Grief Lessons

By Amanda Ripley

On the morning of Sept. 11, as she drove to her job at the gift shop at the Oklahoma City National Memorial, Doris Jones learned from the radio that two planes had flown into the World Trade Center. As she walked into the memorial building, she paused at a picture of a curly-haired young woman that hangs on the fence outside. "I think there are a lot of new angels up there with you today," she said to the frozen image of her daughter Carrie Lenz, who died in the bombing of the Murrah Federal Building when she was 26 and six months pregnant.

Weeks ahead of New Yorkers, people in Oklahoma City understood what it meant when the Twin Towers collapsed. Until last month, their city was known for the deadliest terrorist attack on American soil. They'd spent six years educating themselves on terror's ills and elixirs, turning this corner of the Bible Belt into one of the largest concentrations of terrorism experts in the country. As with the Trade Center attacks, regular folks had lost all their co-workers in minutes. Some families lost all their children. They started using words like "hypervigilance" and "a new normal" in everyday conversation.

Looking at the memorial, it is possible to glimpse New York City's future. How long will it be before there is a memorial gift shop in Battery Park that sells children's books called Let's Talk About Anger? Visitors look at the 168 chairs standing sentry at the pristine memorial and try to fathom 5,000. At the anniversary of the Oklahoma City blast, people traditionally stand in silence one second for each victim--168 seconds, or nearly three minutes, which feels excruciating. To do the same in New York City would take almost an hour and a half.

Oklahoma City survivors are quick to point out that the two attacks were very different. Even some who lost children in the '95 blast now refer to it as "our little bombing." But if pressed, they concede they have much to teach the people of New York City and Washington. If what happened here is any indication of what will happen there--and it is, thankfully, the only indicator we have--then here is the good news first: in the 10th month after the bombing, five more babies came into the world in Oklahoma City hospitals than in the state's other urban counties. A year later, it was 16 more births a month; two years later, 37. University of Oklahoma researcher Joseph Lee Rodgers attributes the spike to a desire to replace life and a need, in a time of instability, to solidify one's role in the world.

But here too is what New York and Washington will likely experience: six months from now, nearly half the people who were in the immediate vicinity of the attacks will have a psychiatric disorder, a figure based on a 1999 study of Oklahoma City survivors. At least a third will have post-traumatic stress disorder. That meant hundreds of people in Oklahoma City; it will mean many thousands in New York. Six years from now, survivors and family members will still be in counseling. Some will just be starting--particularly rescue workers. People who lost spouses and children in the building will still keep phone lists next to their bed so they can call one another in the middle of the night. In Oklahoma City, at least six people who survived or lost loved ones in the Murrah building have killed themselves. Others have lost marriages and custody rights as a result of new addictions.

Perhaps the hardest time for most people comes when they least expect it. The next time a terrorist lights a fuse or hijacks a plane in the U.S., people here warn, New Yorkers will have to beat back the anxiety and sadness all over again. During the week of Sept. 11, the hotline at Oklahoma's department of mental health got 300 calls--triple its normal volume.

"Every time we see something devastating, it brings back the sleepless nights, the nightmares, the whole dang ball of wax," says Paul Howell, who lost his 28-year-old daughter Karan Shepherd in the bombing. Howell, like Doris Jones, 53, knew immediately after the recent attacks that he would go to New York City to help. Both of them made the trip, sponsored by the Red Cross. Three times a day, they escorted grieving family members on tours of ground zero.

"People would ask, 'Do you ever get over something like this?'" Howell says. "I told them no. Something will bring it back all the doggone time. It might be an airplane or an ambulance siren or a yellow Ryder truck." Throughout his two-week stay in Manhattan, Howell, 64, kept his composure, while victims' families around him sobbed, fainted, hyperventilated or vomited. He felt it was important to show people that he was still standing, six years later. He confides it took him three years to break through his depression. Going to New York was, he insists, the best way for him to avoid getting sucked back into the vortex of grief. Two days after he returned home, he was at the Red Cross, asking when he could go back.