By B.L. Ochman
I’m avoiding the news, paying no mind to the special editions of magazines, ignoring the memorials, disgusted by the products related to the 10th anniversary of 9/11. While PTSD removed the memory of several hours of that horrible day, I remember every detail of the days that followed.
It was the kindness and love of people I’d never met, as well as my close friends who got me through it. I want to tell you about some of them.
Friends put Sammy, my late Yellow Lab, and me up for a week or two, and then the Red Cross put us and in a hotel where we lived til November. While I was there, I heard from Judy Vorfeld, one of my earliest online friends from the early days of the Web.
She said – and I’ll remember it for all my days – “I can’t help everyone in New York, but I can help one person, and I’d like to help you.”
And then she offered to handle my business for me while I got better from pneumonia and mercury poisoning and other immediate ailments.
That meant she answered my email, handled my e-book sales through my website, answered emails from people who had questions for me, published and sent out my email newsletter when I had the energy to write it, and lovingly encouraged me to keep healing.
One day, approximately six months later, she gently told me that it was time for me to go back to work. She said that she would help me ease into it and then leave me on my own. I have never met Judy in person, but I love her dearly and always will be grateful for her incredible love and kindness toward me.
I’ll never forget
There were so many other people who helped me and showed me kindness that I could hardly name them all. They include my brother-in-law, Andrew Schwartz, who drove alone down deserted highways and around police baracades to find me that night. John Counsel in Australia, whom I’ve also never met, who mobilized thousands of people via the Web to make my landlord let me out of my downtown lease. Karma Martell, who helped me find a hotel that would accept my dog. Gerlinde Puchas, who, without being asked, went out and bought me clothes because it was getting cold, and I couldn’t get to my apartment to get my clothes. My dear friend, Jill Elliot, was by my side, past the soldiers camped in the lobby and into the dust-covered West Street apartment when we could get in for a few minutes to fill a suitcase with clothes. And there were so many other people who wrote, called, and cared.
Thanks to all of you from the bottom of my heart. But especially you, Judy, and you John. I’ll never forget.
My story, if you want to know it: Antegrade amnesia is amnesia in which the loss of memory relates to events that occur after a traumatic event.
In a way, I was happy to learn that there’s a name for my inability to remember the time between counting the people jumping from the burning building and a man asking me if I needed help around 1 in the afternoon of September 11, 2001. He helped me get to a hospital in New Jersey, with my late Yellow Lab, Sam, via ferry and ambulance.
I didn’t know I had lost part of the day, so I didn’t tell the doctors. I thought I was fine at the time. When you’re in shock, you don’t know it. I have some flashes of what happened in that lost part of the day, but had no idea, for example, that the second tower fell until friends told me a few days later.
You can’t go home again
I lived three blocks south, was evacuated into the street, herded into Battery Park. None of it seemed real at the time, and it still doesn’t. I thought it would be like a fire drill. We’d all go home soon.
But I never got to go home again, except to pack my stuff and move months later, with the fires still burning at Ground Zero.
I had atypical pneumonia within three days, mercury poisoning with a blood mercury level of 27 ( below 6 is normal) and I’ve had asthma every since and have had pneumonia four times in 10 years and bronchitis every time I’ve gotten a cold. All of that was horrible, as were the loss of friends and colleagues.
I dealt with PTSD for the next few years, and can’t say with certainty that it’ll ever be completely gone. It took me 5 years to sleep through the night. Sirens still undo me. I still seem to notice twice a day that it’s 9:11, and the present fascination with the anniversary by people who weren’t there is making me more than a little anxious and, yeah, I’ll admit it: angry.
Choosing to remember the kindness
But the most important thing I’ve had to do in the past decade was put one foot in front of the other and move forward. Thanks to all the wonderful people who helped make that possible.
I’m choosing to remember the kindnesses I was shown, and am still shown, and trying like hell to keep moving forward. Maybe I’ll turn the TV on in a week or so and watch a sitcom.
– Tweet above is by Patrick Laforge of the NY Times.
– 9/11/2010: Reflections, 9 years after a day in hell.
– The 9/11 Slip
– On 9/11, for the boys
– 9/11 – Memory and miracles
I just want to reach out and hug you after reading that post. I’m so sorry for all you’ve been through but inspired to hear about the people who reached out to help, people you’d never met in person. Thank you for this blog post.
thanks karen. i got your hug :>)
i’ve been blessed with good friends, including you.
xo
I am proud of you for putting words to those thoughts and giving voice to your experience for the benefit of us all. Excellent post, BL sweetie.
thanks E.B. my writing has been blocked for a while now, and i think putting out these thoughts will fix that. I am very grateful.
Writing this blog post must have been a powerful mixture of pain and pleasure. Thank you for the tribute. What can I say? You were (and are) an amazing woman and I am honored to be your friend.
thank you so much solnichka. i am honored to have you in my life.
BL, thanks for sharing this. I was in DC that day, my apartment was across the street from Ft. Myers, which is just a mile from the Pentagon. I can still hear the blackhawk helicopters taking off night and day afterward and can picture the tanks with soldiers at the turrets that were stationed around my neighborhood for a year afterward. Also, the people streaming through my neighborhood, walking home because all of the trains were discontinued and they weren’t allowed to drive their cars out of the district. All of these sights, but I still had a home to go to after the smoke cleared. You didn’t. Honestly, you are remarkable.
what an awful experience that must have been! sorry you had to go through it!
There are many people who suffered a lot but it is good to here that strangers came out to give you a helping hand. That’s very positive approach in case of disasters.
I am sorry any of us did.
it was a sad day for the whole world, but unity and love prove that any tragedy won’t break a nation into pieces instead it bonds them tighter to stay together and stand against any disaster.
I will never forget the day, I still know where I was when it happend (I was selling records to a customer and on the other side of the street was a store that sold TV’s). We all have been shocked. But sorry to read, what you have gone through. I still feel sorry for all these innocent people. Thanks for sharing it with us.
You are so lucky that you meet a person who are kind, nice and be willing to help you, you should feel lucky, and we should remember anyone who once help us, we should have a thankful heart, thank you!
Even there so many years past – I still feel shooked and sad. Even I m Swiss , the whole world felt the same pain. For me as some of my best friends are americans, I felt so close. I haven t been to NY for more then 10 years – and I feel the kind of “homecoming” wouldn t be the same as it was before “even time has past” . Thx for sharing – and believe me —“the world still uniteds for all the one s who have gone — they wont forget Rowland