25 years and searching
It’s incredible that it’s been 25 years since the Twin Towers bombings and the attempts continue to identify the remains. There were, after all, 3,000 fatalities (including, I’ve wondered and found out only this year, 30 Filipinos).
Several years ago, I attended a symposium at the University of the Philippines featuring a Filipina who was part of the United States government’s search team (several agencies, actually), and was overwhelmed by her paradoxically vivid description. Vivid and yet you could feel how chaotic the search must be–one article I read elsewhere describes how, if the debris from the bombings were to be spread out, it would take up eight New York blocks.
Many families have accepted they will never be able to identify their loved ones. Those who were able to retrieve the belongings of those loved ones considered themselves lucky.
I’ve followed Twin Tower anniversary issues of newspapers and magazines as well as documentaries, always touched by the instances of human tenacity. Reading one essay that appears each year in The Atlantic Monthly, with a short update, has become a ritual for me, and I read it several times with long pauses for reflection.
Titled “What Bobby McIlvaine Left Behind,” the essay was written by Jennifer Senior (who was a family friend of McIlvaine), and I’d recommend it for schools to help us better understand the impact of disasters and what people can do to respond to human tragedies. (I was in fact asked just last week by the theater group Peta to deliver a reflective talk on calamities, going beyond the medical angles, and weaving in the interactions of the people involved, living, dead, found, missing.)
Background material: Bobby McIlvaine went to the Twin Towers the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, to attend a meeting and was killed by the bombing. He did not work in the Twin Towers and seemed to work a lot from home, leaving behind voluminous materials he wrote up, including diaries and journals. He died miles from home, but DNA technology made the link between his being on a missing persons’ list and the wallet without an owner, a charred folded wallet with his driver’s license.
Jennifer Senior knew Bobby and his girlfriend and Bobby’s parents. We find descriptions of someone very caring and bright—not just bright as in intelligent but someone who lit up the world and people around him, a person, a Princeton graduate, one of whose teachers had “warned” his parents to start saving money so Bobby could go to Princeton. (I think he did go on a sports scholarship.)
He was an excellent writer and after his death, his father took on the task of sorting out his many papers, including his last diary, which the father decided, unilaterally, to give to Jen, Bobby’s girlfriend, and which became a source of great tension. Bobby’s mother wanted the diary, but Jen did not want to give it up, or even to lend it out so it could be photocopied.
In the end, though, Jen did turn over the diary to Bobby’s family.
We get glimpses into the deep emotional turmoil not just over the diary but also in the exchanges in official documents. My hair stood on end reading the reports that came from forensics and pathology—Bobby’s head: “that beautiful face” was the description from Jennifer Senior, but the report noted the face was missing and no longer recognizable, while eye color and hair color were “none.” (Which is why many relatives chose not to read these reports.)
Another passage in the essay: It’s the damnest thing: the dead abandon you; then with the passage of time, you abandon the dead. I’ve had that sense many times, visiting cemeteries. Responsibilities shift too when so many are affected by one death in the family—Bobby’s parents got a new house to be closer to the grandchild, a sibling feeling that if he died then Bobby’s death would have been useless, and all this delayed that brother’s ability to grieve.
This reads like a variation on well-documented survivor’s guilt. That surviving brother, incidentally, eventually married and had four children, and admitted when interviewed by the essay writer that he probably would not have had so many if Bobby had not died, but in the process all four kids have become the center of the McIlvaines’ lives. This brother also admits it may be time for change, that he is tired of being angry and the beauty of his life now is being able to be out to lunch with his youngest daughter.
Most intriguing–if we can use that word—were exchanges between Senior and Bobby’s family over a quote that Bobby’s family alleged to have heard, and even used as part of the eulogy. The problem, if you could call it that, was that nobody seemed sure about a quote allegedly uttered by Bobby. The appearance of the diary opened possibilities of settling the question: Did he say “life lives on”? Or “life loves on”?
I don’t want to give a spoiler but agree with the essay writer: the version is irrelevant. After all, one of his last diary entries reads: There are people that need me. And that, in itself is life. There are people I do not know yet that need me. That is life.”
—————-
michael.tan@inquirer.net
