Love and Grief

Love and Grief It took a few days…after…for the sky to return to blue. The subways and trading floors refilled with bodies and dreams all quietly trying to find some way to more. More wealth, more laughter. More time and life. And America, after taking a sucker punch for the ages, staggered to its feet. But death is not so easily boxed up and buried. Worry appeared where innocence and invulnerability had been. It mixed with rage and righteousness and hung in the air, just like the fog of invisible asbestos. My oldest friend John called me that morning from his Wall St. office. His voice shook with emotion as he watched the second plane explode any pretense of peace. Later, catching his reflection in a window he saw that his blue suit had become entirely white, his face chalky, covered with a mist of dry wall and asbestos. "I looked like my own ghost," he told me before he walked off the island and caught the last train home. Neither of us knew then that something smaller and deadly, something like a bomb, had crawled into his chest and began to patiently tick. Years earlier, after school ended, we lived together for a couple years and used to run at night. Like all young men we were in a hurry to catch up to our futures. In the city happiness has a geography. We were sure where it lived. Across the river. So we ran the Bridge at night waiting for the lights to reach out and engulf us. To shine on us. Happiness has always been fast. And hope, as ever, is slow. But, like everyone else we knew, we became chasers. Trying to chase down wealth and love. Trying to outrun doubt and worry. Headed to the bright lights over the bridge each night. And John each night was always faster than me. Always the first home. After a time he began to run toward love. I was his best man. He chased after a family, the tried and truest way to happiness, a wife and home and kids. He believed you have to walk the floor with a baby in hour arms at 3 am and worry about the mortgage before happiness would ever let you close. But me, I wasn’t so sure happiness existed, at least not the way I was told to expect it. And I began chasing words and the light I was sure waited beneath them. I wanted answers for the thorns I had picked up and driven into myself. John eventually ran to Wall Street trying to discover happiness in its cousin Fortune. He took the dawn train in from the island each morning. But my chasing was at night. I was trying to make it dark enough so that the light I was after was unmistakable. I was trying to read God’s blueprint in the eyes of strangers. There is a type of darkness that can tattoo you with a certain kind of beauty. I listened to hope and worry climb over each other trying to reach love in a million stranger’s confessions. It’s been many years now but I still carry all that. Like something mysterious and powerful was carved into my bones, waiting in me still to be deciphered by memory and ink. And life ran on like that for a time. Until that September exploded, 23 years ago today. For a time life seemed to stop. But asking money to wait is like asking light to hold still. It has its own velocity. Wall St. waited ten days, an eternity before reopening. Then the traders and number crunchers and the legions on commission sales guys went back to their desks ...chasing the numbers up and down, trying once more to turn wealth into happiness. Money speaks many languages but it really only knows one word. More. That one word language hollers at old men about empires. And it whispers to young men and women trying to hitch a ride on love to the suburbs. To the corner of happiness and hope. Next to money though, the most common tongue on Wall St. is lying. It comes in many dialects…pitches, rumors, omissions, desperation and self deception wrestling with each other. So that September when the government lied about the air being harmless below Canal St. no one noticed. We all wanted to believe it was a wild sucker punch. One and done. This is an old story. Old stories like this become history and are then forgotten. But it needs to be said. Governments lie. The poisonous truth was in the air, but the lie, just as deadly, was in the airwaves. And many died from the lie. That fall we tore away at grief and tried to forge it into a kind of steel. We took what was left of bone and dust and dragged it to the Staten Island of our memory. And we rebuilt because that’s what we do. Then we buried the rest with the debris of memory. And we pretended that the wars and casualties moved back to where they belong, in caves and far away deserts. We wanted to believe that the dying had been fenced into that one terrible day. But not so fast. The AC ducts began to clog. The air was full of unseen poison.The filters overwhelmed by what was left of asbestos and dry wall and the remains of innocence. Everyone breathed it in and pretended they were just swallowing their doubt. The first responders, driven by rage and patriotism, were first. Cops and firemen developed blood soaked coughs. Then construction workers, used to aching joints, began to feel a dull unrelenting pain they told themselves was age. If you want to find the truth in Lower Manhattan its always in the numbers. It’s in the zeros on a bonus check. It's in the square footage of your office and the digits of your credit line. But that year the truth was in a different kind of number. It was in the sum of persistent coughs and sleepless nights. It was in the fights for breath. And it was in the ever rising cancer deaths that now far outnumber that first terrible day’s toll. The terrorists have long ago fled into infamy and oblivion and another kind of justice. Time stumbled on but the meter still runs on that day. Now, 23 years later, many more have died from the air and the lie, some 20000, than did from the jet fuel and fire. Pancreatic cancer takes many years to become lethal. The toxic remnant of that day mixed with the lie and hid inside thousands. It crawled into my old friend and laid down next to his future. Good and kind men are not granted a reprieve from suffering. His suffering those last few months is a memory now, but my old friend who chased the light with me, in his last days found it difficult to walk at all. But near the end, with courage and will, he somehow walked his little girl into the arms of her new husband. And for a moment or two happiness and light slowed enough to be caught. His was in his children's eyes and in his wife’s love. The truth about love though is it is at once both beautiful and terrible. Love, even the 'take it to your grave kind', demands its price in grief. It's a package deal. And grief, like the truth, beats us up before setting us free. And me? I still lean toward the black and run toward the dawn. Still and forever chasing the light. Under the words. I suppose I always will. I talked to him near the end, like only old friends can. I tell him I hoped he could see his own blessed reflection. Before he becomes his own ghost. I tell him it's like stepping off a curb. Like crossing the bridge at night. You remember. I tell him he's just running ahead in the dark. Heading for the lights. You were always faster, John. Once again you beat me to the other side. Always the first one home. WLM