In the summer months of 2001, I lost half my family. After putting a brother into the ground in Texas on September 13, I flew back to New York City with one other woman in the plane. She prayed, cried and genuflected for 5 hours. That’s 1,556 air miles, in case you were wondering. She screamed when we flew directly over the smoking burning pit of the former World Trade Center; as far as I was concerned, that pit was a perfect metaphor for my soul.
Over the next months, I brought people into my life who had lost half their family. I really did this, hanging out with Connie – she’d lost her husband and her brother – or Jack – he had the one-two punch of dead sister, dead dad. We’d pull each other’s wounds open and then glue them back together, turning events over and over and hoping to make something make sense. It was agony and it was so sad.
Around this sad sack “Dead Family Club,” New York was in deep shock and struggling to understand what had happened to them. With 3000 dead in one city, the grief powered outward like Niagra. My husband and I took the long walk from our home in the East Village to the pit of the World Trade Towers downtown, a symbolic carrying of 3000 caskets. Thousands of New Yorkers were taking this same journey, silently looking at photos of the dead plastered on building after building, wall after wall. Those photos were among the most powerful expressions of love I have ever seen. One said, “Dad, I came looking for you.”
Pain was everywhere; we were consuming it like food or air or water. My usual tricks of escaping were not working. This feeling was in everything and I couldn’t get the taste of it out of my mouth. I did not want to die of this grief poison.
A word – just one word – from a friend got through my curtain of hurt. She said, “come do this thing with me. I mean you can’t feel worse.” She called me into the room where others were sitting on the floor, upturned faces alive and welcoming.
“This is an exercise in Loving-Kindness,” she said. I remember thinking, oh great. Just when I had nothing to give, she was asking me to love. Okay. Okay. I’ll try, I thought. And as if that wasn’t challenging enough, she then said, “and the subject of our loving-kindness is Osama Bin Laden.”
I stood up to leave and she said, “sit back down!” like a cop working Harlem. I did not want to do this; I feared it would kill me in fact. I looked at the others and they were already deep inside themselves, firing love beams at Bin Laden. I tried to get up again and she came up behind me and hissed, “no way!” I was down again and closed my eyes rationalizing, “they won’t know I’m actually fantasizing about killing him. I‘ll just sit here and do that.”
In my mind’s eye, I put my hands on his neck and started squeezing. I didn’t get far because other thoughts were intruding. Did he always want to kill 3000 people? Is that a life goal? I’ll bet it wasn’t. Then I started thinking about what might have happened to him to get to this moment. Did people love him? Did he love them back? Did he ever have a pet? Was he interesting to talk to? Did he ever have a sweet dream with no killing? I suspect now that the loving thoughts of the others had entered my head and were changing me, softening me up.
And when I finally got up the nerve to focus my love on Bin Laden, the tears came. Sheet after sheet of salty water wiped my face clean. My insides had broken open into a great feeling of love, despite the bloody images still running like a slide show through my head. In the course of 20 minutes, the frozen horror inside me melted all over the Loving-Kindness Meditation group’s floor.
I stumbled out of the studio like a terrified drunk. My legs were wobbly and the horse I usually rode had been shot out from under me. My life wouldn’t work with the hate and the death; it was just too hard to live that way. I was exhausted. I was spent. The world had broken me and there was no place to go but up.
I don’t ever want the mechanics of Loving-Kindness explained to me. I just don’t. I want to remember that moment for its transformational magic, it’s mystical power, it’s otherworldly effect. It cured me from seeing dead people all the time.