A Thanatologist’s Reflections on 9/11, A Quarter-Century On

September 11, 2001. It was a Tuesday. A little after 7 a.m. in Southern California. I turned on the shower and tuned the radio to listen to the usual morning hosts banter about nothing important while I got ready for work, as I always did. The usual guys were on vacation, so they were supposed to be playing “best of” segments, but then the station had to go live with whoever was in the building. As I was washing my hair, I heard the news guy, a man nicknamed Doc on the Roc, telling us about the planes deliberately being flown into the World Trade Center towers by terrorists.

As it sunk in what was going on, I just couldn’t make sense of it. I hurried up, put on my robe, and went out to the living room, where my husband was now glued to the TV. By this time, both planes had crashed into the WTC, the Pentagon had been struck, the South Tower had collapsed, and the plane had crashed into the field in Shanksville.

I sat there in my bathrobe with wet, dripping hair, staring in total disbelief and horror as people jumped out of buildings rather than burn to death. People on the streets running for their lives, covered in dust and debris. Replays of the planes crashing into the towers over and over again. At 7:28 a.m. PDT, we sat stunned and watched the North Tower collapse.

We sat watching for another 30–45 minutes, waiting for the other shoe to drop. Oh God, what’s next? Will they attack L.A.? When and how will it end? When there were no more attacks that morning, I got dressed and went to work. The world had just changed before my eyes.

I don’t think I can express to you the surreal sense of waiting. Waiting to see what would happen next. Waiting to see who was responsible. Waiting to find out how many people died. Waiting to find out if we were going to be called up to serve in the armed forces. Waiting to find out if our lives were going to be able to go how we had planned. Waiting. In those first hours, the fear of not knowing was, for me, the worst.

And in the days that followed, the eerie quiet of no commercial jetliners, broken only by the occasional sounds of military aircraft overhead. Just waiting. People wanted to do something—anything—because simply watching from afar and being unable to help was almost unbearable. They gave money to the Red Cross. They lined up to donate blood, but the missing-person flyers plastered on every available surface in New York City made it increasingly clear how little of that blood would be needed. The scale of the loss of life was incredible. The scale of the loss of safety and certainty was intense.

This is when the phrase “first responders” entered my vocabulary. This is when the constant news ticker started running along the bottom of the cable news networks. This is when everything changed about air travel.

Then the anthrax attacks. And the shoe bomber. And then the conspiracy theories. Over the months and years, more terrorist attacks were thwarted and others succeeded, both here and abroad; investigations and reports were made; wars were fought; and the shape of our new world slowly emerged from the dust.

And every morning came with a little trepidation. At first, it was turning on the radio: What happened while I was asleep? What fresh hell awaits us today? Later, it was opening my computer, and eventually picking up my phone. That feeling lasted for years—the sense that something terrible might have happened somewhere while I wasn’t looking, and I was about to find out about it. To some extent, I’m not sure it ever entirely went away.

We mourned and grieved together and privately. And not only did we mourn the loss of life and our sense of security, we grieved the future we thought we were promised. I was fortunate that I did not personally know anyone killed that day, and for a time, I wondered if I had the right to grieve this loss. But of course I did. And I still do. We all do. Including you, even if you were not born yet, because you have inherited this changed world, even though you did not experience the difference.

As the years passed, the mantra of “Never Forget” became somewhat stale, for it seemed to me that a lot of people had either forgotten or never learned the lesson in the first place. There was anger, fear, and hatred that could not be easily explained or assuaged. There was pain too intense to face.

Among the wreckage that remained after the towers fell were remnants of the south tower’s perimeter columns. (Photograph courtesy of Wikimedia Commons/FEMA photographer Bri Rodriguez)

Now here we are, 25 years—a quarter of a century—after the day my assumptive world collapsed with those towers, and I am writing my reflections down for the first time. It was simply too painful to look back. I avoided the documentaries. I didn’t read the official reports like my husband did. I lived it in real time, and I didn’t need to keep reliving it. I just wanted to get on with building my life.

And I did. But the specter of 9/11 is forever imprinted on my psyche, as it is for almost everyone who was alive and old enough to understand what had happened. For those who were not, it is history. But like all historical events, it continues to reverberate into the present and the future. I still mourn. I am still bereaved by our collective loss. Twenty-five years later, the indirect body count continues to rise, and we cannot know for certain the number of individuals whose lives were, and will be, cut prematurely short because of the aftermath.

And though I did not know it then, it is through my work in thanatology that I have come to understand the psychological and social impact of this thing. Of mortality salience and terror management theory. Of grief and assumptive worlds. Of collective mourning. Of the anxiety and exhaustion of constant vigilance and its impact on the nervous system and body.

Mortality salience helps explain why death suddenly seemed everywhere rather than safely distant. Terror management theory helps explain some of what followed—the intensified attachment to identities, symbols, nations, and beliefs, and the hostility toward the “other.” Assumptive-world theory describes particularly well my sense that the future itself had been damaged. Collective mourning helps explain the rituals, flags, memorials, photographs, vigils, missing-person posters, and shared language through which millions tried to metabolize an incomprehensible event.

As the new millennium dawned, I had just finished graduate school and was a newlywed embarking on my career and life’s journey.

As the world turned on September 11, 2001, I was a young woman in a bathrobe sitting on her sofa, unable to comprehend what she was witnessing, full of fear because she had just watched the world as she knew it end live on TV.

Today, a quarter century later, I am a thanatologist with the vocabulary to sit with her on that sofa and comfort her.