him from answering: What had he done in those crucial last moments that allowed him alone to survive? “I like to think I was the type of person who was trying to push someone out of the way to save them and not the type who ran in fear,” he said. “But I can’t remember anything, no matter how hard I try. It’s like my memory collapsed with the building, and now I have to piece the whole thing back together again.”
There are some things he does remember. He remembers Mike D’Auria, a twenty-five-year-old rookie with a Mayan tattoo on his leg. He remembers Frank Callahan, his captain, and Mike Lynch, another firefighter, who was about to get married. He remembers what they carried: a Halligan, a maul, an axe, a Rabbit Tool, eight-penny nails, utility ropes, wire cutters, chucks, and a screwdriver. He remembers waking on September 11th and the alarm sounding at the firehouse at 9:13 A.M. He remembers the men getting on the rigs. He remembers the rigs. He remembers asking the lieutenant if he thought it was a terrorist attack and the lieutenant saying yes and their riding in silence.
There are other things he remembers, too: his nickname, Ric-o-Shea; his age, thirty-four; and his favorite color, yellow. He remembers meeting his girlfriend, Stacy Hope Herman. He remembers growing up on Long Island and his parents fighting and his mother moving out when he was thirteen. He remembers some things even if he doesn’t want to-things that refuse to dissolve, along with all the insignificant memories, with the passage of time.
Memory is a code to who we are, a collection not simply of dates and facts but also of emotional struggles, epiphanies, and transformations. And in the wake of tragedy it is vital to recovery. After a traumatic event, people tend to store a series of memories and arrange them into a meaningful narrative. They remember exactly where they were and to whom they were talking. But what does one do when the narrative is shattered, when some-or most-of the pieces of the puzzle are missing?
In the last week of September, I went with Shea to the St. Charles Hospital and Rehabilitation Center in Long Island. The doctors were uncertain if he was blocking out what had happened as a result of physical or psychological blows, or both. Mark Sandberg, a neuropsychologist, greeted Shea in the lobby and led him into a cramped office. After Sandberg closed the door, they sat down, facing each other. “I know very little about you,” Sandberg said. “So what do you remember?”
“I can tell you what I remember and what I was told,” Shea said. “I remember responding to the scene. I’m in Ladder 35, but they have an engine in there as well, and they had a free seat. I wasn’t working that day, and I said, ‘Can I jump on?’”
The doctor seemed surprised. “You were off duty that day?”
Shea explained that he was “buffing,” or volunteering, which was “the right thing to do.” He continued, “So the officer gave me permission, and I… went down the West Side Highway… We noticed car fires and debris falling everywhere-like big falling carpets. There were pieces of metal and glass. And people were falling-”
“Do you recall that or did someone tell you that?”
Shea closed his eyes. “I recall that.”
Sandberg made several notes on a pad, and then asked Shea to continue. On the way to the scene, Shea said, he pulled out the video camera that he sometimes used to document fire scenes for training. “I remember putting it in the plastic bag and putting it back in my coat,” he said. “I knew I couldn’t be filming that long.” He then prepared to go into the chaos. “I don’t remember anything after that, except waking up in the hospital.”
“Are your memories back after that?”
“Yes, they started to come back. They were in and out. They were drugging me at the time, with morphine, I think. They said I was conscious, but I don’t know.”
“You can be conscious and have no memory. It’s called post-traumatic amnesia.”
“That’s what this is?”
“That’s what I’m trying to understand.”
Shea fidgeted with his bandages. “Some say it’s better not to remember. Maybe the fact that I don’t know if I was trying to save someone, maybe that’s helping me deal with the post-stress… or whatever you call it.”
Sandberg asked how many men from his house who had gone down with him were lost. For the first time, Shea looked up from his bandages. “All of them,” he said. “All of them but me.”
He had never intended to become a fireman. Though he came from a long line of firefighters-which included his grandfather, his uncle, his father, and his older brother-he didn’t fit the stereotype. He wasn’t, as he put it, “a typical macho.” He was smaller and more bookish than many of the other men; he disliked sports and didn’t drink. Initially, he embarked on a career in computer software, at which he excelled, but by 1998 he felt compelled to follow in the family tradition.
When he was first assigned to Engine 40, Ladder 35, in the summer of 2001, he showed up at three in the morning. The men were going out on a call, and when they returned he greeted them with platters of eggs and French toast and chocolate-covered strawberries. “They were looking at me, like, ‘Who is this freakin’ guy?’” Shea recalled.
“A lot of the guys didn’t know what to make of Kev,” Steve Kelly says.
But he displayed an almost monkish devotion to the job, until he gradually found his place as the one who was always willing to lend a hand, speaking in frenetic bursts, saying, “Yes, sir,” and “Negative K, sir,” and answering the phone with the refrain “Firefighter Kevin Shea. How can I help you?” Although many in the house assumed that Shea would retire, given the severity of his injuries, he vowed that he would return to active duty by Christmas. “I have my family,” he said, “but this is my family, too.”
As he tried to heal, strengthening his muscles and maintaining a strict protein diet, he could not forget, as some amnesiacs can, that he had forgotten. He was reminded of the gaps in his memory when he flipped on the television or saw the relatives of the missing men.
One of the firefighters mentioned offhandedly to Shea that he had seen a news clip of a lone rescue worker who, instead of carrying out victims, was standing in front of the towers paralyzed with fear. “I hope I wasn’t that kind of person,” Shea said.
His brother Brian told me, “He needs to figure it out. I don’t want him thirty years from now walking around angry at the world and not knowing why. I don’t want him to be like one of these guys who comes back from Vietnam and loses his mind.”
Shea agreed that he had to recover his past-“no matter what I discover.” And so, still in bandages, he set out like a detective, sifting through clues.
He started with only a note from the hospital. It said, “Patient is a thirty-four-year-old white male firefighter… who was knocked unconscious by falling debris just outside the Trade Center.”
Shea soon tracked down the neurosurgeon who treated him on September 11th and beseeched him for more details. The doctor said all he knew was that Shea was brought in on a stretcher and that the injuries to his neck were consistent with being hit by something from the front. “Is there anything else?” Shea asked. “Anything at all?”
The doctor thought for a moment. “Well, I remember one thing,” he offered. “You said you crawled two hundred feet toward light.”
Shea didn’t remember crawling or even saying that he had done so. “How the hell could I have crawled two hundred feet with a broken neck?” Shea asked.
As he intensified his search, he tried to be methodical. He interviewed his family members and closest friends for any details that he might have mentioned in the hospital, and since forgotten. One of them told him that he had mentioned grabbing a Purple K extinguisher, which is used to put out airplane fires.
More people learned of his search, and he was inundated with tips. One morning, he flipped on his computer and showed me a list of dozens of individuals who claimed to have information. “People keep calling, saying, ‘Yeah, I was there. I pulled you out.’ It’s hard to know what to believe.”
Joe Patriciello, a lieutenant whom Shea had known for years, called and told him he had seen Shea moments before the first tower came down. “You embraced me in the command center,” Patriciello said. “Don’t you remember?”
“What command center?”
“In the south tower.”
Shea saw an image in his mind: a room full of people. They were standing in the lobby of the south tower, which was soon decimated. “I remember that,” Shea later told me. “I’m sure of it.” He became excited. “It’s possible other things could come back.”
