One week before the planes flew into the towers, I secured my first full-time, salaried job. I had applied to work for the New York City Parks Department at the suggestion of my roommate, Ethan. He’d recently quit his Parks job—not because he hadn’t liked it, but because he was, by his own reckoning, in the midst of a quarter-life crisis, brought on by the unexpected death of his father a few years earlier. Ethan regarded me as lucky because my mother had at least told me about her cancer diagnosis before she’d died. From his father he’d inherited a three-bedroom apartment on Roosevelt Island, just one subway stop and a short walk from Central Park. Ethan sublet my room to me for $667, a remarkably low rent for a building with a doorman, pool, and gym.
As an English major whose only real skill was writing, I’d never considered that I might be qualified to work for the city, but after going on a few interviews at magazines and publishing houses, I’d discovered I couldn’t afford to work in the New York media world. Not only were the salaries insufficient to cover my expenses, which included monthly student-loan repayments, but I also just didn’t have the drive to work for employers who expected me to arrive early and stay late. Before my mother died, I might have been willing to pay my dues at a publishing house and even rack up some debt, but when I went to interviews where potential bosses told me about perks like ordering in dinner or taking a town car home if I stayed past 8 PM—all in lieu of being paid overtime—I just wondered if they knew it was possible to die at fifty-four while knitting baby sweaters for your unborn grandchildren.
Jobs at the Parks Department were unionized and, by extension, more humane. When I entered the Arsenal, the department’s castle-like headquarters at the southeastern edge of Central Park, I was comforted to see a lot of young people in the hallways, and I saw why Ethan had recommended Parks: the atmosphere was friendly and unpretentious. The young chief of staff, Chris, explained that hours at the Arsenal could be long, but all the time was comped so that when you left, you’d be paid out for several months after. I was familiar with comp time because Ethan was still receiving checks for his accumulated hours, but I wasn’t tempted by it. As far as I was concerned, I could die at any moment, and there was no point in deferred payment. I asked Chris if there were any open positions where the hours weren’t long. Something low-key, I said.
At that moment Chris had every reason to end the interview; instead he asked why I wanted to work there.
The honest answer was that it seemed like something I could manage, emotionally. My mother had disappeared from the world just three months before, and I was still in the stage of grief where normal life—that safety net of etiquette, ritual, and routine—felt like a bad joke. As I scrambled for a reply, I recalled a Willa Cather quotation my mother had taped to the refrigerator. For years I’d read it every morning: I like trees because they seem more resigned to the way they have to live than other things do.
“I like trees,” I said. “I think they make the city beautiful.”
After two interviews at the Arsenal, I walked across Central Park for a third. The day was warm and sunny, so I detoured through Literary Walk, a promenade lined with rare American elms, whose curving branches reached expressively toward the sky. I felt soothed as I walked under the vaulting canopy, and by the time I arrived at my interview I really wanted the job, if only so that I would have an excuse to visit Central Park every day.
I barely knew the position I was interviewing for—just that I would be doing administrative work for the Manhattan borough commissioner. His chief of staff, Sarah, was a few years older than me with yellow-blond hair and a soft, pale complexion that another staffer later described as reminding him of a fresh apricot. He said this in a protective way, noting that she had not yet developed the toughness that a chief of staff needs. She seemed nervous during our interview and eager to assume we were alike, with our degrees from New England liberal arts colleges, our passion for running, and our sensible outfits: gray pencil skirts, button-down shirts, flats. I was also wearing my mother’s pearl necklace, more as a talisman than as a statement of personal style.
I worried sometimes that the pearls made me seem stuffy, and when I explained to those who asked that they were my mother’s, I feared they gave the wrong impression of her. She worked from home as an artist, favored simple, practical clothing, and rarely bothered with jewelry or makeup. The pearl necklace, which she’d worn pretty much every day, was an oddity—a surprisingly extravagant Christmas gift from my father. She let me borrow it once, for my high school portrait. I loved how the pearls looked but in general felt they were better suited to someone much older: a real adult. I never dreamed of wearing them to interviews in my twenties.
Sarah explained that the job involved a lot of writing; I would reply to all the constituent letters and emails regarding Manhattan parks. I found it hard to believe there was enough mail to warrant a full-time job and, in my characteristically blunt interview style, said as much. I hadn’t yet internalized the size of New York City and had no idea that parks were like shared rooms where New Yorkers of all ages celebrated important life moments. Friendships and love affairs began in parks. Children grew up in them. Adults grew old in them, too, walking and running the same paths for years and decades, marking time.
“It’s really interesting, actually,” Sarah said, “because you’re hearing directly from the people. It’s, like, the ground floor of democracy.”
Sarah was an earnest go-getter, and I liked that about her, but I had the uneasy feeling I was going to disappoint her. I could never match her enthusiasm. She told me my meeting with the commissioner would be brief, because he was just stopping by the office to pick up some papers. His mother had recently passed away.
I was unsure how to respond to this coincidence. Young people, I had learned, often had an enormous, unexamined fear of death, and if I told them I was grieving, they became uncomfortable and avoided me. Middle-aged people were harder to predict. Sometimes they were kind. Other times they probed for details, transparently looking for a specific cause to my mother’s illness, one they could perhaps forestall or congratulate themselves for avoiding. I decided to say, “I’m sorry to hear that.” No need to mention something that was likely to bring me to tears.
The commissioner was younger than I expected, in his mid-forties—my age, now—and dressed casually in jeans and a blazer. He seemed distracted, and I had the feeling that Sarah had squeezed in the interview at the last minute. I sat in a wooden chair, awkwardly passing my résumé across his desk. He gave it a perfunctory skim and asked why I’d moved to New York City. I told him the stupid truth, which was that I had followed my college boyfriend. Also, I said, I wanted to be a writer. He asked if I wanted to be a journalist, and I said, just as honestly but perhaps less naively, that I didn’t yet know what kind of writer I was. We talked about books, and he told me he’d met John Irving at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and that Irving was a very charming man, as likable as his novels. I’d never heard of Bread Loaf, and he explained it was organized by Middlebury College and that I should try to go one day; Middlebury was a beautiful place.
I walked back across Central Park and took the train home. As I walked in, the phone rang; it was Sarah, offering me the job. The salary would be $28,600, with health care and two weeks’ vacation, though I might have to work over Christmas my first year. I accepted immediately because I’d determined I needed to make $27,000 to pay my bills, and this was the first time I’d been offered anything above it. It didn’t occur to me to negotiate, though I remember feeling disappointed when Sarah asked if I could start right away, on Thursday. I’d already begun looking forward to a long weekend in New York when I wouldn’t have to think about finding a job. But, I reasoned, the sooner I started, the sooner I would get paid. My first day was September 6, 2001.
Upon arriving at work, I was delivered into the hands of Jen, whose job I was taking so that she could be promoted to borough analyst. Like Sarah, Jen was passionate about working for Parks but much more relaxed. She was pretty and warm, with long black hair that she curled every morning. My office was adjacent to the commissioner’s, and Jen warned me that people were inclined to stand and chat with her at her desk while they waited to confer with the commissioner. Seeing Jen’s upbeat charm, I wondered if it was really the location of her desk that caused people to linger.
I asked if I could set up at the empty desk behind hers instead; I preferred a spot that was a little quieter, I said, if I was going to be writing all day.
She said sure but warned me that the TV perched on top of a filing cabinet nearby was the only one on the floor, and people came by to check the news. It was tuned to NY1, with the sound muted. “Maybe we can move it so it faces out more,” Jen said, then stood on a chair to do just that. “Hey, Pat!” she said to the screen, friendly even to TV news anchors who couldn’t hear her.
She spent the morning explaining how I, who knew almost nothing about the dozens of different parks and playgrounds, would be able to answer correspondence pertaining to them by consulting a handbook of rules and regulations, as well as the department’s nascent but growing website. If letter writers wanted to know why a certain rule existed, I would need to consult the managers. Jen gave me a map that showed how the borough was divided, with the name of the manager for each section. Most were older men who didn’t use email or carry cell phones and were usually on the move, checking on parks; the best way to get in touch with them was to send a copy of the letter through interagency mail.
I was surprised by how seriously everyone took the letters. If several people complained about the same thing, it was discussed at meetings. The only people who got eye rolls were the tennis players, whose correspondence usually regarded disputed reservation times and was dealt with separately. “Don’t engage with the tennis players,” Jen warned me. “They’re very territorial about their court times.”
On Tuesday, September 11, I left for work early so I could stop at the post office and get a money order to pay my union dues. I took the tram and walked west along 59th Street. As many have noted, it was a particularly gorgeous day, and as I passed Central Park, a feeling of well-being descended—a sense of my own competence and resilience. I felt proud that I had moved to New York City and would soon earn enough to support myself and pay off my student debt.
I recalled a story my great-aunt had told me, when I’d asked how she had gotten over her beloved brother’s death in World War II. She said that one morning she had gone into her backyard and looked at the flowers in the garden, and a feeling of calm had come over her. In that moment she’d known that one day she would be happy again. It wasn’t the dramatic epiphany I’d been expecting, but as I made my way past Columbus Circle that Tuesday, with the crisp blue sky overhead, I thought I understood what she had described.
There was a long line at the post office, and it was just past nine when I got to work. As I approached the commissioner’s office, one of the park managers was standing in the hallway. I assumed he was waiting to speak to the boss, which meant the commissioner was already in the office and would notice my late arrival. My embarrassment only increased when I saw several people standing in front of my desk, including Sarah. It took me a moment to realize they were looking at the television.
“A plane crashed into one of the Twin Towers,” Sarah said to me.
“Oh my god,” someone else said, staring at the screen. “There’s another one.”
I watched the second plane crash into the South Tower, horrified that I’d just witnessed the death of everyone onboard in real time. Then it dawned on me that there were people in the building too.
I don’t remember much about the morning after that. At some point I called my boyfriend from the office phone—I didn’t have a cell—hanging up and calling back until he answered. I knew he was probably sleeping late, but I wanted to hear his voice. After that, I called everyone whose number I knew by heart—but not my father, because I didn’t have his work number memorized, and I hadn’t yet shared mine with him. A school superintendent in nearby Dutchess County, he was a recent transplant to New York and didn’t know Manhattan very well. He told me later that he’d asked staff members to help him figure out if there were any Parks buildings downtown. When I finally got home, my answering machine was full of messages from friends and family who knew I was in New York City but not my precise whereabouts.
It felt odd that people didn’t know where I was exactly, that I existed in the abstract space of “New York.” Partly this was because I had just moved. Partly it was because I was young. But mostly it was because of my mother’s absence. She was the person who connected me to my family and a network of family friends. In the days and weeks that followed, I kept thinking how strange it was that she didn’t know I was OK. She didn’t even know she should be worried. I couldn’t shake the feeling that she’d lived and died in a world that was fundamentally different from mine, as if a black line had been drawn between September 10 and September 11. I tried to imagine her response to what had happened, but all I could think was Mom’s dead. Mom’s gone. Mom doesn’t even know where I work.
I thought my job would become irrelevant. A lot of people did, and many scrambled to find some larger purpose. A friend who interned at an entertainment magazine told me the editor had gathered the staff and given a speech about the importance of their publication, which was not as frivolous as it might seem. People needed a break from thinking about tough stuff, he said. Glossy magazines were a mental vacation.
The city’s parks, it turned out, were very relevant. People gathered in them to grieve and just be together. There were candlelight vigils, religious services, and community events of all kinds. That was all to be expected. Unexpected, however, were the handmade fliers with photos of missing loved ones and contact information for friends and family if the person was found or seen. People began posting them on the day of the attacks, in the hopes that a loved one who worked in or near the towers was still alive but perhaps wandering the city in shock. Initially the signs seemed like a manifestation of the supposed first stage of grief—denial—but they quickly morphed into shrines, becoming more personal, sharing information about the person’s family, pets, and personal interests. They were like practice obituaries: too messy, too emotional.
Union Square Park was the hub of mourning, the place where the signs became shrines, decorated with flowers, candles, stuffed animals, and other offerings. Manhattan remained closed below 14th Street for several weeks, so the park was a kind of borderland. It felt like people crowded there because it was the closest you could get to Ground Zero. There was the sense of being pressed up against the gates. I visited it at least twice after work. There were always a lot of people walking slowly down the sidewalks, reading the signs that were taped to benches. I remember the handwritten notes and candles.
Like all the parks, Union Square was cleaned on a regular basis, with workers picking up detritus and emptying trash cans. The shrines were clearly not trash, and the cleaning crews did not, at first, dispose of them, but with the increased foot traffic, the park began to get very cluttered. On September 19 workers cleared the shrines in advance of a rainstorm.
I had to look up that date, and was surprised it was so soon after the attacks. In my memory Union Square Park was covered in shrines for weeks. I’m not sure if I remember it this way because the days felt so long, or if I’m simply remembering how quickly the memorials were resurrected. Their persistence was discussed at the weekly managers’ meeting, and we got letters from people angry that the Parks Department workers continued to clear away the shrines every few days. People felt the signs, photographs, and candles should be left up indefinitely. Others felt the memorials should be cleared at some point in the future, but not now. It was too soon. Many who wrote were not the bereaved but explained that they were writing on behalf of the mourners, who they believed had been wronged by the Parks Department. They wanted to stand up for these grieving people.
I had no idea how to answer the letters. At first I drafted something perfunctory, stating the rules and the park-cleaning schedule, but it didn’t feel right. In fact, it felt very cold. The people writing in were perfectly aware of the park rules; they were asking for an exception. The commissioner worked with me to craft a longer response that acknowledged the humanity of their request and showed sympathy but also explained that it was time to move forward.
I wish I had a copy of the letter we wrote. I remember we borrowed the phrase “makeshift memorials” from The New York Times because “shrines” felt too religious. I don’t know what we could have written that would have satisfied the letter writers, but I like to think it mattered that we took our time with it and recognized the park was being used for something important and we weren’t trying to diminish that. I like to think the people felt respected when they received our response, not condescended to. I know I tried to be respectful.
Maybe I was also trying to understand my own grief. After my mother died, my sister wanted me to collaborate with her on an obituary, and I resisted. We got into an argument about it: She said it was my duty. I was the one who wanted to be a writer. I should want to use my talent to honor our mother. I, on the other hand, didn’t want to feel pressured to write something for public consumption. The idea of summarizing her life in staid paragraphs felt unbearable. But I think, if she had died on 9/11, I would have made a “Missing” sign. They weren’t entries into the public record. They were cries from the heart.
I understood the letter writers’ desire to preserve the memorials. It felt bad to be on the side of bureaucracy and rationality, especially since I longed for something like those memorials in my own life, some ritual or image that would help me understand my enormous loss. People said the absence of a loved one was like a hole in your heart, or like rocks in your pocket, but none of that spoke to me. I felt very good, physically, and I had a lot of energy. But there was this feeling of something missing, all the time. Obviously it was my mother, but it was more than that somehow. My point of origin had vanished.
Symbols come into our life in mysterious ways. For me it was a rainstorm. One morning—probably in October or November of 2001—the commissioner was late arriving at the office because he’d stopped to assess storm damage in Central Park. He told me one of the American elms on Literary Walk had fallen, and that I should take a break to go look at it. I said I would check it out when I took lunch.
“Go now,” he insisted. “Before they clean it up.”
Would I have remembered this downed tree if I had not left my office first thing in the morning to see it? Would I have remembered if it had not disappeared by the end of the day, spirited away by the Central Park Conservancy? Was it the combination of spontaneity and ephemerality that wedged this moment into my memory? Or was it the elm itself, this member of an endangered species, this witness to history, struck down, its labyrinthine root system laid bare? When a large tree falls, it upends the earth with it; I was amazed at the amount of soil this tree had ripped away: a wall of dirt and stone, as tall as a house, chunks of rock and mud clinging to its roots. I stared at the roots more than at the tree itself, in awe of all that’s unseen beneath the surface.
I wish I could say I immediately recognized the gift my boss had given me by insisting I witness this fallen tree, but the truth is I didn’t understand its meaning until nearly a decade later, when, at long last, I was at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. Bread Loaf is a place of traditions, and there was a little trail in the woods that several people told me I had to take so that I could add a stone to one of the many cairns marking it. I put it off until the last day, then went more out of a sense of obligation than any real desire to hike.
Halfway through I noticed a fallen tree just off the path. The trunk had started to decay, but the area around the tree was still bare, with just a few seedlings encroaching. I walked over to get a better look at the root system and found myself thinking of the elm in Central Park—and my younger self who had looked upon it. Tears came as I realized that elm had been a metaphor for how my life had felt then—my mother’s death followed so quickly by 9/11. Everything uprooted, then cleared away.
Trees are often a symbol of motherhood, but they are also tall towers reaching to the sky. Seeing the fallen giant at Bread Loaf, disintegrating slowly into the soil, I finally saw the reality of loss—it doesn’t go away quickly. You can clean it up, you can repair the sidewalks, you can put on a pearl necklace and pretend you’re an adult—and maybe even become one—but the person is still missing, the towers are still gone.
I looked up how long it takes a large tree to disintegrate in the forest. It depends, of course. But, in general, longer than most of us live.
