Gail on the Today Show

THE NEW YORK TIMES
September 21, 2003

'Middletown, America': Processing Death
By ROBERT SULLIVAN

Like many New York City suburbs, Middletown, N.J., was hit hard when the World Trade Center was destroyed on Sept. 11. By one measure, Middletown was hit the hardest -- nearly 50 people left for work in lower Manhattan and didn't come home, the largest death toll concentrated in one area. And yet, despite its dark subject, ''Middletown, America: One Town's Passage From Trauma to Hope,'' by Gail Sheehy, is an upbeat book. Despite all the failings she sees in how Americans deal with death and bereavement, Sheehy finds a positive message, which she describes with her trademark dramatic compassion. ''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,'' she writes.

Few reporters would seem better suited than Sheehy to document the emotional ramifications of Sept. 11. As the author of ''Passages,'' ''The Silent Passage'' and ''Understanding Men's Passages,'' all books about life's stages and crises, Sheehy is America's emotional tour guide, a national therapist. After the towers fell, this former student of Margaret Mead set herself up at the Oyster Point Hotel, and, in her words, ''began walking the journey of trauma and grieving with some of the victims' families and survivors, week by week'' -- sometimes in their unkempt, shade-darkened homes, sometimes as they nervously testified before Congress, sometimes as they sipped a glass of Burgundy at the Oyster Point's bar. The weight of the world had suddenly exploded in the midst of manicured lawns, McMansioned subdivisions and estates owned by the likes of Bruce Springsteen and Derek Jeter. There are blue-collar enclaves in Middletown, but the majority of people who died worked at firms like Cantor Fitzgerald; Middletown is a place where moms often stay at home with nannies who take care of parenthood's unwanted tasks. The losses on Sept. 11 ''devastated this place,'' a local music producer says.

Though it seems as if everything has been written about the World Trade Center attack, Sheehy is covering a lot of untouched ground. ''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,'' she writes. One person who has not been studied is Laurie Tietjen, the sister of a Port Authority policeman who commandeered a taxi to the World Trade Center, where he died rescuing people. Months after the disaster -- after a funeral, and, later, the tortuous recovery of various body parts -- Laurie's mother gets a call at Christmas from a medical examiner, another shock to the family's system. A few days later there is a flag draped over a few small lumps. ''I was a mess for a while after that,'' Tietjen told Sheehy. She didn't bring it up with her co-workers; people not directly affected by the disaster thought they understood her situation, but they didn't, of course. ''Among Americans lucky enough not to have directly suffered a loss on Sept. 11, it was common to hear impatient comments like 'A lot of other people have lost their loved ones in auto accidents or sudden heart attacks -- why are we making such a big deal out of these deaths?','' Sheehy writes. ''How could the public be expected to know about these repetitive tortures? Most of the families had learned to keep the grisly details to themselves.''

Sheehy follows the parents of the deceased, as well as siblings, co-workers, children, survivors who carry unbearable portions of guilt and, most prominently, widows, who are called to preside over ceremonies and events and then watch as their husbands are beatified even if they didn't always take out the garbage. While there are surely widows who continue to suffer, Sheehy emphasizes the women who find a way out, like Anna Egan, a 47-year-old Sicilian-born mother of two whose husband had called from the 106th floor to say ''I love you, darling. Kiss the boys --'' With one son just off to college and another at home with Down syndrome, Anna all but shuts down completely for four months -- a move that possibly helps her later emotional recovery, according to the mental health experts Sheehy cites. Anna can't eat, but after Christmas 2001, she comes alive. She moves to Connecticut to escape celebrity widow status, keeps her husband's clothes in what is described as her ''dreaming room,'' and, she confesses to Sheehy, dances with him one last time in her wedding gown, until she is finally ready to move the old clothes to the basement. Sometimes, the author's omniscience makes Egan's story sound more like a case study than a living, breathing Middletown life -- This was a necessary step in her journey of grieving,'' Sheehy writes -- but mostly Sheehy lets the widows speak for themselves. ''It felt good -- no crying this time -- just nice memories,'' Egan says.

''Middletown'' ends up being an indictment on two counts: first, of the state of the typical prosperous American town, a gated and car-oriented place that does a good job of keeping the riffraff out but less well when it comes to inspiring people to throw dinner in their minivan for the neighbors. The book is secondly an indictment of the Bush administration. ''Just Four Moms From New Jersey'' is a group of four widows-turned-activists whose work in documenting United States intelligence failures makes a much better read than the recent censored Congressional report. The moms focus attention on Condoleezza Rice, for instance, who, in a nonpublic memo a few weeks before the Trade Center disaster, warned of a possible Qaeda attack. The moms also criticize the rest of the White House for not cooperating with the Congressional committee investigating Sept. 11, and for making terrorism more likely at home by launching a war against Iraq. One mom -- Kristen Breitweiser, a formerly loyal Republican -- at first can't cope. ''Where is the book for the 30-year-old woman with a 2 1/2-year-old child whose husband was killed by terrorists and who watched it on TV?'' A year later she's testifying before Congress. ''I can't believe Bush has moved up his convention to September 2004 so he can wrap himself in the anniversary of 9/11,'' she says.

There is no such thing as ''closure,'' Sheehy thankfully reports; death is not shut away but processed. Accordingly, the people of Middletown who deal with death grow stronger, while the people who don't -- who caricature their horrible misfortune, for instance, as ''pure evil,'' or obsessively focus on that video loop of the planes repeatedly hitting the towers -- suffer. Thus, it is nearly traumatic in itself to read of the institutional roadblocks set up for police officers who attempt to deal with what they experienced at the World Trade Center: if they seek treatment, they can lose their guns and are demoted to a desk job, their identity stripped. The natural inclination for these men and women is to deal with the trauma silently -- an impossibly heroic proposition that is dangerous to the cops and as a result a risk to the safety of the people they are protecting.

At the close of the book, Sheehy follows a group of Middletown residents to a memorial ceremony in Oklahoma, where suicides followed in the years after April 19, 1995, the day 168 people died after a rental truck full of explosives was exploded by Timothy McVeigh, a domestic criminal who was assumed at first to be a Middle Eastern terrorist. To this day, there are people in Oklahoma -- survivors and rescuers especially -- who suffer the physiological aftereffects of traumatic stress, people who break down, just because the day is April 19, even years after. ''You can't expect a lot of this to surface until three to five years,'' says Jack Poe, the Oklahoma City police chaplain, adding, about the particular stress faced by emergency workers, ''You guys are sitting on a time bomb!'' Reading ''Middletown'' makes you realize that while there's been so much concern with smoking people out of holes around the world, there are thousands of people in and around New York who are in pain every time they smell something burning.

Robert Sullivan is the author of the forthcoming ''Rats: Observations on the History and Habitat of the City's Most Unwanted Inhabitants.''