Reflections on the 20th Anniversary of 9/11
The destroyed WTC towers. Photo by Alexander Stein, September 2001
My wife and I lived across the street from the World Trade Center. The towers soared up so high from our apartment near their base you had to crane your neck out the windows to see the tops. On that terrible morning, my wife was 3 months pregnant with our first baby. I was already in my office near Union Sq. Before the next hour had passed, the world as we knew it would change. Smoke and fire were everywhere; people were hanging out of the windows on the upper floors, frantically waving; bodies were flying out of the buildings. I went out into the street just as the south tower fell.
Given how close our apartment was to the trade center—just a few hundred feet—I feared our building, with my wife and unborn child in it, would be crushed. Was she alive or among the thousands whose deaths so many of us just witnessed? I ran toward home. The north tower collapsed . A couple of blocks from what would be known as ‘ground zero’ a wall of police officers stopped me. We stood there, enveloped by the swirling thick grayish-white cloud, the vaporized remnants of buildings and lives. I was scanning every anguished face looking for one. But she wasn’t among any of them. Finally, much later that day, my cellphone rang, and I heard her voice. She was safe. She’d been chased out of our apartment by the torrential avalanche of debris which came crashing through our windows as the first tower collapsed. After bunkering in the basement with neighbors and other tenants during the fall of the second tower, she’d been evacuated by police boat. She was on Ellis Island.
We were much more fortunate than so many others; we were reunited, and we lost only material things. But what we once called home was now wrecked, covered in pulverized debris and locked-down behind military blockades in an ashen wasteland designated by the FBI as The Frozen Zone. We embarked on what would be a harrowing 3-month odyssey before eventually resettling in Brooklyn. We named that son Miles as a tribute to the distance we traveled together before he was born. He’s 19 now and a sophomore at college studying engineering. His younger brother just started 11th grade and is an elite soccer player.
I describe my consultancy, Dolus Advisors, as: “founded in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 attacks.” This history is what that refers to. My experiences on and after that day transformed and still informs the trajectory of my career—refocusing my expertise as a psychoanalyst treating patients in private clinical practice to working on a larger scale and with greater social impact: advising senior leaders and boards in making complex decisions, helping executives affected by trauma or crisis to be more effective in upholding their responsibilities to others, to mitigate executives’ abuses of power and influence, and to help protect people, organizations, and society from the harmful consequences of those who misuse their authority.
There is still so much work to be done.