PARADE OF BROKEN HEARTS

There were many reflections about the 2001 terrorist attack on America leading up to the 15^th anniversary just a few weeks ago. Following is my reflection on the memorial service at the World Trade Center on October 28, 2001. I attended the service with a group of mental health workers who offered their support for the bereaved.

As I recall, at the end of the service there was a chill in the air as the sun disappeared behind the ruins of the World Trade Center. Renee Fleming, accompanied by the Orchestra of St. Luke’s, sang God Bless America.

Moments earlier I said goodbye to the family I stood beside during the memorial service. They sat in the back row of our section, one of scores of sections filled with thousands of folding chairs, each chair occupied by a grieving family member. I stood with my back against an iron gate so I would not block anyone’s view. The family had lost its father and husband, a decorated firefighter. The widow was a slight woman of Italian descent, probably in her late sixties.

Photos of her husband were pinned to her wool coat, and to the coats of her three children. He was handsome. He had a white moustache and a full head of silvery hair, combed straight back. When the memorial service started an hour earlier one of her sons, an off-duty police officer, asked if I would make sure that no one obstructed his mother’s view. He said, “You can see how short she is.”

The service began with a processional that included His Eminence Edward Cardinal Egan, Archbishop of New York. Then, police officer Daniel Rodriguez of the NYPD sang The Star Spangled Banner. He had become a national presence by appearing in his dress blues and singing the national anthem at Yankee Stadium before the 97^th World Series that pitted the Yankees against the Arizona Diamondbacks.

Everyone was on his or her feet. A massive wall of mourners rose around the tiny figure to my right. When I saw her struggling to climb, I took her arm and helped her up onto a folding chair. I told her that she could grab on to me. “Hold on to my shoulders,” I said. She hesitated. I told her, “Don’t worry you won’t knock me over.”

I could feel her trembling as she removed her right hand from my shoulder and fumbled for a tissue inside her coat pocket. I reached into my pocket and handed her a handkerchief.

When I was picking out my clothes earlier in the morning I had come across several unopened packets of white handkerchiefs. They belonged to my father who died seven years earlier. As I got dressed, I thought that today my father would want somebody who needed it to have one of his handkerchiefs. At first she refused my offer, not wanting to impose. I urged her, “Please, take it. It’s okay.”

Fifteen years later, my father’s handkerchiefs remain tucked into my dresser drawer - a daily reminder of when I joined a parade of broken hearts. Sometimes I close my eyes, think back and try to recall what things felt like before that sunny fall morning at ground zero.

https://longislandweekly.com/parade-broken-hearts/

Andrew Malekoff is the Executive Director of North Shore Child & Family Guidance Center, which provides comprehensive mental health services for children from birth through 24 and their families. To find out more, visit www.northshorechildguidance.org. 

WHEN ARE THE CARTOONS GONNA COME BACK ON?

Violence—random, sudden, illogical, and lethal—has become a fact of life. Shootings and acts of terror, homegrown and imported, with or without racial or religious overtones, have become gruesome signposts along a seemingly endless path of public and private horrors. They are taking a toll on our children.

No child should have to wake up each day as if he or she was on 24-hour-a-day guard duty. But in the United States this is the reality.

We can no longer think of these as isolated incidents, aberrations or confined to urban settings. Denial, an emotional trap door, is not a viable escape in a world where a sense of imminent threat is ever present.  

In the immediate aftermath of the September 11, 2001 attack, writer Jeph Loeb and artist J. Scott Campbell produced a nine-framed cartoon entitled “Please Stand By,” that featured a very young girl watching cartoons.

By the third and fourth frames, the image on the screen changed to a live feed of the Twin Towers ablaze. As the little girl stood transfixed, stuffed animal in hand, the commentator announced, “We interrupt this program to take you live…,” the little girl turned away and called, “Mommy…” The next three frames began with her mother dropping a basket of laundry. Then, with her face contorted in anguish, she embraced her daughter to shield her from the unrelenting images. The final frame is a close up of the little girl asking, “Mommy, when are the cartoons gonna come back on?”

Among those who are left in the wake of violent acts are the survivors - friends and family members of victims, who live with the emptiness, frustration, and rage of incomprehensible death by violence.

Earlier this month, as the mother of the oldest child of Alton Sterling, the black man fatally shot by Baton Rouge, Louisiana police, expressed sorrow and outrage at his death, Cameron Sterling, 15, the oldest of Sterling’s children wept inconsolably by her side, for the entire world to see and experience his heartbreak.

One day later a St. Paul, Minnesota Montessori school cafeteria supervisor Philando Castile met a similar fate. Just one day after his shooting, five police officers, protecting  hundreds of people in Dallas, Texas, who were peacefully protesting the two shootings, were gunned down and murdered, ambush-style, by a lone shooter who was fueled by racial hatred and bent on misguided revenge. Ten days after the Dallas shootings, three Baton Rouge police officers met a similar fate.

Beyond those left in the direct wake of violence are growing numbers of young people who are fed a regular diet of horrific episodes of violence through graphic media accounts such as the live streaming of a bloodied and gasping Philando Castile, filmed by his girlfriend Diamond Reynolds who wanted the world to join her in bearing witness as he took his last breaths.

In the aftermath of trauma, children (and others) feel fearful, unprotected, hyper-vigilant, and hopeless and on their own; similar to orphans who feel they must take care themselves.

We are living in world gone mad, a place where the rich diversity of colors, shades, languages, orientations, beliefs and rituals should be shared and celebrated rather than drawn as battle lines. The answers do not lie in books of psychology or popular bromides, or in aspiring national leaders who have proven to be untrustworthy.

The answer lies in being mindful - paying attention on purpose, making connections with one another and building a sense of communality.

https://longislandweekly.com/cartoons-gonna-come-back/

Andrew Malekoff is the Executive Director of North Shore Child & Family Guidance Center, which provides comprehensive mental health services for children from birth through 24 and their families. To find out more, visit www.northshorechildguidance.org.