Before and After
Before and After
Psalm 46
I ran into a comment recently from the writer, Jennifer Donnelly: “Right now I want a word that describes the feeling that you get--a cold sick feeling, deep down inside--when you know something is happening that will change you, and you don't want it to, but you can't stop it. And you know, for the first time, for the very first time, that there will now be a before and an after, a was and a will be. And that you will never again quite be the same person you were.” I think the word she was searching for is “dread.” Anxiety is fear about something specific, something that I can point to and name. Dread is non-specific. I don’t know what’s coming but something is definitely coming and, man, it feels huge.
“Before and after.” “Was and will be.” A lot of the dreadful moments are full of dread because we are experiencing the hardest things in this life in real time: someone we love dies; a bad test result comes back and it is our test and our mortality that is on the line; something horrifically unjust happens at work or in a relationship. Because we don’t spend our lives imagining the worst, we may feel blindsided when such things happen. Yet, even then, we often work our way back to the “before” and realize that we felt something was off, that there was, in the words of my generation, “a disturbance in the force.” We see the “clues” that we missed before, at least they seem like clues now with our new ‘twenty-twenty hindsight.” Moving forward, we turn our “sensors” on high, and become very vigilant so that we won’t ever get blindsided again. (We all know how well that works!) Meanwhile, the dread simmers.
If we’re honest, we also have life-changing good moments, too. We meet the love of our life. We discover our vocation. We get married. We have babies. We go on a much anticipated trip. What links these things is that we care deeply about what’s about to happen. Caring deeply puts our hearts on the line. This matters! And at the same time, some part of us realizes that we really don’t know what’s about to happen. We have expectations. We have plans. However, we also know if just planning a wedding can be incredibly challenging, all of that pales in the face of the overwhelming unknowns that you’ll face when you’re finally married. When we care deeply, what happens does change us, often in ways that we never would have imagined, sometimes so much more for the better than we ever would have dared to guess.
Again, if we’re honest, we really don’t know what’s next. Sure, we have our schedule and our routines. We know that today might be a lot like yesterday because there have been a lot of yesterdays which were a lot like the day before. Really, though, that’s how we get lulled to sleep. What’s the line on the ads? “Past performance is not an indicator of future success.” Most of us grow accustomed to acting as if we know what we really don’t know.
People who knew him said Bobby McIlvaine was incandescent, that he glowed. On a basketball court, his friend, Mike, said that he was “all bones and acute angles and stiletto elbows.” In 1992, in high school, Bobby scored 16 points on Kobe Bryant but the play he loved most was the one that ended the game when he floated the game winning assist to his teammate, right over Kobe’s head. Bobby was serious and intense but everyone who knew him said he was also warm and decent and quirky. He wanted to be a writer but until then, he took a business job.
On September 11th, Bobby was doing what he did—helping a friend. The friend had to make a presentation early. Bobby was free. So, he offered to come along for moral support and to offer a little tech support, too. People are pretty sure that the presentation was finished and that Bobby had left the World Trade Center before the plane hit the tower. He just didn’t get far enough away. Bobby died on September 11th, 2001, for no good reason other than the best reason of all: he was helping a friend.
Tidal waves of grief spread through an ocean of people who loved Bobby. Tony Morrison, the author, wrote not one but two letters of condolence to Bobby’s parents. Bobby had been one of her favorite students at Princeton. Friends came to Bobby’s parents home in droves. Lives were changed through this terrible loss. There was a before and an after, a was and a will be. For a moment, forget all the other losses that happened that day. Just consider how the world changed because Bobby McIlvaine was no longer here.
Really, for any of us who were around on 9/11, that day changed us all. When I wandered home from some early morning office time and found Tracy in the living room watching the Today Show, everything seemed normal. Well, that wasn’t entirely true…something weird had happened. They thought a small plane had hit the twin towers. Everyone assumed that it was an accident, though. Of course, I can look back now and say that the dreaded "disturbance in the force” was there, that somehow there was a feeling that more was coming. However, I think I actually manufactured that memory to reassure myself that if something else happened then next time I would know for sure.
When I sat down, something else did happen. The second plane flew into the tower, live and on t.v. I remember sitting there slack-jawed and thinking, “My God, we’re under attack but that’s impossible!” I was numb and in shock and entirely aware that what had started as a beautiful fall day like any other day was, in fact, the day that was going to change everything.
The second plane hit the tower just before 9:00 a.m. By 9:30, I was at the table in the Fireplace Room with the Church Ladies group, listening to the radio coverage. We talked and talked with each other. Then, we became utterly speechless as a reporter told us that a plane had just flown straight into the Pentagon. Word would come later of yet another plane that crashed in Pennsylvania, with the passengers having heroically rushed the cockpit and forced the plan into the ground. The authorities thought that plane was on the way to the White House or the Capital building.
By afternoon that day, we were gathering children here at the church by age groups. Nancy Rozak, our educator at the time, and I spent time with each group, asking what their questions were and trying, as best we could, to quell their fears. I will always remember those innocent faces looking up at me…
That night, Lake Bluff gathered at the Gazebo for a prayer service. I prayed for peace and justice. I prayed that we would be led through these challenges to be faithful people and not just a people of hate. A day or two later, I received the obligatory complaint letter that everyone receives who tries to pray in public only this one said that instead of praying for peace, I should have been praying that God would help us to “smite our enemies.” For years, that letter was taped to the wall in the bathroom in my office.
All of that mattered a lot but not nearly as much as the fact that Bobby McIlvaine was dead. Do you know what I mean? The shock that we all had to deal with was that Americans had been attacked on American soil. We all had to come to grips with the fact that a small group of suicidal people people on a “mission from God” with not that much money and some box cutters could do terrible damage. Yet, for most of us our innocence or our assumptions of safety were likely our deepest losses. Of course, we all felt genuine empathy for the families and friends of the 2996 people who died that day. We felt anguish as we learned what people went through trying to survive. However, almost all of us were at least two or three steps removed from those whose losses were direct and unspeakable and unfathomable and particular.
This year, as we approach the twentieth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, I think we should be careful. Before we draw the grand conclusions about the attack’s historical meaning, I would urge you to read the account of the McIlvaine family that was in the September 2021 edition of The Atlantic. The author, Jennifer Senior, tells us not only Bobby’s specific story (he had a ring and was about to propose to his girlfriend) but the story of his family, as well. She tells us about Bobby’s mother who tried to never talk about her loss on 9/11 until she finally found a group of mothers who had lost children through a variety of circumstances and found solace there. She tells the story of Bobby’s father who, over time, became a 9/11 conspiracy theorist, collecting evidence and speaking at conferences. She tells us of how a mother who never wanted to talk about 9/11 and a father who didn’t want to talk about anything but 9/11 did the hard work of figuring out how to keep loving each other and stayed married. She tells us what it was like to be Bobby’s surviving brother and bear the burden of trying to live up to his legacy. She tells us what became of the girl who never got the ring and what unfolded between that girl and Bobby’s family. For a whole lot of people, the grief of 9/11 is not about a national event so much as it is the marking of a moment that was a personal and family catastrophe. We should honor their courage!
I think that we also need, as we mark this anniversary, to honor the real sacrifices of a whole generation of young men and women who joined our military and did what we asked them to do and went halfway around the world to fight ill-defined battles in wars that have had no clearly defined end goals or exit strategies. Are we hunting terrorists or building nations? We have never been able to define how a war against a strategy—“terrorism”—would be “won.” Still, for the last twenty years, no such attack has happened on American soil. We can thank those young men and women for that and honor the price that they have paid on our behalf.
At the same time, I think we should acknowledge the price that we have paid as a nation in the last twenty years. While we came together, however briefly, in the days that followed 9/11, twenty years later, we are more divided than ever. We have traded some of our most prized civil liberties for security. We have compromised some of our most valued principles. We have grown comfortable not just with vehemently disagreeing with one another but with questioning one another’s patriotism. We’ve struggled to find the will to take care of the illnesses of the 9/11 responders and the veterans who returned with battle wounds. All of these things, in the end, have made us more vulnerable and less secure.
Finally, to tell the whole story we have to acknowledge a final truth. From almost the moment that the towers were hit, everyday people started doing heroic things: helping each other down the stairs; running up the stairs to do their work as firefighters and E.M.T.s; conspiring together as passengers to rush a cockpit to do something for the greater good. I am convinced that the real tribute that we can pay on the twentieth anniversary of 9/11 to the 2996 who died, to all of those who have sacrificed since, and to Bobby McIlvaine and the people who loved him, would be to cherish every moment that we get on this earth and commit ourselves to caring for one another no matter what comes our way. When we don’t know what’s coming and feel dread, perhaps the lesson is to reaffirm that every person matters and no one gets left behind.