Questioning Pleasure in the Face of Death
On Getting Married After 9/11
One of the biggest lessons I’ve ever learned about prioritizing pleasure happened twenty years ago this week.
On this day in 2001, Joe and I left our East Village apartment in New York City in an old Toyota station wagon and headed north to Cape Cod. In the back hung the ivory lace dress I had bought at a vintage store my very first week in NYC, and a blue linen suit with a light pink shirt and pearly white tie. Next to them were 40 pounds of heirloom tomatoes and garlic that we would stew for our wedding in five days’ time.
It was after midnight when we arrived at the cottage where we had fallen in love four summers earlier. The same cottage where the heights of our children now crawl up the wall. We unfurled our sleeping bags on the deck and talked about all the remaining wedding logistics. We had asked people to travel a long way to be with us. I worried that we hadn’t prepared enough. I tracked the stars as the planet spun slowly through the night wondering what the future would hold.
We awoke the next morning to a call from Joe’s sister. “I know you don’t have a television where you are,” she said. “You need to get to one right away.”
We drove into town to the Lighthouse Restaurant where we had watched the US Women’s Soccer team win the World Cup two years earlier. We sat in silence watching the planes hit the buildings, and then the buildings fall. When it had looped a dozen times, the waitress told us we needed to order something to stay. We drove home and lay on the deck. The September sun warmed the cool air. Every now and then an acorn would hit the roof and roll to our feet. “I wish we were there,” Joe said. It felt like we were a million miles from home. We called a friend who might have been downtown. “I’m safe,” he said, “but I saw someone jump.” We were silent for a minute. “I can’t unsee that,” he said. I imagined what it would be like to make that decision to jump 100 stories, and how, at the very end, living is about choosing, even when it is choosing which way to die.
Joe and I looked at each other. “I don’t think we are getting married this week,” I said.
My mother called, her voice quivering. Her flight from Minneapolis to Boston had been ordered to make an emergency landing. I could hear CNN droning in the hotel room in Detroit where she and my step-father had been grounded. “As soon as we can find a rental car, we are driving home,” she said. “This is no time to be getting married.”
My cousins called next. They are a family of pilots. Of course you will understand,” they said. My brother and sister in Alaska called. “We won’t get there in time,” my sister said. “I’m so sorry.”
We had been excited to introduce our families to one another and to share our beloved Cape Cod with friends. Month’s earlier, we had sent out elaborate invitations with a list of the weekend’s festivities and directions to our favorite swimming ponds. We hired a band and a square dance caller, and our musician friends had been practicing Margaret’s Waltz so they could serenade us as we walked down the grassy aisle. Maybe my mother was right. It was insensitive—and perhaps irresponsible—to be getting married when so many New Yorkers were going from hospital to hospital desperate to find loved ones. We stayed on the deck, listening to the radio. One reporter described her view from lower Manhattan. “Several city blocks are smouldering,” she said, describing the dust cloud hanging over where the buildings had stood just a few hours ago and how the smell of burning metal and jet fuel stuck in her throat. We listened to reports from different countries. Grief was drifting around the world. France, England, South Africa, Australia—the condolences for America were pouring in. We called friends. Everyone had a story of where they were and what they saw. We were trying to assemble an impossible puzzle with fragments of disbelief. Joe’s mother called. “Flights are cancelled indefinitely,” she told us. “What do you think you will do?” she asked. Silence felt like the best answer. The sun dipped below the treeline. The night cold set in and we crawled into bed. “Let’s not make any decisions right now,” Joe said.
The following afternoon, Joe’s mom called again. She had been searching for guidance for us. Google provided. “There is a Jewish teaching,” she said. “When a funeral party and a wedding party meet at a crossroads, the wedding party has the right of way.”
I inhaled as the words settled in. Grief is always with us, I understood it to mean. Sometimes it is over the horizon line and sometimes it is sitting on our chests, pinning us to the ground. We need to celebrate not in the face of grief, but alongside it. We would go ahead with our wedding and we would turn it into a ritual for all of us. Sometimes it helps to be granted permission to choose joy. “Let’s go for it,” Joe said. I agreed.
We went down our dwindling guest list and asked friends if they would still come. “I was hoping you would decide that,” my friend Darcy said. “I have a bus ticket from Nebraska and I can be there in 2 days.” Another friend who had been reporting from ground zero said she would be there as soon as she could. “I need to forget about this for a moment. I need to breathe clean air and I need to be hugged.” Everyone who could get there said they were coming. I called my mother. “Please come,” I begged. “I can’t get married without my mom.” “I’ll try,” she said.
My father and his wife were the first to arrive. He served two tours in Vietnam. “Life is for living,” he said as he helped me set up the chuppah.
Over the next few days, friends arrived, pouring out of their cars into our growing collective arms. We wept. We swam. We threw stones into the ocean. We chopped tomatoes for enormous pots of seafood stew which kept us warm in the chilly night. On Sunday morning, under a yellow September sun, Joe and I exchanged rings and promised to grow old together. We took a moment to remember all those who had lost their lives that week and, as I looked out at our family and friends, my heart ached for all the weddings and celebrations that would go on in their absence. In the front row was my mother who had driven home to Minnesota and who, with my stepfather and two friends, drove through the night to be with us. At the end of the ceremony, we wrapped a glass in cloth and stomped on it. In this Jewish tradition, the broken glass recalls the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem and also serves as a reminder that marriage, like life, holds both sorrow and joy. And then the band began playing. We danced into the night kicking up the dirt under our feet. A cloud of dust enveloped us. We took off our shoes and danced some more, our nostrils filled with the sweetness of the earth.
From the Institute of Pleasure Studies
Living 9/11. Reporters Beth Fertig and Marianne McCune from WNYC were reporting from the WNYC newsroom on 9/11. This feature, produced ten years later, is one of the most evocative and tender documentaries about what it was like to be in NYC on 9/11.
The Sonic Memorial is a radio series and an immersive online experience that was the result of a more than 100 radio producers who came together under the helm of the Kitchen Sisters to memorialize the World Trade Center. I was a big part of this team in 2001 and it is work that I hold dear to my heart.
Thank you for reading. It means the world to me that you are a member of this community. If you enjoy these reports, please consider sharing with a friend.
This made me weep. Thank you for sharing the sorrow and the joy.