This afternoon, my wife had gone to the store and I flipped on the television. I think I was looking for the weather this weekend for an event, but it was on a news channel, and they were talking about the pear tree that survived 911 and has been replanted at Ground Zero. I think Obama visited there today at the site of the tree. In the course of things, they showed a picture from 911 – girders jutting upward amid the smoke after the towers fell. And I was overcome.
On the morning of 911, a patient came in and said something was happening in New York. She’d heard it on the radio. Did I have a t.v.? We went to our break room where there was a t.v. and saw the smoke, the second attack, the buildings come down. My partners and patients came and went. Nobody said much after they caught on to what was happening. Some patients needed to be seen as usual, and I did that. Otherwise it was as it was for all of us – dreamy, foggy, looking for something to say. Nothing fit.
In the months that followed, I began to watch the news in a different way. I was horrified by the Iraq thing and hoped beyond hope that my intuition was wrong. As time drug by, I became political in a different way. When Bush got reelected in 2004, I had the only episode of clinical depression I’ve ever had, and this blog was the treatment as I followed every blog and news story that came along about the decit that went into getting us in the Iraq War – writing post after post about the details we learned more. When Bush and Cheney left office, I followed the Recession revelations for a time, but then got diverted into matters Psychiatric.
Today, it was as if I’d really never felt 911 and it just overwhelmed me. Our whole world was changed and is still changed because of the actions of one guy with an obsession. I have no idea about Osama Bin Laden, what made him be or do what he was and did. I guess his death allowed me to finally feel the overwhelming impact and meaninglessness of 911. How we’re still trying to dig our way out of all the rubble from that day. I don’t even know if there was anything to learn from it. I’ve seen people in treatment overcome by memory, usually a memory they already knew, but the significance of it or the emotion from it had been missing, or maybe never felt. I didn’t feel a weight lift. But I did feel that 911 has been a buzz in my attitudes and life view all this time, all the time – a driver mostly not acknowledged.
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