ORPHANS
I WAS ON SHIFT ON SEPTEMBER 11, 2001. THE FALLING TOWERS DID NOT REACH south Minneapolis, and I spent the day transfixed like much of the world, staring at the television. I was with two crews of guys who had never been to New York City, who had no idea the scope of what had happened. I worried about friends of mine in the city. It was a heavy, shocking day. I got off shift and went home, looking to hold Annie (whose birthday, September 12, had a definite pall cast over it) and snuggle baby Flann. As I got out of my car, I said hello to the neighbor across the street. He was walking from his car to his house, as well. We weren’t close, but, you know, America had just been attacked. Human contact was at a premium. “How’re you doing?” I asked. He stopped and looked at me, blank and lost. Before I even finished the thought that he was taking it harder than I was—and I’d spent the day with fireguys who both second-guessed FDNY’s actions with the sublimely stupid con- fidence of people who have never seen a one-hundred-story building, while also fighting furiously to suppress the raw terror of what those New York guys had experienced—he gestured vaguely. Not toward the eerily blue sky, as I expected, but at the car, then their house. She’s gone. She’s—she died. Yesterday.
His wife had been sick with cancer. We were not close. I had no idea how ill she was. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. He stared some more then walked inside. I didn’t remember his name. The poor guy’s wife died on 9/11. His grief was enormous, and specific. It wasn’t the flash of the planes striking the towers, or the jet fuel immolating the damaged floors, or the surreal collapse. No. His wife died of cancer, died in a hospital bed with him by her side. He likely watched the television coverage as she slipped away. Every TV in every room, every channel, every doctor, nurse, orderly, every family: everyone focused on the same unthinkable monstrosity. It was inescapable. He now faced the aftermath of the attacks and her death, alone: walking alone out of the hospital, driving home alone, walking up the steps alone, entering the empty house, alone. Her death eclipsed by the myopic national panic and grief of the terrorist attacks. What room would there be for his sorrow?
The world spins on. It always does. Your heart is broken, and some- one is mad about a lunch order. Your wife dies, and your boss still needs the report by Monday. People got sick and died unrelated to the racial justice unrest. People died from things other than Covid. We went to work and responded to the panorama of human experience, as is our charge, as we do.
//
Shortly after shift change one morning—I don’t remember when specif- ically, but early winter; before Covid, since we had no masks, but after 2017, since I was back at 17s; the years blur—we were called to “one un- responsive” a couple of blocks east of the station. We arrived within two minutes, entered the house, and directly encountered the patient. It was an overnight cardiac, a dead man hunched between the recliner and cof- fee table. He was a young Black man in a T-shirt and shorts. No blood, no mess, no drug gear or pills, no signs of a fight. His skin did not yet show pooling or lividity, but it was cool to the touch, and his limbs were tight with encroaching rigor mortis. Directly to the left, about seven feet away, was an infant bouncing and laughing in a baby-jumper hung between the dining and living rooms. As we confirmed the man was pulseless, without respirations, cold, and stiff (dead and unworkable), a little boy zipped across the room, jumped onto the chair’s thick arm. We all flinched, reflexively tried to stop him, then froze as he threw his arms around his dad’s bare shoulders. The kid was too fast.
He hugged the dead man and then jumped down and looked at all of us. “Who are you?” he asked.
The man’s wife was standing in the middle of the room. She looked at her husband, looked away, looked back, shook her head, searching frantically—for nothing and everything, seeking something safe, solid, real. Not this. She was tall, with striking green eyes clouded with pain and panic. There was no answer on the couch and nowhere to turn.
We all felt the horrific imperative of her two young children. She kept saying, “No, no, no, no,” her voice rising and croaking in a strangled cry. She didn’t want to upset the kids. Yet it was inescapable—to me, and my crew—the crushing truth that her two young children were fatherless. Their dad’s corpse, halfway off the easy chair, was undeniable. Thanksgiving was a week away. This family’s holidays, their future, were marred. Infinitely, indefinitely. This was the start of their new life, the death of the husband-father.
I told the crew to take our gear back to the rig and then return. We would be staying on scene a while.
These situations offer a strange limbo, an awkward foreknowledge. We know what we are seeing, what it means. We are waiting for the survivors to grasp this new truth. It sucks. I touched the woman’s arm and asked if she needed to call anyone. She stared at me, then shook her head, then nodded. She was clutching her phone still, the 911 dis- patcher still giving prearrival instructions, muffled in her palm. I took the phone from her, told Dispatch we were there, and hung up. I grasped her shoulder calmly. I peered up into her face, forcing eye contact. “I’m so very sorry. I am sorry this has happened to you all.” I put the phone back into her hand. “Several things will occur in the next hour or so, and I will explain what they are. First, is there anyone you can call? Anyone you want to tell? Family? Someone to help with the kids?”
She started at the word, glanced around for them, pulled the boy to her. He twisted and squirmed out of her embrace, hurtled over the table, and knelt beside the jumpy seat, bouncing his little brother. The boys looked like replicas of each other, one five and the other about a year, but stamped from the same mold. The woman’s face contorted, desperation interwoven with grief.
“Is there anywhere we can go right now, to talk?” I asked, guiding her away from the couch. It was a tiny house; the small galley kitchen opened onto the living and dining rooms. Not there. Two small bedrooms beside the lone bathroom just off the kitchen. No real space for privacy. “Let’s go in here, yes?” I asked. She whispered the boy’s name and as he rushed to her, grabbing her hip, they went into his bedroom.
I stood by the door to the room, shielding their view of the corpse, the dead man, their husband-father. The woman stared at her phone, shaking. “Ma’am?” She looked up emptily. “My name is Jeremy. What’s your name?”
She stared at me, mouth forming letters.
“It’s all right,” I said.
“Amina.”
(A reminder that everything depicted has happened, and none of it being recounted here violates the private experiences of any living or dead person. There is no “Amina.” There have been many sudden widows.)
“I’m so sorry to meet you like this, Amina. Let’s take some breaths. In, nice and slow. Hold it. Out slow and easy. Good, good. Again.” She stiffly complied. Her son climbed into her lap, trying to wipe away her tears. I guided her through some breathing exercises. The boy thought it was funny and mimicked her.
“Good job, Amina. Keep breathing. It will help you think.” I had no solutions. Nothing for the short or the long term. There are none, just live through it. There was also no real hurry, sadly. She could call whomever, or she could sit with her son in her lap and cry. Either way, her husband was dead. She had eternity now, without him. Our end of things, the official process, was in motion.
I leaned back to check on the infant, who continued to bounce and gurgle. The medics arrived and I briefed them. The woman started speaking into her phone, gasping bursts of sorrow. It was family, I could tell. These calls sound alike. The gutted staccato spurts: “It’s [husband]. . . . He’s gone. Yes, dead. . . . He died last night! . . . Come here. . . . Yes. Right now. No. Yes. Yes! They’re here now. No. They said he’s gone. He’s gone! Come now.”
Even though the medics were cleared, they stayed too. The tragic contrast of the little tyke bouncing happily in front of his dead dad struck us all. One medic went into the room to talk to the mother; the other medic and I gave the deceased a more thorough examination. My first check had shown no signs of struggle, violence, or self-harm. But I’d also been processing the kids and the shocked wife. Whether an OD, suicide, or natural causes, it was essentially irrelevant. But, still, we have to check, and I didn’t want anything sharp sticking out to cut anyone, if that were the case.
The police squad arrived. The medics left and my crew remained. The officers needed official information and tried to speak with the mom while she managed a flurry of incoming calls. The boy stared up at them, half hiding in his mom’s loose nightshirt. The room was cramped. It was early winter and fairly cold. They couldn’t step outside to interview her. We didn’t want the boy to see his dad—let alone climb on him—and it was too far below freezing to distract him by playing in the yard or exploring our rig. The baby started fussing a little, and the woman went to him, followed by the officers.
My durgan and I remained in the room with the boy. About the best option we could manage was to act as the world’s most awkward babysitters while the police spoke with the mom in the small dining room and little brother bounced, bounced, bounced suspended in the doorway. Behind them, the man remained dead between two pieces of furniture.
The boy sat shyly on his bed, looking down. He started snuffling, not quite crying. We bent down and comforted him. He was in shock. Or, no, I realized: not even shock. This was beyond his comprehension. The word dead is an abstraction to a kindergartener. His dad was still at home, he just wasn’t moving. We stayed with the boy. He sat back against the wall and stared at us. I asked if he was all right. He shrugged. Poor little dude, I kept thinking.
We stood, or knelt, beside him, struggling to make small talk. Everything seemed irrelevant or too loaded. The voices in the next room flowed to us, the woman’s bursts of weeping or crying out, the officers’ steady responses. The boy started each time his mother wailed for her husband. My durgan tried asking questions about the posters on the walls, the constellations painted on the ceiling. The boy would answer vaguely then trail off. They had a sweet house, nice personal touches, good artistic flourishes. This was a warm home, the love and purpose apparent everywhere. I couldn’t tell if this comforted or disturbed me, considering the desolate places we generally find ourselves. We kept trying: to engage, distract, block out the pain from the front room.
The boy was silent, pulling on his fingers. I knelt beside him and said, “I lost my mom when I was a little kid. I was even younger than you. My sister, she was a baby just like your brother. Our mom died. It’s really hard. But, you know, I guess the clichés aren’t wrong. Life goes on. Here I am. You’ll be all right. You will.”
My crew member gaped, peering with horror at me over the kid’s head: What the fuck?! I shrugged. This kid is caught on profound currents, things he knows nothing about. His dad is stiff in the living room. What will he remember later, or tomorrow, or next month, or forever? Worrying about whether my abstract analogies would confuse him was as useless as giving him my turnouts to wear. You’re the man of the house now, son. Ugh.
I asked the boy how he felt. He also shrugged, his eyes searching the room. He suddenly sprung forward and grabbed something from a pile on the floor. “Look!” he said, triumphantly holding an action figure aloft.
“Cool,” we said, loudly and with maniac enthusiasm—anything to stop talking, and not talking, about his dead dad. “Spider Man is rad,” I gushed.
The boy and my durgan both said, “No, it’s the Black Panther! T’challa,” as if I were the most oblivious person in the world. How could you not know that?! “Sorry,” I said. “I’ve got daughters—and they’re older.”
The boy looked at me oddly, pondering the notion that I was an actual person, with kids even, not just a stranger in a uniform. He hoisted his action figure and launched into that excited nonstop blast of narration, explanation, imaginative thinking. “Wait,” he interrupted himself, then rushed past us into the main room. My durgan looked at me again. What the fuck? was a sufficient encapsulation of the scene. The boy sped back into the room and triumphantly presented me with two action figures. One, Black Panther; the other, Iron Man. “Cool!” I said again. “But, really, I wasn’t totally wrong. I mean, they’re all in the same franchise.”
The boy looked at the heroes in his hands. My crew member stared at me. “Really?” he asked. “You’re splitting hairs, arguing with the kid? Now, here? Really?”
“It’s not like I called him Batman, right?”
We both laughed, then talked superheroes with the boy. He wanted to show us something else and rushed again back to the room where his dead father, grieving mother, and bouncing brother were. “Do we, like, stop him, or something?” my durgan asked, rhetorically more than practically.
I shrugged. “It’s his house. Putting hands on him might freak him out—stranger danger and whatnot. He’s doing all right. We can only do so much to distract him.” We looked into the living room, where the boy searched around the table, nearly ignoring his dad’s body, then rushed between the police to his mom and pulled her down to loud-whisper into her ear. He wanted to bring his baby brother into the room to show us how they play Black Panther. The mother smiled a broken grin and told him to wait a few minutes. My heart kicked me in the throat.
We heard car doors slamming in the street, feet rushing on the walk, and then three or four people burst into the room, crying out at the sight of the dead man, enveloping the woman in loving hugs, sweeping the boy into their circle. With family present, we were redundant and conspicuous. “I’m so very sorry” always feels a woefully insufficient leave-taking.
//
Back at the station, we discussed the bummer of it all. I wondered how the woman would remember the immediate minutes after finding her husband. What would her memories be of objective and practical details? What sticks amid, or despite, the shock and grief? I thought of that small, sad family the following week, on Thanksgiving, and then leading up to and through Christmas. The boy, his mom, the baby, their fractured lives.
Neither of my crew members that day had children. They had no real sense of how kids process, what they grasp, what filters in or out. What would the boy remember later? His sibling would bounce and laugh, cry and eat, nap and soil his diapers, in the simple yet essential routine of infancy. He would never know his father; he would hear a name, see a few photos, some video of him not-yet-born, a bump inside his mother perhaps. Their memory lane ended that morning, with the baby too young to walk yet. But my little buddy: what would he remember? He was a bit older than I was when my mom died. Time in illness and death is quite relative. The man died suddenly overnight. My mom’s cancer “journey” lasted under four weeks from diagnosis to death. Annie’s dad’s journey was the time it took to put the shotgun to his head and pull the trigger. We all lost a parent. The big-picture hairsplitting about death matters very little to the orphaned kids.
I have no solid memories of my mom’s sickness, of seeing her die, of her funeral, of the aftermath, though I was there for all of it. I’ve been told I ran up to every woman who entered our house over the next two years (whether babysitter or date for my dad) and demanded, “Are you my new mom?” My sister was five months old when our mother died. She has no memories at all. The sparse few I retain are largely tales I’ve told myself, animations of photos I’ve found squirreled away. The 1969 professional advice our father got: Move on, don’t dwell. Kids are resilient. They won’t remember her. He took it quite literally. I was eighteen when he first asked if I had any questions about her.
I was and am absolutely empathetic for the bereft mother, for the implications of her loss. And I’m aware, having stood before dozens (hundreds, likely) of suddenly widowed humans, that the world had cracked open and swallowed her. In her grief, she was shell-shocked, literally, incoherent and uncomprehending. That she was unaware of her son climbing on her dead husband, not cognizant that she was still in her nightshirt and holding her toothbrush. She kept muttering that they had argued last night, and he had gone to sleep in his recliner. Now she will blame herself, forever. I killed him. If we hadn’t fought, he wouldn’t have died. It is not true, but truth holds no power over feelings like that.
In this short, shocked period, she was oblivious—she needed some guidance and direction to function in the fog of loss. I stood with the bereaved woman, allowed her to be lost, provided help where I could, and I also thought of their future. Hers was a scramble, a chasm of heartbreak and brutal logistical hell. The weight a now-widowed parent must pull: micro details and existential riddles simultaneously. This isn’t a cold that one hunkers down and recovers from: this is a life sentence. Brutal, jagged, heart-rent life.
The boys, though.
I wrote at the outset that my bumpy childhood likely shaped my worldview. This job has reinforced and broadened it. I see myself in every orphaned kid we encounter. I scrutinize their unknowing, their lostness; I extrapolate my own path. The days, the months, the years; the unlived lives, the unfulfilled promises. The absence, the haunting absence. We swear our village will look after each orphan, but life gets in the way. I want to fight for the kids, offer them what too many adults failed to give my sister and me. We grew up knowing nothing of our mom. Her friends did not talk about her around us for fear it would upset us (or, not us as much as the tenuous equilibrium of a family reconfigured, the self-evident absence of the dead mother). Their collective silence was not malicious, but, because of good intentions and social niceties, they failed to help us in ways only they could.
Mary Oliver describes it strikingly in her essay “Staying Alive”:
‘Adults can change their circumstances; children cannot. Children are powerless, and in difficult situations they are the victims of every sorrow and mischance and rage around them, for children feel all of these things but without any of the ability that adults have to change them. Whatever can take a child beyond such circumstances, therefore, is an alleviation and a blessing.’
I concur. I also, at this point, have witnessed enough of these heart-breaking situations that I see the uselessness of tactful reserve—it seems something that comforts the awkward witness, not the grieving person. I have almost no filter and am shit with small talk. So, I try to puncture that crushing quiet in the few minutes we spend together, asking questions, allowing the bereaved to open up. Talking about the deceased person won’t make them any more dead, and “sparing the feelings” of the grief-stricken survivor is just selfish comfort.
The primary reason I remained in Chattanooga after my first year teaching was because my dear friends Paco and Ann Watkins had a baby. I was there through the pregnancy, the birth (not literally: I took care of their dog while Ann did the work), baby Patton’s earliest weeks, months, then his first three years. I wanted to see—needed to fathom— what he saw as he approached the age I was when my mother died. I looked at the world through his eyes, watched how and what he perceived and clung to. I understand now, of course, that all those hours of playtime, of reading, of imbibing the world around him, might be scant slices of recollection for him—at best. I am nothing but a name his parents might fondly mention, part of a tale he was present for but has no memory of. But it shaped his life and papered his growing mind. Judy died when I was pushing three, the height of mother–child (son) attachment, the cusp of the Oedipal journey (for those who believe). By all accounts, Judy was smitten with me. I was a much-loved, swell baby. In some ways, my preposterous sense of self was forged then. And then she died.
Mary Gordon writes in The Company of Women: “A fatherless girl thinks all things are possible, and nothing is safe.” I’d argue that works across gender and parent. Losing my mother warped my sense of a safe world. If we consider Piaget’s developmental stages, losing my mom at stage six of Object Permanence was a profound mind (and heart) fuck. Is it any wonder I expect that everyone will die, that no one will come back? My default worry is that the worst will happen. Yet this job has provided profound context: life is a path of loss, sadness, doubt. These aren’t exceptions, nor unfair attacks. All of these punctuate and empha- size our love, laughter, lightness.
Factor in systemic and generational issues, health and welfare challenges, and some families lose far more than their “fair” share. Our crews respond to such folks, for whom the single traumatizing death might be stacked in a heap of losses. They lose one family member, then another, and another. We might walk into someone grieving their fourth dead immediate relative or distraught over what seems like a routine cold. It isn’t an abstract worry but the brutal truth, their reality. And when we respond to folks having “dysfunctional” or “hysterical” reactions to seemingly small events, if we can’t fathom what might be behind their worries, we dismiss and misserve them.
//
My sister and I lost our mom before we knew her. That marked us, shaped our paths and our narratives. My aunt Linds lost her big sister, the rock of their family, when she was twenty. A year later, she lost her mother. And then she lost her brother a couple of years after that. A grandmother and an uncle I never got to know, in addition to my mom. These are entirely different scales of loss. Of heartbreak. Concrete loss of family is different from being orphaned, left bereft of the person and the symbol. We lost our future, Linds lost her frames of reference: the connections to past, to self, to memory, to blood. It isn’t a competition, who has lost more. And it’s good to remember that many people suffer profoundly and keep on living heartily.
Linds told me some years back, “You know, it’s too bad Judy died—well, for a bunch of reasons . . . Obviously.” (We both chuckled mordantly.)
“But,” she continued, “I’m thinking specifically that it would have been interesting to see how she turned out. She loved you, loved being your mom, but I don’t know that she would have been satisfied as a full-time mother. And then what? That’s what is so sad. The paradox was that she was fierce and independent, yet held horribly regressive—or, typically traditional, for the sixties—views about women staying out of the workplace. She might have become someone radically progressive or she might have curdled into a D.C. Junior League Stepford Wife. And we’ll never know. It remains a mystery.”
And that was interesting, because for the decades I had not known my mom as anything but a mythic absence, a saintly ghost. I presumed that she was all-good, all-loving, grounded, centered, clear-eyed, virtuous—perfect. I had one small photo of her that I hoarded and hid away growing up: we were forever a two-by-two-inch faded color snap- shot. Our brief lives together reduced to that one moment (one I had no real memory of). The notion of her actual human flaws was inconsistent with the hagiographic fantasy I’d constructed, having nothing else to go on.
Also, the specter of a non-awesome mother was startling. Of course, she would have been perfect. It was nothing but a tragedy that we had been deprived of her boundless embrace and wonderful cookies. But: I have no idea if she could bake or even liked children. To consider she might have been crazy, or a bully, or some phony society matron—not out of the realm of the possible, given her upbringing and proclivities—was jarring.
Wait, I thought. I don’t have anything to go on, so let me at least pretend she was perfect. Give me that. Which is unfair to her siblings, of course. They knew and experienced her temper, whims, flaws. And my dad, too. Maybe they were an unhappy couple, or he felt bossed around by her, or they hated each other’s taste in music? But, with her long dead at such a young age, we will never know. And that is its own shame.
Annie’s dad was a suicide. He was a sorcerer: compelling and seductive, and also darkly manipulative and abusive. The suicide of a father, the deliberate abandonment by a parent: that eclipses anything else—for years if not lifetimes. As long as I’ve known her, she’s grasped at his shadow—If only I’d been more—if I’d been less—if if if, he wouldn’t have killed himself. He was everything to me (and he was abusive). The hole in the heart and mind cannot be filled. Reason cannot touch this void.
I’m not suggesting that anyone would be better off with their parent dead. I’m saying that with these deaths, we never get to see anyone grow older, fix their wrongs, or simply fail to be better. We (they) are spared disappointment but deprived of redemption.
But we are also deprived the other universes of Schrödinger’s cat box. Yes, it’s a god-awful tragedy that Billy and Susie never knew their parents. And we tell ourselves that everything would have been great. But, looking at the rest of us flailing through our own not-dead lives, we must consider that, maybe, John would have flaked out on you, or cheated, or abused someone. Maybe Jenny resented the trappings and trap of domesticity and would have cut out, or become a drunk, or a shopaholic. “Regular” relationships curdle and fail; domestic resentment and misery abound. We will never know how things might have turned out. And that, of course, is the crime, the shame, the tragedy. We never get to see our beloveds, our parents, our kin have the opportuni- ties to grow, fail, recover, live.
I think of that when I see orphaned kids in the aftermath of a parent’s death: how brutally their lives are being altered, but also the fact that it might be years before anyone suggests or considers that the dead parent had feet of clay. Too, the surviving parent must shoulder the weight, the worry, the guilt—all of it—for the absent parent. The ghost expands to fill the hearts, minds, and lives of the bereft. The orphans always seek that dead mom or dad, while the surviving parent keeps plugging along, often sacrificing their own grief and hurt, anger and loneliness, to protect the kids. That is the essence of parenting. No matter what, the survivor will fail the one thing the kid demands: to bring the dead parent back to life.
When people now imprint their memories and the images of their deceased in the amber of social media, it provides a far better, more concrete repository of memory and tactile connection, a virtual footprint. Kids can google their dead parents, for better and worse. And our society recognizes that utter silence about the dead doesn’t help the kids. Advances in psychology have shown that Get over it. Move forward! is not an effective grieving tool.
My affinity and allegiance are with the young kids, of course. But the ways their lives are marked will be revealed over time. Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. There will be time for such a word (provided someone has the guts to speak it). But those who are widowed: thrown naked and shivering into a harsh, hostile landscape, hearts ravaged, futures obliterated, children to be fed and consoled. In these moments, this immediate chaos, what actually matters? What can any of us do for them? I pragmatically considered that devastated mother and my interactions with her. I’d be curious what her perspective was on our time together. I expect I am nothing but a blur, if even that. But maybe my manner or tone was too brusque? Or she mistook my help for egregious condescension? Maybe we did her a kindness, distracting the boy and stalling as she began to wrap her head around the fractured family. Or maybe I was simply another anonymous official peering into her cavern of grief. I certainly embodied the official death of her husband: I wouldn’t blame her. My feelings are irrelevant, but I will stand before a new widow again. If I can learn better ways to be of use, to help someone when they most need it, I want to know that.
Propriety is often useless in emergency situations. But respect and compassion are essential. We see the naked and the dead where they lie, and if we are squeamish or cowed by propriety, we fail to help when someone needs it. My mom’s dying before I could ride a bike savaged my fealty to proper. I have little filter, and less use for demure social niceties. But my heart is capacious, and I will look you in the eye and honor your pain and fear and messy humanity. We don’t get taught about these esoteric human skills. We trust our guts, or instincts, or previous expe- riences. Families don’t fill out surveys afterward. It may sound awkward, and gloomy, and blunt, but someone else will die while I am working, and we will rush into their home and find what we find. With the dead beyond help, we turn to the living.
As Nora McInerny says, “Every single person we know and love will die someday.” The challenge for each of us is to learn to be present with the grief and the grieving. Honor the dead and the bereft, be patient and kind, and cut people slack, but don’t rewrite history. Allow the dead their full humanity; allow the survivors their measures of grief and gall. As we say at work, Do right. Be kind.
(Reprinted from Trauma Sponges: Dispatches from the Scarred Heart of Emergency Response by Jeremy Norton. Published by the University of Minnesota Press, 2023. Copyright 2023 by Jeremy Norton. All rights reserved.)