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The Vocabulary of Grief
Twenty years after 9/11, we still don’t know how to talk about death
Twenty years is a long time to grieve. In those early years after the buildings collapsed on 9/11 taking my husband, Caleb Arron Dack, along with 2,995 others, I couldn’t imagine what my life without him might look like in twenty years. It seemed an unfathomable amount of time. I had to get down to the business at hand —raise two small children while mourning Arron in a way that I felt “honored him.” Those were the words that kept creeping into my brain: you must find a way to properly honor him.
The problem was, as a 35-year-old new widow with a two, and six-year-old, I barely had a vocabulary for “honoring” or “mourning” or even “grieving” him, let alone a methodology. I was surprised to learn I was meant to “celebrate” his life. I was not in a very celebratory mood. And so I did what all good 9/11 widows did — I attended public memorials. The city of New York, the state of New Jersey, the town of Montclair. I sat through countless tear-jerky renditions of Amazing Grace on the bagpipes and the ringing of too many fire bells. The firefighters had the mourning thing down, and I derived unexpected comfort from the consistency of those bagpipes and bells.
The first anniversary
At the memorial on the first anniversary of September 11th that took place beside the remains of the World Trade Center, I flocked with thousands of other families, dismayed that I hadn’t thought to emblazon my husband’s face on a series of t-shirts to be worn by all my family members. How did I not know I was supposed to create a t-shirt? Granted, only my mother-in-law and I made the trek because the rest of my family were back in Canada. Huge public memorials were not really their thing. They weren’t really our thing either, but it felt important to be there somehow, to hear Arron’s name read for the first time. We waited for what seemed hours, shoulder to shoulder with other tearful family members, hiding from TV cameras and photographers that seemed determined to catch every tear for national consumption. Finally, the name readers reached the letter D. We held our breath as Arron’s name was read… except instead of reading the name “Caleb Arron Dack,” the young man read the name “Caleb Arron Back.” Was he not aware that he was reading “D” names? My mother-in-law spit out her exhale in a swear word. After the name was bungled, we allowed ourselves to be herded down into “the pit” where we were meant to do something… lay flowers? But again, we were unprepared and flowerless. It felt hard to breathe down there — as if the air was thinner — so we escaped.
I came home from that memorial feeling angry and it took me months to dissect the reason: the memorial was not about Arron. I almost laughed out loud at how obvious the answer was. Of course, a public memorial was not about my husband. It was about the collective loss. Which brought me to another realization. Because we never received Arron’s remains, we hadn’t followed the standard protocol that, in my family would have included a memorial, a cremation, and a sprinkling of ashes somewhere meaningful like a lake. We’d stopped at the memorial since we had no ashes to sprinkle. There was no stone or plaque or even a place to commune with him. We held Arron’s memorial in New Jersey overlooking the still-smoldering buildings a month after their collapse. It was meaningful and powerful, sure, but it wasn’t enough. Missing was a place where we could go to commune with Arron.
Around the time of these revelations, I left my job. Widow brain, the brain fog associated with trauma, had gotten the better of me, and my powers of juggling the production of a large e-commerce website were well beyond my pre-widow capacities. To keep busy and begin to process the enormity of my circumstances, even two years after the fact, I began to write about my experiences, mostly for the benefit of my kids who would have no way of remembering those early days. I craved words to put meaning to my experience and dripped tears onto my keyboard as I wrote. Later, when what turned into my book was close to being published, my editor told me there was an over-population of the word “tears.” Did I have another word? Interestingly, the word “tear” is a homophone, and the other meaning of “tear” is oddly accurate when describing the effects of grief: rip, hole, split, rent.
The birdbath
As I wrote, I hatched an idea about creating a memorial for Arron: a mosaic-tiled birdbath that would bear a meaningful epitaph on a brass plaque. I know, most people would have planted a tree, or set a stone in the garden, but Arron was a little unusual, and given that his nickname for me was “Lemonbird,” it made perfect sense. Mosaic tiling was a skill he often talked about learning. I cleared his workbench in the corner of the basement where his tools hung on the wall collecting dust and set the bowl of the birdbath on it. With a hammer, I broke pretty colored glass tiles into small bits and glued them into place. I felt Arron’s approval whenever I worked on the birdbath. Eventually, my fingers plastered with bandaids, I covered the birdbath in tiles, creating a scene of whimsical creatures that each represented a member of our family. A small brass plaque included an epitaph from a poem written by Henry Van Dyke:
Time is too slow for those who wait,
Too swift for those who fear,
Too long for those who grieve
Too short for those who rejoice
But for those who love, time is not.
– Henry Van Dyke
Just after the third anniversary of my husband’s death, I hosted a “birdbath” party to christen my memorial into the world. Others wept as I read my dedication, but I wasn’t sad. I was euphoric. I had finally found a way to honor Arron in a way that made sense to me and my family.
When Henry Van Dyke, a Presbyterian Minister, and English Literature professor at Princeton University who wrote his poem “Time Is” in 1904, we were much better as a society at facing death head-on. It was possible to speak about death more honestly and grieve with a greater community, perhaps because more people died during wars and disease and famine.
Modern-day grieving
In more modern times, death became something to be conquered. People are expected to “beat” cancer; technology creates wars fought with distant weapons instead of hand-to-hand combat, so seeing death up close is uncommon. Televised caskets draped in flags are the closest we come to seeing actual casualties of war. Even during Covid, the images we see are the temporary trailers used for housing the dead until the bodies can be claimed, or the hand-dug graves in faraway countries.
Helping the bereaved through the immediate aftermath of a death is one aspect of bereavement that perhaps hasn’t changed much. For me, it involved dozens of bagels left at our front door and a sheet of paper taped to my kitchen cabinet where people signed up to deliver meals. That sheet of paper now has been replaced by a digital “meal train,” resulting in freezers full of lasagna and carrot soup.
People show up at the door and burst into tears, creating a strange reversal of the bereaved comforting the well-wisher. Or there are those who scurry away at the sight of the bereaved, not wanting to enter a scary dialogue that might result in an awkward display of tears. A common phrase like “sorry for your loss,” a widow’s inside joke, causing us to glaze over because we hear it so often. That, along with some form of “I don’t know how you do it,” or “you’re so strong!” causes us to roll our eyes and think, you would if you had to. “I have no words,” is actually the most truthful statement in the aftermath of a loss. Because there actually aren’t any words that are going to make us feel better.
People fear upsetting the bereaved if they talk about the dead but ask any person who has lost a loved one and they will tell you, that’s ALL they want to talk about. It’s strange to us that the world suddenly goes silent on the topic of our dead person. We want to hear their name over and over and hear stories about them that we didn’t know before, stories that remind us and others that they existed and that they didn’t live their lives in vain. We love the people who make us laugh, even though it feels like we’re dishonoring our loved ones by not spending every waking moment in a state of tearful despair. Laughing reminds us that we’re still alive and have a duty to our dead loved ones to keep on living.
Finding a community
Looking back, I can see that 9/11 ushered in a new conversation around death and grieving. When I was newly widowed, the books I found about widowhood advised how to balance checkbooks to the long-suffering widow who had let her husband take care of everything that didn’t include cooking and child-rearing. Balancing checkbooks was not a skill I needed to learn. How to talk about grief with small children was. In those early days, the kids were invited to Camp Comfort Zone, where they made memory boxes and talked about their dead daddies (most were daddies, alas). The moms (and occasional dad) were ushered into empty classrooms where we sat in a circle and shared our stories — stories we couldn’t talk about in everyday life: how to collect DNA samples from our children that would be used to identify their dead parent’s body parts; how to deal with policemen who arrived at the door at dinnertime to tell us they’d found a piece of a loved one’s body; how to deal with a teenager spinning out of control; fears of being alone in the house. We talked about wedding rings and memorials and anniversaries and birthdays and how to deal with the media. The topics were endless. The community was priceless.
In 2009, I found a new community in the form of a conference for widowed people called “Camp Widow,” where I have been a regular presenter ever since. In that first year, just under 100 people attended. Now there are three camps every year with some camps attracting over 400 attendees. These camps were initially the domain of women who seek grief communities — support groups, friend groups, etc. — but the percentage of men attending increases each year. In the aftermath of the pandemic, I cannot imagine how they are going to manage the potential tsunami of attendees.
Many more books about grief have been published in the years since 9/11, and movies and TV no longer seem to shy away from widows. Widows are even action heroes, such as Viola Davis kicking ass on behalf of her dead husband in Widows, the critically acclaimed film. Social media has had a major impact on discussions around death and has allowed grieving communities to find each other. After the Twin Towers collapsed, the topic of death pervaded the national consciousness in a way that it hadn’t since World War II.
But we are still a long way from knowing how, as a society, to grieve.
A complicated grief
The 20th anniversary of 9/11 is arriving amid a pandemic where over 600,000 Americans have died. The number is unimaginable and all I can think about are all the newly-minted widowed people who now must navigate grief and loss and mourning in a world that even twenty years later, lacks the vocabulary of death. Where a 9/11 death publically iconized the blameless victims, a Covid death is permeated with judgment, and blame, and politics. How might such nuances impact grieving those deaths, I wonder?
Where my grief was in many ways very public — I spend each September 11th fielding emails, text messages, and phone calls from people who are determined to “never forget,” which is both a blessing and a curse, I envy the widow who gets to mourn in peace. Yet, I feel lucky to be remembered on one day every year. Those grieving their Covid losses are so numerous that I fear that many of them are very much alone in their bereavement, possibly feeling judged, just when they need a community the most.
I am grateful for our widowed President who is at least able to speak the grief language, and I hear his desperation every time he implores people to get vaccinated. He knows the truth of loss and the long-haul journey it entails. in February 2021, he marked 500,000 Covid deaths during a ceremony against a backdrop of candle-lined steps of the White House. He used all the right words: “I know all too well,” Biden said, “that black hole in your chest. You feel like you’re being sucked into it. The survivor’s remorse. The anger. The questions of faith in your soul.”
The reverberations of those who have died from Covid weigh heavily on me too. All those children, spouses, brothers, sisters, friends… the list goes on and on. They all must endure the journey of loss. I have seen twenty years of those reverberations first-hand and they create deep scars. Trauma, which we are learning more about, has impacts on the brain similar to concussions. Coping mechanisms lead to addictions of all sorts. I have watched my own children deal with sometimes crippling anxiety. We have already seen the impact of the pandemic with escalating suicide rates, so beyond the victims of Covid are all those victims trying to cope with their losses.
In a perfect world, I would sit with each and every family member and listen to them speak about their loss and sadness, tell them it gets better, cry with them, let them swear and be angry and seem downright insane sometimes and tell them again that it gets better. I would do what I could to give them words when there are no words.
For those who love, time is not
As I write, I glance over at my birdbath. It’s still wrapped in cellophane from a move I made three years ago, which I left on to keep the tiles from falling off. Turns out, mosaic tiling a glazed birdbath isn’t ideal for having the tiles stick. The birdbath has become a container for the past three years’ tax returns that I haven’t yet gotten into a box in the basement. But despite its disrepair, the birdbath in my office is still with me, and still makes me smile and think of Arron. But I no longer need it to “honor” him. I long ago realized that I do that with every word I write or speak about my own story of grief. By putting words to an experience that has such a limited vocabulary, I hope I’m helping others experiencing loss to do the same.
Abigail Carter was an ex-pat Canadian living in New Jersey with her husband and two young children when her husband died in the attack on the twin towers on 9/11. She wrote The Alchemy of Loss: A Young Widow’s Transformation as a form of catharsis after her husband’s death, chosen by The Globe and Mail as one of the 100 Most Notable Books of 2008 and long-listed for the B.C. Award for Canadian Non-Fiction, Canada’s largest Non-Fiction prize. Her novel, Remember the Moon was published in 2014. Her work has also appeared in SELF magazine, Reader’s Digest Canada, MSN.com, Huffington Post, and MORE.com and on her site, abigailcarter.com. Abigail now lives in Seattle and is working on a novel about Camp Widow.
