COMMENTARY:
Solitary work of mourning must take its own pace
___By Eugene Kennedy
___On the site where the World Trade Towers stood, the still unfathomable loss of Sept. 11 breeds deeper losses and the first sorrow issues into intense secondary sorrows.
___This second wave of pain rolled in when heroes of the New York Fire Department were arrested by heroes of the New York Police Department after venting their grief in pro-tests in Manhattan.
___These aftershocks offer us a measure of how deep our loss is and of how little we comprehend it and of how long it will take us to begin to grasp how its rage and mystery work beneath and beyond our words to symbolize or our wills to command them.
___Such red, raw pain mocks our culture's efforts to hurry sorrow as if it were sundown so that we can achieve "closure" on it.
___We cannot "deal with" this event. We can only respond to it, and that requires us to enter this mystery of loss. That is the message of the firefighters who protested the city's limits on the number of them who could be present at the site. Such a decree, designed, it was said, for safety, cut into something deeper than workplace regulation.
___This scene, causing fresh pain for everybody connected with this tragedy, tells us how profound are our needs after we have suffered enormous loss. So deep is this wound to our spirit that we humans can only express it symbolically, through carrying out rituals as old as honor itself.
___Nothing is more human than our need to do that work of mourning that nobody can do for us. We cannot interrupt this spiritually and psychologically necessary work without damaging those who are carrying it out. It is not unusual, we are told by experts, for those in mourning to search symbolically for a lost spouse or child. This activity appears irrational and perhaps even wasteful or dangerous from our point of view, but for those who mourn, it is an essential activity if they are going to complete this labor, as great as any of Hercules and as old as any we know.
___Those who interrupt or try to manage mourning always have good reasons--safety or that need for "closure"--so they do not understand how they are endangering the mourners when they interrupt carrying out this ancient and sacred work.
___That is why the New York firefighters scuffled with the police. The river of loss batters against the artificial dams set up to contain or divert it, overruns its banks to flow where it will. Listen as these mourning firefighters tell us of the work of mourning only they can do.
___"Bring our brothers home," they shout, referring to the 250 firemen still lying beneath the rubble. "You can't treat sacred ground," one says, "as just another construction site."
___Mike Heffernan speaks "of the great relief that comes when a family recovers the body of a loved one," as he did on Oct. 1 when the remains of John Heffernan, his brother, and a firefighter, were found and buried.
___As Fire Capt. Bill Butler speaks, you hear the keening in the souls of all the generations of parents over their children taken by death: "My son Tommy from Squad 1 is still in that building, and we haven't gotten him yet." And in the background, voices welled out of the deep mystery, "Bring Tommy home, bring the brothers home ... ."
___Larry Mooney speaks for them all: "They want to pull out the people with cranes. We want to bring back our brothers with dignity. ... We've got friends and brothers and family. This goes very deep."
___So deep that we need to give everyone time and space in which to grieve and allow them to do it in their own way and on their own schedule. Reporters at the memorial service held at the site found their own superficiality revealed by the depths of those searching in that desperate place for those they loved.
___Why had they come here today to this difficult place, a correspondent asked a woman whose husband was killed on Sept. 11. She had to come here, came the swift, agonized answer. "I had to breathe the air--I had to fill up my lungs with him."
___Eugene Kennedy is professor emeritus of psychology at Loyola University in Chicago.
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