Coping with the greatest tragedy

As I wind down to my last day at The Bergen Record, I think there's something fitting about the fact that my last assignments have all dealt with Sept. 11, the World Trade Center and the news event that may never go away.

Two days ago, I watched a memorial service in Demarest, N.J., watching men and women, young and old, cry at the thought of this tragedy. I saw police and firefighters in full uniform, saluting as "Taps" was played on a trumpet.

I listened to the mayor, a man around 60 years old, barely able to voice his prepared remarks. He was a big man, the size of a linebacker who could have crushed Walter Payton in his day. But he rushed away from the lectern just after he finished, covering his face so no one could see his red eyes and the tears running down his cheeks.

Several weeks ago, I toured the site where the memorial and One World World Trade Center are going up, and I saw it again - emotion, raw emotion coming by people who never would have displayed it before the attacks. They were hardcore construction workers who were proud, and even tearful, as they helped make Ground Zero alive again.

Every time I go there, and after every annual memorial service, and after every controversy regarding Muslims and mosques and what have you, I think: How are we going to get over this? Are we going to get over this? How are we going to heal ourselves?

I think about what a friend mine, Michelle Parisi, said the other day, and she nailed it, because it speaks to the genesis of this website, as well as the "Coping" column I did for The Bergen Record from 2003 to 2008.

"I think when you are faced with a great tragedy, you are forced to deal with it, and you find ways to cope," she wrote on my Facebook page. "The best case is you find healthy ways to cope."

I started writing about mental health because of my family, but I also felt an obligation as a journalist to talk about "coping" with all forms of stress and tragedy after the terrorist attacks. Sept. 11 was not just a physical loss, but also a mental disaster for so many people.

It's so easy to say, "We just need to cope." But how? And how do you do it so it's "healthy," which is an important distinction to make?

That's what we need to figure out, as Michelle said, and I think the nation is, though slowly.

I hope someday we get past the anger I see on cable news channels. I hope we can someday forget about political parties and labels, and keep doing what we've been doing: saluting, playing, remembering, crying and rebuilding.

We just need to cope, as Michelle said, and find a healthy way of doing it.

I hope we can become one again, just as we did on Sept. 11, and in the months after, and as we do every Sept. 11, when people of every race and political stripe forget about labels.

We all cry, but we can all feel a sense of goodness, too, because we are finding ways to deal with families without fathers and mothers. We're dealing with people who lost their jobs, and lost their livelihoods, but somehow managed to keep going, nine years later.

We have come so far. I was nine months into my tenure at The Record when I saw the North Tower fall from my car window while driving on the New Jersey Turnpike. The next day, I was there, taking a PATH train to midtown because they didn't go any farther south.

I took a subway as far downtown as I could go and walked about 10 or so blocks. I had to write about something that dealt with transportation, but I never did write it.

The paper didn't need it, which was good, because it gave me time - time to look at something I never saw before, and may never see again. I saw and smelled a pile of burning, twisted metal, with a smoldering fire that gave it a glow.

I saw people wearing surgical masks, and somebody gave me an extra one so I wouldn't have to breathe it all in, too.

The wind blew slightly, and the air was stuffed with clouds of dust that made it all still hard to see.

A man saw me looking a little lost. He pulled down his surgical mask and said to me, "Smell that?"

"Yeah....it's bad."

"What do you think that smell is?" he said, hunkering down a bit as the smog filled the streets, like it was a snowstorm.

"That ain't metal," I said, just as I wrapped the mask around my mouth.

That was about as close as I ever got to it, and it was one of the most intense feelings I've ever had. I've always felt like I had some connection to it, even if I did live in New Jersey and I wasn't there on the day, running away as the skyscrapers crumbled.

Michelle is from Delaware, and she noted feeling a connection but also a sense of distance. I felt a distance, too, but we all seemed to know somebody who was in there. You still feel a connection and a sense of loss.

When I saw the North Tower fall, and I thought a friend of mine was in there, and I nearly drove off the road, thinking, that's it. He's gone. When I found out he was alive, I was relieved.

But he wasn't the same afterward, so I still feel a sense of loss.

In many ways, I think we all felt powerless, and I think we still do, in a lot ways. We never caught the people who really masterminded this, and the ones who executed it died. I feel like much of this country has been in a collective funk since then because we still don't know what to do.

We shouldn't take for granted, however, what we've accomplished.

Every year, we have our memorial services, we cry and we remember. Every day, construction workers are working to add one more level to One World Trade, and working to get the water pools that will mark the footprints of the Twin Towers finished.

Every year, as we move farther away from that day, we can feel a sense of relief that many of us are still healthy, getting up every day and battling against a bad economy. We're still working hard to earn a paycheck.

We move on, because that's what people do whenever tragedy strikes. It happened after the Vietnam War, though slowly; it can happen now.

Every day, we find new, better ways to cope.