These guys not only helped me with the logistical problems of identifying and re-bagging the remains, they helped me stay focused. It was easy to get emotionally involved with the work-a piece of monogrammed jewelry around a neck or a name badge still pinned to a victim's shirt constantly drove home the fact that these weren't just shattered bodies, they were also shattered lives. We all did our jobs efficiently and with care, but sometimes the stress got to be too much and we had to stop, step outside the tent, and get some fresh air just to clear our heads.
When I started that first night, I was especially serious. After all, I was the new girl in town and I was well aware of how personally everyone took this work. And my trip to Ground Zero that afternoon had fired me with my own sense of reverence for the remains I handled. Hour after hour we focused on our jobs, with barely a superfluous word or unnecessary comment. I'm sure my team members wondered how they could stand to work with me for the next two weeks if this unbroken seriousness was all that was in store.
Then, right before midnight, something broke through the shell of the ultraprofessional demeanor I had assumed to cover my nervousness. Al opened up a small red biohazard bag containing a flat piece of mangled tissue. Gently, I teased it apart so that I could get a good look at it, dictating notes about the muscle mass and the little bit of white fat around the edge. But when I caught sight of the splinter of bone, I looked up from my delicate task, gazing at John, Mickey, and Al in turn.
And then I started to laugh.
Everyone was shocked. Being super-serious might not be acceptable, but laughing at a dead person's body part? What kind of monster was I?
I reached down, grabbed the piece of bone, and waved it in front of them. “It's a pork chop!”
There was a moment of silence. Then we all started to chuckle-quietly, so the pathologists on the other side of the room wouldn't think we had all gone crazy.
“How in the heck did
Mickey knew the answer. “There were restaurants in and around the Twin Towers. In fact, during the first day or two after the attack, we found part of a side of beef inside one of the body bags.”
I shook my head. “At least no one expects us to catalogue
That wasn't the last time I encountered nonhuman tissue. Throughout my time in the morgue I managed to catch a good number of chicken bones, beef ribs, and even a few legs of lamb before they were given case numbers.
Other laughs were few and far between inside this morgue. The solemn care with which we tried to handle even the smallest fragment of tissue often threw a mantle of despair over us all, and when we got a respite between shipments of body parts, we would gather in the street or inside one of the adjacent tents or trailers and tell stories of life away from death. The cops from New York delighted in telling me about life in the Big Apple, and I, in turn, would reveal some of my adventures in the hills of Kentucky. They teased me about my accent and I made fun of theirs. I taught them how to say
When I first started working at the morgue, I was continually amazed by the tent city that had sprung up around it, and by the generosity and creativity of the New Yorkers who were trying to show their support in any way they could. Just around the corner from us, the Salvation Army and numerous charitable organizations made sure we had a continuous supply of soft drinks, water, candy, and crackers, as well as hot meals three times a day. The Salvation Army canteen was staffed continually and offered not only good, nourishing food, but smiles and a touch of home. Their tables often had fresh flowers in little bud vases and notes from schoolchildren and other well-wishers taped to the walls. Someone had obviously put a lot of thought into the decorating scheme, because these notes were positioned throughout the makeshift dining hall, so that wherever you looked, you could see someone's message of hope or thanks.
When I first got to New York, the weather was balmy, but when it got cold outside, the Salvation Army brought kerosene heaters into the mess tent. A common sight inside the dining tent was a group of morgue workers clustered around one of these devices, holding out hands that were chilled and raw from repetitive washings and hours inside thin latex gloves. The bustle and camaraderie of tired workers in surgical scrubs working long hours, combined with the makeshift surroundings, made the whole thing look like a scene out of the TV show
One of the hardest parts of my New York tours was how disoriented my life became. Working on the night shift meant that I practically never saw the daylight. I'd leave for work at six p.m., when it was already dark, and return home at seven a.m., when the sun had not yet quite come up. And when you work all night long for more than a month, you begin to lose all sense of time. The hours blend into one another and so do the days, because every day is exactly like the one before and the one you know will come after. It's hard on a practical level-how do you manage to do your laundry, or get a haircut, or call your niece to say “Happy Birthday”? But it's hard on a psychological level, too-a sustained course of sensory deprivation and lack of sunlight that I found almost as wearing as the pervasive grief.
One day, though, my routine was broken-though not necessarily in a way I would have chosen. Late one afternoon near the middle of October, DMORT regional commander Todd Ellis made an urgent call to my room, telling me to go immediately to the command post that filled the top floor of the Sheraton New York Hotel, where we were now staying. Lieutenant William Keegan, the night shift recovery supervisor at Ground Zero, needed my help recovering some incinerated bones on top of what they now called “the pile”-the mountain of debris that had once been the Twin Towers.
Until recently, several fires had smoldered in and around the pile, and firefighters had only recently managed to put them out. As a result, searchers were just now starting to gain access to this area, a mass of rubble and concrete that rose up steeply, supported only by the enormous steel beams that had somehow survived the blast. As soon as workers had seen the burned bone fragments, they halted that particular excavation effort until I could get there and help with the bones' removal.
Two uniformed NYPD officers rushed me to the site in a nerve-wracking trip: speeding through the streets of New York in a police car with flashing lights and a siren that pierced the air, skirting other vehicles and pedestrians with only inches to spare. Finally, we reached our destination, the battle-scarred face of Engine 10 fire station, where Lieutenant Keegan was waiting for me. Quickly, he led me to an area where dozens of police officers were sifting through buckets of fragmented concrete, searching desperately for the bones of their fallen brothers.
“We found a weapon and a charred NYPD badge up there by that grappling crane, so we know at least one police officer was up there,” Keegan explained. “But we're not sure how to get the rest of the bones out without any more damage.” He pointed almost straight up, past a bulldozer and a huge crane that now seemed to be poised in mid-swing. Their diesel engines were rumbling at idle as the operators sat quietly, watching the sifters down below.
“We'd like you to come up there with us,” Keegan continued. I wished I could say no-but how could I refuse? With my heart in my throat, I inched my way up the face of the pile, gripping the slabs of broken concrete and picking my way carefully across pieces of steel that spanned cavernous spaces below. I looked down once into a seemingly bottomless abyss, where glowing embers from somewhere below sent up tendrils of smoke that stung my eyes. I tried not to look down again-but looking up was almost as frightening. The steel framework that had formed the towers' facade rose to incredible heights in front of me, and I could swear that it seemed to move. Then, I realized that it was actually the ground that was moving, in what felt like a sustained minor earthquake, a subtle shifting and an almost constant vibration of the materials under my feet.
“That movement is from all the heavy equipment working on other sections of the site,” Keegan explained. “This whole mass of debris is sort of suspended like jackstraws, so when one piece shifts, sometimes the whole thing moves.”
“Oh, boy,” I said to myself. “I thought all those days spent in sinkholes, coal mines, and limestone ravines back home had made you tough, Emily. But this is almost too much for the old girl.” I bluffed myself past my fear and kept going.
I'd taken to heart Keegan's sense of emergency, so the moment I reached the top of the pile, I began suggesting to the cops and firefighters what I thought we should do. Almost immediately, I could see, they began to get their backs up, rolling their eyes and muttering to each other. But I'd been in this situation before, though, and I had some idea how to handle it.
“Now, gentlemen,” I said, with just a hint of smile and my best Southern drawl. “I know you are all experienced rescuers. After all, you are New York 's Finest and Bravest, and I'm nothing but a blonde from Kentucky. But I think we can level the playing field here a little if y'all call
After a shocked pause, they burst out laughing, and that was all it took. For the next hour, we sifted bones out of the ash, working together as colleagues. They taught me how to recognize artifacts buried in the odd assortment of debris we were digging through, and I taught them how to recognize fragments of calcined bone.
A standard DMORT tour of duty is two weeks long. After my first two weeks were up, DMORT asked me to stay for a second tour and I readily agreed. Then, a few days before my second tour of duty ended-when I would have served thirty nights without a break-DMORT asked me to stay on for a third tour.
“I just can't do it,” I told my commander. “I haven't seen daylight in four weeks. I'm brain-dead, I'm exhausted, and I have a mountain of work waiting for me back in Kentucky. Please, cut me my orders and send me home.” What I thought but didn't say was that I was also emotionally wrung out. As the head of night shift triage and one of the older workers on-site, I was the person on whom the others had leaned. They counted on me to keep it together when someone burst into uncontrollable tears or wandered outside in a daze, overcome by the realization that the remains on the table belonged to a person he or she had known. I was more than willing to provide any support I could-but now I simply had nothing left to give.
My commander agreed to send me back to Kentucky with the understanding that I'd be called later and asked to return to New York. I didn't say anything to anyone, but I guess the word spread. My last night of that first month, when we hit a little lull, Carmen said, “Oh, Doc, we've got one more bag here that we missed somehow.” Wearily, I unzipped it-and there were two ceramic angels and a card that everyone had signed. As I hugged and kissed every single one of my amazing colleagues, I wondered if I'd ever find the strength to return.
When I got off the plane in Kentucky the next afternoon, I felt dazed and bewildered. This was home, and it was so familiar. But I'd been away for a month, and I'd seen and done things that would change me forever. It felt strange and disorienting to be without my “combat buddies,” the men and women with whom I'd worked side by side on a job that, I now realized, I'd never really be able to explain to anybody else. We'd shared something that only made sense to those of us who'd been through it, and now I had no one to share it with. I was looking forward to seeing my friends and talking with my family-but I also felt terribly alone.
My first stop on the way home was Daisy Hill Kennel, where my beloved springer spaniel had spent the past month. I hated to leave Savannah in a kennel, even for a short time. But my neighbors Suzanne and Bill Cassity had introduced me to the people at this long-term animal facility right before I'd left for New York, and I felt confident that my pet would be well cared for there. To my amazement, when I went to pick her up, I found notes and letters from strangers who had left not only words of encouragement for me and my colleagues, but also enough money to pay my kennel bill.
I had managed to stay in control for the past four weeks, but now, driving home with Savannah by my side, I felt my emotional walls start to crumble. As soon as I got home, I collapsed, sobbing on my bed as Savannah tried desperately to lick the tears off my cheeks. Life and love were proving to be stronger than death, and I surrendered to a wave of overwhelming sadness as I held Savannah tightly to my chest and allowed her soft fur to soak up my tears.
I fell asleep after this cathartic cry but was wrested awake a few hours later by a ringing telephone. It was my mother, telling me that Dad was close to death. If I wanted to see him again, she told me, I should come to Indiana right away. I'd known my dad had cancer, of course, but when I left for New York City, we'd all thought he was holding his own. Soon afterward, he began a rapid
