My father has brain cancer.
In the printed pathology report, the diagnosis states, “at least anaplastic astrocytoma with glioblastoma possibilities.” The bottom line is that the disease is fatal. It will probably take my dad within the next year and a half. As explained to me by Dad’s brain surgeon, the cancer cells grow in tentacle-like patterns. The visual picture that appears in my mind looks like vines rapidly lengthening and working their way through the gray matter, entangling, strangling, cutting off the synapses that should be firing off for normal brain activity.
Like those ever-growing tentacles, the shock waves created on September 11, 2001, stretched vine-like from the twin towers throughout the country, touching thousands who didn’t even know they were to have any connection to those who perished that day. I, like one of the many cells that will eventually be overtaken in my dad’s brain, found myself touched by the event in a most unexpected way.
On Friday of the week before the attacks, I received a cold call from a marketing firm located in Greenwich, Connecticut. The woman on the other end of the phone wished to make an appointment with me in the hopes of persuading me that her firm could do great things for the private school I worked for. I constantly received calls like this, and more often than not, politely explained that we had no need of their services. But, I had recently been made aware of the need to do some more aggressive marketing, and thought it might be prudent to at least start talking to some of these firms. The appointment was made for the following Thursday.
On the day of the attacks, I sat in my office working on the school’s rapidly expanding website when my colleague, Marne, poked her head in to say, “Hey, something really weird just happened. Some plane just flew into one of the twin towers.” By her light delivery, I imagined a small single or twin engine, and though tragic because certainly people would have been killed, responded in a most unemotional way. “Huh,” I probably said while continuing to mouse away. She, too, was not particularly affected and breezed into her office. When, however, Lorraine yelled up the stairs at us both that we’d better come downstairs, Marne and I headed down and into the small conference room where, stunned and shocked, we, and the rest of our co-workers, watched in disbelief as the second plane flew into the other tower. My story is about the same as tens of thousands of others after that point. That is, until two days later.
Forty-eight hours after the planes hit, the news continued with coverage. Over and over, we saw the clips. First one plane, then the other. The firefighters, the victims, the rubble, the mess, the everything. It was relentless and catastrophic, and inescapable. And far from over. In our office, we had the television on all day long. We drank our coffee in front of it, we ate our lunch in front of it. We edited copy in front of it. It was both repugnant and magnetic.
On Thursday, I checked my calendar and saw that, at 11:00, I was to expect two representatives from the marketing firm in Greenwich—the woman I spoke with on the phone and one of her colleagues. The minutes ticked past eleven until it was nearly 11:30. I wondered if I’d written the date and time down wrong. I wondered if these people had rudely failed to let me know they were running late. Finally, I paged through my datebook to see if I’d written down a contact number. I had. I called.
The weary voice of a man answered. He simply said, “Hello.” I thought perhaps I had dialed wrong. I explained who I was and the firm I was trying to reach. He confirmed that I had, indeed, reached the correct firm. I then told him that I wasn’t sure whether I had written down the information correctly and told him that I thought I had an appointment with two people from this firm. I then said their names. There was silence on the other end. The silence was so long I was compelled to say, “Hello?” thinking for a moment that the call had somehow been disconnected. I then heard this man, this complete stranger, someone I knew nothing about, start crying. He cried as he told me that these two people, his employees, had gone to the towers on Tuesday morning for a 9:00 meeting. He was certain they were dead. Their cell phones went straight to voicemail. Neither one of them had been in contact. They were no where to be found. I, too, was crying by now. He was inconsolable. And so was I.
Like anaplastic astrocytoma cancer cells, the tentacles of grief reached their way from the bottom of Manhattan and wrapped themselves around someone who had done nothing more than make an appointment with a soon-to-be victim. I spent about an hour talking with her boss, the owner of the marketing firm. His last words to me were, “I don’t know what I’m going to do.” His despair was palpable.
And so, with Dad, I, too, don’t know what I’m going to do. For now, I cope by paying his bills, keeping his checkbook balanced, and making sure he is well taken care of. Perhaps ten years from now, as it is with the families of those who died on September 11, there will be distance and perspective, a moving on. Closure. And as they have, I will have figured out what to do.
Copyright DJ Anderson, 2011
