if I didn’t, I might never go back.
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The day after, all I could think of was getting back on the train. I had to, had to go back to work in the city as if nothing had happened, because I knew full well if I didn’t, I might never go back. In a nation suddenly at war, I soldiered on with millions of New Yorkers, a proud member of the walking-pretending-not-to-be-wounded battalion.
I walked a pair of work boots over to St. Vincent’s for the workers who were clearing all the rubble.
I placed my hand over my heart as I looked at all the missing person posters, knowing all those people weren’t coming back.
I shuddered as warplanes, a day too late to have protected us, a day too late to have dropped the suicidal jetliners from the sky, streaked fiercely, proudly overhead.
I gave a homegrown rose to my neighbor, Elisabeth, whose Greenwich Village apartment now overlooked the smoking ruins of what had been, and she told me later that she put it in her window, a single stem of hope and beauty in the face of such consummate ugliness and despair.
I organized a clothing drive for the newly, indefinitely homeless condo owners in Battery Park City.
And I tried to focus on my work, while trying to think through the unthinkable. Not to understand why. Simply to accept that the act had occurred.
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I sunk deeper and deeper into a vortex fueled by the forces of loss, damage, and broken dreams, of interrupted and corrupted trajectory, just like the path of the planes the terrorists rerouted.
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Slowly, as I tried to put my life back together, to reassemble pieces shaken loose by the blast and others brought to light by the burning fireball I saw erupting from the South Tower, my surface coalesced and hardened while everything beneath it grew soft, dispersed, and fell apart. I suffered a serious demotion at work. I was passed over for a coveted position at my club, one I had spent years working towards. Relations with a next-door neighbor worsened to the point of physical violence. And my marriage began to suffer mutual breaches of trust. The bright spot in my universe, my first son, conceived on the morning of 9/11 and born nine months later, shone, but my joy in everything faded, and my world darkened as I sunk deeper and deeper into a vortex fueled by the forces of loss, damage, and broken dreams, of interrupted and corrupted trajectory, just like the path of the planes the terrorists rerouted to strike and destroy their targets.
I didn’t relate any of what I was experiencing to 9/11. I had gone back to work, the very next day, just as I had gone back to school with a smile on my face a week after my father died, and I thought I had absorbed, could absorb, the shock.
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I spent a night in the local hospital, disturbed as much by my own existence in its current state as by the snoring drunk on the next cot sleeping off his bender.
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Weeks, months, and ultimately years passed before one night, the tenth of September 2005, after returning home, I lost it, completely and totally lost touch with reality for the most frightening hour of my life. I can’t describe that hour for you now. Even more than five years later, it’s still too raw, too personal, too unfinished and unintegrated to be shared. The person I was during that hour was not me, and yet it was me, in a way that I had not, for many painful, suppressed eons, been myself. Fortunately, I did not hurt anyone. I was taken from my home in handcuffs, and I spent a night in the local hospital, unable to sleep under the rough, insufficient sheet of aberration, disturbed as much by my own existence in its current state as by the snoring drunk on the next cot sleeping off his bender.
I got help. Good help. Really excellent help. And for the first time, in contrast to the misleading, symptom-treating help I’d received previously, the cure started working. Slowly, working. I knew I had a long journey ahead, and I often described it to my therapist as my struggle to surface from the depths of the ocean so I could once again breathe, encounter light, and swim. It took another four years to break through and emerge into the icy chop (I had envisioned calm, tropical waters), and another two after that to get my groove back, to become a champion swimmer again. And there were false starts, lungfuls of fluid, and periods of treading water along the way. The upside of this sort of journey back to the surface and the light is that after you complete the hardest part, you begin to feel as if you can walk on water, and the phrase “the unbearable lightness of being” takes on new meaning.
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Crucial parts of me had been knocked down, terrorized, reduced to rubble, and it was up to me, and only me, to rebuild them.
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Looking back, I realize now—having just expressed it this way to a colleague at work—that the damage New York, my adopted city, my first love of places, suffered on 9/11 echoed all the damage I had suffered in my life—from loss of father at age nine, to career and extracurricular setbacks, to the long dysfunctional marriage in which I played my own part. Crucial parts of me had been knocked down, terrorized, reduced to rubble, and it was up to me, and only me, to rebuild them. I had to find the strength to pick up, move, and reassemble the pieces; the patience to try and retry endless permutations and combinations until things fit back together again; the wisdom to know where to start, what to undo and redo, when to fashion a new piece in the forge of my psyche, and when to stop with the understanding that I was seeking function not perfection; and the grace to forgive any and all, including myself, who had contributed to my destruction.
I like to explain to friends now that I was lost and had to draw my own map. An equally appealing—and more contextually appropriate—metaphor is to portray myself as the architect of my own reconstruction.
The twin towers are no more, and on each anniversary of 9/11, two beams of light rise where they once stood. I am also not the person I was on that morning, before the towers fell. I cannot rebuild that Tom. I am though, a new person, rising from the ashes of Ground Zero, a person who is finally the person I have always wanted to become.
This post was originally published as “Delayed Response” on the Tom Aplomb blog.
Photo—glynlowe/Flickr
You have described the journey of every addict or alcoholic who had the courage to attempt recovery. I suspect you have also described the journey of most sufferers of PTSD. There are certain things our minds cannot process. . But we are capable of coming back from the brink. And often we’re better upon return than when we left.