Director Laurie Kahn wrote the following post only months after the events that transpired on September 11th, 2001. It has been twelve years since these words were penned, but their insights and emotions still ring true.
I have returned to New York many times
since September 11 and always find myself wandering back to the damage. The
streets surrounding ground zero are littered with memorials. Teddy bears with
red white and blue ribbons around their necks. Plaques with the names of police
and firefighters who died in the World Trade Center. Street corner memorials
with wilted flowers and names of loved ones scribbled on cardboard with frayed
edges. A bicycle chained to a lamppost, draped with flowers and a red scarf,
and dedicated to a bicycle messenger. Construction workers with pictures sewn
on the back of their work clothes of a friend lost in the disaster. Circling
the streets you know something horrific has happened. Grief is in the air.
Maybe a little less palpable now than in September or October but it is
undeniable. Every time I revisit the memorials it is strangely reassuring. I
worry as I age I may become one of those people who spend their spare time going to funerals of
people they barely knew. Communities gathering, praying, grieving and
collectively honoring their losses – it soothes me. Pain mitigated by the
embrace of friends and neighbors.
It is the unwitnessed losses that
trouble me. The ones that are hidden. Where communities don’t gather and tears
are not shed. The places in which there are no memorials.
I am haunted by the unnamed losses of my
clients. The loneliness that comes when your public cheeriness is camouflage
for the pain inside. The isolation that comes when the stories of your
childhood are riddled with violence and abuse, and don’t make good dinner
conversation. Not knowing the comfort of friendship because your desire for
closeness is coupled with fear. The loss of pleasure because you experience
shame with sexual desire. Not finding relationships that nourish because again
and again you choose ones that mirror what you learned in an abusive family.
The loss of not having had the comfort of an adult when you were in pain. The
loss of not being a virgin when you chose your first lover.
My heart aches and I wonder where are
the memorials, the teddy bears, the plaques with the names of those who lost
their childhoods. Those who have had to resurrect from the ashes a capacity to
love, a sense of self and dignity. I sit in my office behind closed doors. I
companion my clients; together we walk through the debris of betrayals. I know
there is a need greater than what I can provide. My compassion and skills are
not adequate to the magnitude of the developmental and psychological scars of
their traumas. The stories are hard to hear, yet I wonder why are so many
people willing, even clamoring, to witness the site of the terrorist attack on
New York and so unwilling to know and witness the losses suffered by childhood
abuse.
I want to assure my clients that their
grief is not theirs to bear alone. It belongs to all of us. I want to tell them
that there should be a moment of silence every day in every community where a
child’s spirit was lost. That child we all know or have glanced at or have been
ourselves, the one whose eyes stopped sparkling with curiosity and wonder. I
want to tell them if they listen very carefully they can hear a village
weeping.