Preface A few weeks after the attacks of September 11, I set out to explore the human side of the catastrophe. My subjects are the people who remained after the devastation and who are putting their lives back together. This is a book about life going on. September 11 was both a shared national trauma and a unique private tragedy for thousands of families. Not only were the victims innocent citizens but certain communities seemed to be singled out for death in disproportionate numbers. The toll appeared to be particularly heavy in New Jersey. As Jersey newspapers began collecting names and hometowns of those confirmed dead, one town kept surfacing: Middletown. The name rang a bell. Middletown: A Study in Modern American Culture was a famous book that revealed many different aspects of American life in the 1920s through the prism of one small American city in the middle of the country. It occurred to me that we could learn a good deal about American life at the opening of a new millennium through the microcosm of Middletown, New Jersey. Nearly fifty people were robbed from this middle-class commuter suburb and its sister hamlets on the Rumson peninsula by the terrorist attacks twenty miles away at the World Trade Center—the largest concentrated death toll. Those lost included a gung ho Port Authority Police officer who had raced to the scene, single working moms, beloved sports coaches, and a heavy contingent of traders and brokers who worked in the Twin Towers. Most clicked out of their garages in the dark of early morning, took the train or ferry across the river, and clicked back into their garages after dark. They didn’t think they needed to know their neighbors or depend on the community. I began walking the journey of trauma and grieving with some of the victims’ families and survivors, week by week. What would become of the young wives carrying children their husbands would never see, wives who had watched their dreams literally go up in smoke in that amphitheater of death across the river? I remember sitting with a formerly feisty surfer girl, Kristen, as she raked her fingers through her uncombed hair and described a visit to the library. “Where is the book for a thirty-year-old woman with a two-and-a-half-year-old child whose husband was killed by terrorists and who watched it on TV? Where is the book for that?” And yet this same Kristen later channeled her pain into the battle for an independent investigation of the government’s failures to protect its citizens—a battle that led her all the way to the White House. Would the tears ever stop for a middle-aged woman who lost her son only months after her husband walked out on her? Or for the wife so defined by her now-dead husband that the only identity she had left was as the mother of a Down’s syndrome child? How would children make sense of an evildoer called Osama with powers greater even than those of his Hollywood counterpart, Saruman in the Lord of the Rings movies? Was there any light at the end of the tunnel for widowers who felt like Kevin, the forty-two-year-old construction manager, whose greatest remaining wish was to find his dead wife under the rubble so he could lie down beside her and go to sleep to stop the pain? I closely followed selected families of Middletown over the better part of two years. It was a tumultuous passage—through disbelief, passivity, panic attacks, sheer survival, rising anger, deep grieving, and realignment of faith—to the shock of resilience, the secret romances, the discovery of independence, the relapses on the first anniversary, the return of a capacity to love and be loved, and, finally, the commitment to construct a new life. I cannot imagine any greater reassurance of the powers of the human spirit, buttressed by faith, to heal itself. These stories are relevant to many situations less horrific than death by terrorism. We experience many kinds of loss and trauma in life. Within the experiences of the characters I followed is just about every kind of human struggle. It wasn’t only the journey of the bereaved families of Middletown that I wanted to follow. Thousands of witness-survivors were also traumatized, and past experience suggested that they would carry a dangerous burden of guilt. How would religious leaders explain the inexplicable to their depressed flocks? Would mental health professionals accustomed to dealing with “traumas” on the order of divorce and depression be prepared to help people make sense of lives shattered without warning by human missiles propelled out of hate? What would teachers and principals tell their students? Would friends and neighbors emerge to form vital networks of support? How would the corporate leaders calculate their debt to the bereaved families of their deceased employees, weighed in each case against the dire need to protect the corpus of a decimated enterprise? How would the police be changed by spending months of white nights at Ground Zero picking through body parts to find remains of families they knew? They would not emerge from that pit the same people. Who would look after their recovery—an issue that remains a concern? Would the country’s leaders demand investigation of this massive failure of government to discharge its basic duty to provide domestic security? Or would they evade, stonewall, cover up, and use 9/11 for their own political ends? The town itself became a character—a social organism turned inside out. Middletown is like many affluent middle-class American suburbs today, which are not always connected to the cities that spawned them. They appear ideal in good times, but how well equipped are they to absorb trauma? THE RESEARCH PROCESS This book follows more than fifty characters. Their stories run parallel and often intertwine. To follow them all on a month-by-month basis required more than nine hundred recorded interviews, as well as many follow-up phone calls and e-mails. But the word “interviews” doesn’t begin to convey the trust that had to be earned and the emotional nakedness that was allowed by the people who agreed to participate in this book. Over the months we developed a special kinship. My investment in them extended beyond the writing of a book. I wanted to know their future, at least insofar as previous experience could help them navigate their ongoing passage through trauma and grieving toward a renewal of hope. I went back to interview families and survivors from the Oklahoma City terrorist bombing of 1995, and even further back to families robbed of spouses and children by the terrorist attack on Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988. The thoughts, feelings, dialogue, and actions attributed to people in the book were described to me in interviews by the participants themselves. Thoughts and feelings are italicized, but all have been verified by the individuals themselves. Apart from the Holocaust, there is no clinical study of the families of victims of traumatic mass murder, especially where there are no intact bodies or only remnants. There appear to be no data on what kinds of treatments work specifically for victims of terrorism in the context of living with an ongoing threat. Another vacuum in our knowledge about coping with man-made trauma is how to protect against vicarious trauma. Those in the helping professions who step forward to offer clinical support take on heavy emotional burdens, as do those friends, neighbors, and community volunteers who offer consistent support to people directly affected. In the context of living with the ongoing threat of terrorism, how do we protect the protectors? The single event that we know as 9/11 is over. But the shock waves continue to radiate outward, stirred up by orange alerts, terrorism lockdowns, and the shrinking of personal liberties we once took for granted. The stories in this book of real people faced with extraordinary trauma, and gradually transcending it, are the best antidote to our fears. The one indispensable ingredient in coming through any adversity is hope. Once a person has hope, it is possible to mobilize his or her resources, both inner and outer. The families of 9/11 who have already begun constructing new lives point the way to others. Tellingly, these families are the least fearful of another terrorist attack. If they could cope with 9/11, they know they can cope with almost anything. Their stories compose a powerful parable for our times. This is a book of hope.