Nineteen years ago, I was already seeing patients when news of the plane crash (or crashes) reached the Lane Murray Prison Unit, where I worked. Did someone roll a TV cart out so I could watch, or was that what happened on every show and movie about the day? I can honestly say I no longer remember what images I saw “live” and what I’ve seen since, over and over, year after year. The memories are TV memories. I remember that despite the fact that we were literally behind concrete and barbed wire, the sense of fear and vulnerability pervaded the place quickly. Like many places all over the country, a rumor started quickly that we too could be a potential target, just miles from a large military base. The minds of most people quickly turned to justifying our fears with a facade of reason. I remember going about my day seeing patients “as usual”, out of either numbness or recognition that there was nothing else I could do. Today, the internet was filled with middle-aged white men reminiscing about how calm and reasonable they were that day; that makes me suspect my own recollection. 

I know I was not a victim, despite how “9/11 changed everything.” No one I know well died or was hurt. Unlike my relatives, I was not grounded in a city unable to be with my family. I did not leave Manhattan Island on foot towards my home. Though I was shaken and scared, and uncertain about the future, I will not lay claim to having suffered. Not when people died, or were hurt in explosions and crashes. Not when people were sickened or injured while rescuing, investigating, cleaning, or repairing or rebuilding those places. Not when people got beaten, or shot, or threatened, or called names, for looking “like terrorists”. Not when military men and women, the enemies they fought, and the people upon whose homelands they warred, were thrown into a chaotic blender or harm. 

I hope that nothing changed for me on 9/11. I trust I was just determined to find my own place of compassion for other people’s pain before that day as after, but I suspect I was not.  If not, then I pray that I redouble the effort to become so, and try to live up to my own standard daily. 

On this 9/11, my coworkers and I spent three hours discussing COVID. We’re trying to help children and the adults that care for them cope with a paired problem: the risks of COVID and the fear of COVID. I’m grappling with how often people confuse danger with fear, and how little it matters that I perceive those as different. Many do not, or can not. In my own moments of fatigue and self-pity, I feel “victimized” by their confusion, and my inability to reduce their sense of that danger, fear, or confusion. 

I want to analogize 9/11 to COVID, but I won’t. Doing so warps the personal trauma of so many people. I see similarities in how people are reacting though.

Every word I typed after that sentence failed…