Walking with Ghosts — a 9–11 Remembrance
By: Thomas D. Kirsch
Tags: 9 11 Attacks, 9 11 Memorial, PTSD, Mental Health

Thomas D. Kirsch

The Pile, September 2001

Twenty years ago, the church sat surrounded by its ancient graveyard, dust-shrouded, locked, and empty. Inside the black wrought iron fence, the grayed-out grass and trees looked as lifeless as the worn tombstones. On the other side, to the west, recovery workers like myself choked in the same gray-brown dust, churned up by the work at Ground Zero and with each step we took. The air was thick with the continuous roar of heavy equipment, the pungent smoke of hidden fires, and an unseen, pressing sorrow. When the bell clanged, it meant they were bringing out the dead.

***

For over six months after the 9–11 terror attacks on the World Trade Center towers, more than one hundred thousand professionals and volunteers worked at the site, putting out fires, clearing the rubble, recovering bodies — police, fire, EMS, construction workers, engineers, truckers, American Red Cross volunteers, and many others. We acted like everything was normal.

“It’s just a job.”

“I don’t need to wear that stupid mask.”

“Another day, another dollar.”

We were fools.

Since then, eighty-one thousand have enrolled in the World Trade Center Health Program, set up to track the physical and mental health impact of working in that jumble of concrete and steel. The daily exposures to the destruction of a world, mass death, and the toxic dust and smoke have taken their toll. Responders suffered long-term health effects that include increased heart disease, respiratory illnesses, cancer, accelerated aging, and even permanent changes to the brain. The mental impacts are even more pervasive — PTSD, depression, and early cognitive decline. As a result, the September 11th Victims Compensation Fund has awarded $7.76 billion to over 34,400 responders who have become sick or died.

***

I have responded to dozens of disasters throughout the world since 9–11 and carry the burden of all. But my ghosts first gathered there, in the stench of that smoking rubble, with the clang of that bell. The weight of it all accumulated until my marriage collapsed and I struggled to function at work. I took a sabbatical, worked overseas, and then spent two months in the wilderness, seeking some answers. After walking nine hundred miles on the Pacific Crest Trail, I thought I had learned much, solved a little, maybe found a new path. I decided to finish my journey where it actually began — Lower Manhattan, on West Street just south of Vesey. It seemed right — walking New York City into a resolved past would complete the circle. Bury the ghosts. I had not been back since 2001.

***

On September 11th, 2001, I woke in my suburban home after a late shift in the emergency department to the strained voices of stunned announcers on my radio-alarm. I sat for hours, unshowered, unshaven, as endless replays of planes full of people disintegrated into giant fireballs and shards of buildings and bodies fluttered to the ground. Trapped by fire, people jumped, tumbling endless seconds, like leaves falling from a tree of smoke. Then the slow-motion horror of the towers, one following the other, crumbling into themselves, leaving nothing but a giant cloud of brown-gray dust that swallowed the tip of Manhattan. The security of life in America, the safe world I thought I had created for my family, had crumbled with those falling towers. We were, all of us, living in a new world.

When the travel ban was lifted, I flew to the American Red Cross headquarters in Washington, D.C., to respond as their Volunteer Medical Director. I took the train to New York City, the same train through the same rolling suburbia I had taken dozens of times. But when the city came into view, an unrecognized anxiety shivered me — the skyline seemed vaguely wrong, as if the island was tilted, the southern tip floating. It took seconds before I recognized the absence — the mass of Twin Towers no longer weighted the downtown — all that was left was a ghostly plume of pale-gray smoke.

Times Square was a funeral, everything subdued, solemn. The west side of lower Manhattan was closed off south of Chambers Street. Somber people gathered at the guarded north entrance on Greenwich, watching, whispering, praying, hoping. Stepping through that barricade felt like entering a cemetery.

The ‘Respite Center’ was inside the gate on the closed campus of St. John’s University. It was a retreat for the responders, with a cafeteria, places to rest and take a break, a first aid station, and tables of donated gifts and food. Exhausted workers still wearing hardhats chatted at tables or napped on recliners. The Red Cross nurses spent most of their time flushing the dust that caked the workers’ eyes.

A hundred yards south, the site was another world — ‘The Pile’ to the responders — a chaotic jumble of wreckage that had once been glistening white, sky-high towers. It was at once mundane and horrible — a demolition site with the usual trucks, cranes, and hardhat workers. But it was also the rubble of our beliefs in a safe world; a pile of death with the bodies of 2,753 slaughtered people intermingled in the debris. The wisps of smoke from the fires raging below like their fleeting souls. It was a massive, smoking heap of jumbled girders and shattered concrete that dwarfed the tiny workers. American flags fluttered throughout and hung from the nearby buildings. To the south and east, the buildings stood like silent mourners, wreathed with protective black netting like a widow’s gossamer veil. The base of the North Tower was outlined by angry knives of giant metal shards that had been its cladding, stabbing dozens of feet into the sky. The South Tower was nothing but a confusion of rubble beside the vast hole that led to the destroyed train station.

Like ants, workers struggled through the wreckage. Giant cranes lifted debris. Firefighters poured water into rubble gaps to quench the uncontained inferno below. Twelve or more hours a day, set to the scorching, filthy, and soul-crushing task of bringing order to this chaos. Digging through millions of tons of debris to discover crushed bodies or pieces of flesh and bone — throats burning from the foul smoke, eyes stung by dust, hearts heavy with the weight of the ghosts.

It is the smell that stayed with me, an acrid, stinging mixture of burned jet fuel, dirt, and cement. Perhaps flesh. Dark-haunting odor-memories buried deep in my brain rise now and again in odd settings, triggered by obscure smells, sights, or sounds to unearth emotions that smother me.

West Street was The Pile’s thoroughfare. It had been reduced to a truck-choked dirt road that split The Pile from the battered buildings to the west. I traversed its grimy maze many times a day to get to the aid stations and attend meetings at the fire station to the south, distributing dust masks to the responders along the way. The walk was a descent into the ruins of our lost world. The weight of the ghosts grew with each somber until my feet became lead and my back hunched under their invisible burden.

Occasionally, the bell rang. Work stopped. Except for the water pouring from the firehoses, the area became eerily still. From somewhere in the complicated jumble, firefighters would emerge carrying a flag-draped stretcher. A priest followed, offering last rights. Another hero’s body. Or another crushed piece. The police, firefighters, and veterans saluted; the rest of us bowed our heads, shuffling nervously at the nearness of mass death. The tears help flush our eyes.

Sometimes I walked to get away, wandering the abandoned streets of lower Manhattan to be alone. It was like a post-apocalyptic movie — towering buildings hemmed empty, silent streets; a ghost town thickly covered in the dust of the destroyed towers that stirred in gentle swirls with each step. There were scattered shrines for the lost, entire walls covered with photographs of young, smiling faces, with scrawled, plaintive messages from family and friends begging for information. Pleas of false hope, disbelief, and sorrow. As hope faded, the walls became monuments for the dead, heaped with flowers, mats of melted candles, and piles of teddy bears. The ghostly photo-eyes followed as you passed, pleading, wordless. Their presence an ache. That’s where I stumbled on that stone colonial church surrounded by an ancient, tree-shaded graveyard east of the site. It stood elegant and forlorn, an anomaly in a neighborhood of giant glass towers, as if awaiting the return of its parishioners or the thousands of souls lingering nearby.

***

The final leg of my thousand-mile walk began at my mother-in-law’s 79th Street apartment on a blustery-cold, early Fall morning. I headed south on 2nd Avenue, an unhip boulevard where modern glass and marble buildings alternate with scattered pockets of 19th-century red brick tenements with corroding black-metal fire escapes cascading down their facades. Miles fell away as I passed through the microneighborhoods on the Eastside — the Bowery, Chinatown, and ‘Two Bridges’ where the Brooklyn traffic rumbles overhead like distant thunder in the mountains.

As I neared Battery Park at the tip of Manhattan, hundreds of people speaking a dozen languages crowded the sidewalk. Walking slowed to a jerky crawl. A heaviness descended. I caught sight of the Freedom Tower and stood suspended at the edge of a long-buried past as crowds slid around me. Visions of The Pile flashed. Hidden memories coalesced — thick dust covering everything, blowing trash on empty streets, the acrid smell of burnt concrete and death.

I froze. Instead of moving forward, I turned away. Instead of walking into a resolved past, I ran parallel. At each cross street, the ghosts of 9–11 tugged. Their souls gathered as I receded. Each step pulled me deeper into the past — a long-forgotten building brought a crystal memory of a wall covered with pictures of the lost. The sour stench of wilted flowers. Dusty, limp teddy bears. Fading photo faces now erased. Every smiling tourist seemed unholy.

***

Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) results from a traumatic or terrifying event outside of our normal experiences. It causes intrusive and distressing memories of the trauma, sleep disruptions, and overreactions to perceived signs of danger and leads to withdrawal from human interactions, dissatisfaction with life, and difficulty in relationships. Mental illnesses were the most common health effect of the 9/11 attacks — up to 20% of victims and responders had PTSD symptoms more than five years later and 15% after ten years. More suffered from depression or had twice the rate of binge drinking. PTSD was more than twice as likely in non-traditional responders (construction workers and volunteers as opposed to police and fire). PTSD risks increased for the responders who arrived early, worked longer, and were exposed to death and human remains. Unrecognized, unacknowledged for years, I became increasingly angry and withdrawn until it all broke.

***

I’d come to Manhattan to finish a long walk and inward journey. I thought I had grown, learned to adapt, that all the trauma was behind me. And then I slammed into the past.

As I hurried north to leave, I ran straight into the church, ‘St. Paul’s Chapel of Trinity Church,’ the same locked and dust-shrouded place from so long-ago. Everything around was normal — traffic, busy shops, and shouting street vendors. It all shrank away as the past beckoned. I hesitated, then entered heavy, hunched. The cemetery’s thin, black wrought-iron fence seemed to swallow the city’s noise, and I was engulfed.

Looking across the cemetery to the west, I could almost see The Pile, hear the dust-stifled work. Feel the weight of the ghosts. All of it was just over there, past the tombstones and trees, down that street, no more than a couple hundred yards away. I stood alone, shrouded in my selfish sorrow, but there were so many more who lost loved ones or dealt with death and destruction for months — tens of thousands of victims, responders, family, and friends who couldn’t leave the weight behind. So many living, carrying the burden of so many ghosts — still trying to walk back to their lives before 9–11.

The scene blurred from long-buried tears. Beside me, a bundled-warm little boy looked up quietly, studying my face as I stood lost in another time. His soft, sad eyes lingered over his shoulder as his mother pulled him away from the strange man. Unable to move nearer to my past, I turned back into the dark church, pausing in its gray light long enough to compose myself. And then plunged back into the living city.

I walked almost frantic to escape. But the streets were crowded — too many people, too many voices, too little room. I put on my headphones to drown their noise, then charged through the throng, still trying to shed the ghosts. I didn’t stop walking until the pain in my feet was the only thing I could attend to, twenty miles at least. But it still wasn’t enough.