By Steve Miller, Editor of GoodBye!
The Journal of Contemporary Obituaries
I was in the World Trade Center on the morning of 9/11 and managed to escape
with my life and health unaffected. I've been writing obits regularly for about
six years now, and as a man whose own wife occasionally calls him "Dr.
Death," it would seem that surviving these events might have changed my
mind about my avocation, or at least have affected it in interesting ways.
There's no necessary connection between the two things, writing obits and escaping
terrorist devastation. But for me there is at least one thing: the necessity
of bearing witness to those terrorist acts and the act of bearing witness that
is an obituary.
Many times since then I've given interviews about what that day was like, and
I can say that writing a large number of obits does not in any way qualify you
to deal with death on the scale of wholesale carnage. Nevertheless, my version
of the story was splashed over front pages from Tokyo to Washington DC to Berlin.
There is a reason that reporters like to interview other reporters. It's really
the same reason that so many reporters turn to writing novels: writers can nail
a terse quote or soundbite. And yet in the aftermath I didn't find myself drawn
towards writing much about my own experience.
I remember the squealing sounds the building made while I walked down the interminable
flights of stairs, the heat that made me sweat through my clothes and the eerie
yellow light that suffused the stairwells. I remember feeling dizzy then, wondering
if the vertigo was caused by the building falling or just my own nervousness.
In the stairwells we really had no idea what had happened - no idea that airliners
had slammed into the towers. All we knew was that it was something bad and we
had to get out and that, to escape, we had to keep our heads clear. I recall
no deals with God. I do recall a man walking near me calling his office on his
cell phone and telling his secretary to cancel his appointments for the afternoon.
More images to remember: looking out at the north tower, the one that was hit
first, from the south when the stairs had become congested and I left the stairwell
to look around and find a phone to call my wife. The hole in Tower One was massive
and the smoke and flames and people jumping made it into the sort of thing that
makes one want to make comparisons to literature or art or the movies, but none
of these are real enough because, of course, this was absolutely real and, incomprehensible
in a way because nobody had any idea what had happened.
It is so hard to fully describe the unmediated experience of a completely new
sensation - your first bite of an apple, the first kiss where you really meant
it, the jangling nerves the first time somebody hits you in the head. I recall
that in Ken Burns' Civil War documentary series, the historian Shelby Foote
says that nobody really knows what the Rebel Yell that attacking confederate
soldiers bellowed sounded like. In just the same way, I can't express to you
the register of voice that I heard from people I saw near the window shouting
"Oh my God, they're jumping!"
In this way life is not at all like writing, where it is all about reflection
and recollection and comparison. An obituary is not, in the same way, like a
lived life at all. In some ways this is a trivial point - life and writing are
different things. Writing is something that one does in ones life, but it is
not life. In a way it is more like death because once it is finished it just
lies there, and whatever gave it life is evanescing away into the ether. Perhaps
every act of writing that wants to describe a reality is a kind of death, because
at the moment it is put down on paper its possibilities are over.
Memory can be like that too. I have no doubt that there were many things I
saw and heard that day that have escaped me. In going over the interviews that
I have done I have detected certain inconsistencies in time and place. Which
floor was I on when the second plane hit? Did I really see workers still sitting
at their desks then? Why did I first enter, and then jump out of an elevator
that was going up, shortly before the second plane hit? My wife and I even disagree
about the details of the chain of events that led to us bumping into each other
on the street that day at a time when she thought I was dead. If you've ever
consulted a psychotherapist you may know that it can be hard to reconstruct
a conversation.
I am thinking now about the difficulties of making a really convincing [or
true?] narrative about a person's life. If a few minutes of my own life, moments
of irredeemable clarity that spanned at most a couple of hours, are so difficult
to get right, how much harder is it to present a truly accurate version of an
entire life in a 20 or 30 newspaper inches?
In that context, the shortness of space presents us with an opportunity to
present something coherent. The longer it gets, the messier things become.
People who study fractals say that the perimeter of the United States depends
on the scale on which we measure it. From an astronaut's perspective of about
240,000 miles up - the mean distance of the moon to the earth - it is one figure.
But if we were to measure it from the ant's perspective, to the granularity
of a grain of sand it would be hugely greater. The ant has to walk around each
grain of sand instead of taking a straight line.
In just the same way, the story of a life gains coherence in its brevity. If
you want to get confused about what a life means, take a look at the latest
volume of Robert Caro's LBJ biography - 1100-plus pages of massive contradictions
and non-sequiturs, and it is absolutely compelling, from what I've read of it.
And that's only volume three.
My little story of escape can be told like this: When the first plane hit the
other tower, I ran down the stairs. I stopped halfway down and looked out the
window, and the second plane hit my tower. I walked the rest of the way down
without significant problems, and once out made for the Brooklyn Bridge. I walked
home where I met my wife and friends who had gathered. That's a good story with
a happy ending and so I am here to tell it to you.
But to tell the story well I have to tell it to you in more depth. I can add
colorful anecdotes. I put on my shoes - new and uncomfortable - before leaving
to descend 80 flights, and in my haste I left my briefcase behind. After the
second plane hit I went into the bathroom and then found someone to show me
to a less crowded stairwell. When I got to the Brooklyn side of the bridge I
saw garbage men still collecting the trash while dust from the collapse of my
office rained on them, as if they were working in a snowstorm.
None of this is particularly edifying, nor would it tell you why I survived
and my friend Charles the security guard did not. Charles, I have since heard,
stuck around, perhaps out of a sense of duty, and did not leave immediately
after the first plane hit. The second plane pretty much nailed my floor on the
south tower, the 80th, and I can only hope he was killed immediately. Why didn't
Charles leave? We will never know. I recently spoke to a woman, a coworker,
who saw him perhaps five minutes before the second plane hit - he was watching
the North tower burn. He was crying. She happened to be two floors below and
was knocked unconscious by the second impact, yet managed to escape and, after
some surgery, is fine. Why did she run? Why, for that matter, did she go back
up before running? She told me she didn't really know. Why did she survive?
She had no idea - a man standing next to her was killed. Pure chance.
Out of such things we have to make sense for our tales of the dead to have
narrative coherence, I guess.
Last year I presented a paper at this conference in which I said that I wanted
obituaries to make sense as stories, that our transcriptions of peoples' lives
should be motivated by a sense of why we should care that they lived and died.
I called for a sense of style that would permit leaving out details as well
as including them. The goal was a well-told story or an interesting essay that
wasn't necessarily even a life trajectory.
I still think that we need such stories, and that the obituarist can do much
to provide them. I love a stylishly written obituary with a moral. But I guess
one of the things that the attacks has shown me is that the random agglomeration
of details that I object to in the traditional obituary does in fact have some
relationship to the actual details of life as it is led. For sure lives are
not really led thematically.
We're all familiar with the great job the New York Times did with its series
called "Portraits of Grief" - short, impressionistic obituaries that
appeared on a daily basis starting a few days after the tragedy. The recent
compilation of them in book form contains 1,910 such obits, most accompanied
by grainy thumbnails. The thing I liked best about the Portraits was the way
that the best ones seized on a couple of significant details of a person's life
- "He's a big mush ball. He cries at commercials," said the brother
of one of the victims. [Michael Davidson, p.118] Another: "Once, with a
friend, she found her way into the stall of Affirmed, the Triple Crown-winning
racehorse, and hugged him." [Marie Pappalardo - p. 380]. In some sense
these were meant to be synecdoches, the small detail capturing the spirit of
the whole life. I think any well-written obit will try for that; it is one of
the most important tools a writer has for distilling and pruning the vast and
unruly details of a life. (If many harsh realities were left out of these accounts,
it is important for us to understand that they were more like tombstones than
history.)
So it is a great advantage to us as obituarists that we don't know everything
about the lives we chronicle, else we could never write an obit. The ant can
never make it around the United States, but the astronaut can measure it easily.
And just so, it was in fact an advantage to us that we didn't know what had
happened with the planes as we made out way out of the towers, and most of us
didn't know what was happening to the people trapped above the impacts - that
ignorance in fact gave us the optimism to continue on our way out. I know I
helped contribute to that ignorance: I didn't tell anybody in the stairwells
about the jumpers.
I've written elsewhere about the thing I didn't like about "Portraits
of Grief," the fact that the daily page or two of obits appeared at the
end of the otherwise impressive "A Nation Challenged" section of the
paper that so often focused on war in Afghanistan. In my opinion that made the
victims into political tokens. It said, we are killing people half a world away.
If you question this, well, here are the reasons that we are killing them. Check
out their hagiographies.
I happened to agree with this logic, but I still thought it was a political
use of the dead and inappropriate and creepy. Not that I can plead innocent
on the subject of using the dead for my own ends. I'm not sure what I would
have done differently if I were the Times, actually.
So what did the events change about my own writing of obituaries? Not much,
at least consciously. My editor tells me that the next couple of issues lacked
humor, but the latest issue seems to have made up for that. I guess the main
thing that has changed for me is what I've tried to talk about here - the consciousness
that a life is seldom a completed mission and that every moment is precious
and even the most driven of us kind of make it up as we go along. That our attempts
to impose order on lives constitutes a kind of fiction, but the truest kind
of fiction, the realer-than-reality kind of fiction. I already knew this stuff
anyway. There's really very little good that can come out of something so horrific.
All those lives wasted, and for what?
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