I was driving by my mailbox, which sits on a wooden post at the end of my long gravel driveway, when I realized my PTSD had been triggered. I don’t know why the sight of the mailbox brought the situation to my attention. You would think being triggered would be a clear and obvious event, caused by a clear and obvious trigger, related to a clear and obvious trauma, but that is rarely how it happens for me.
My PTSD is more of an underground tank full of a thick, rose-pink, and odorless gas in a forest. The gas is the immutable belief that what I did, what I saw, and experiences I had, were not survivable. Not survivable the way being on a plane that plows into the ground is not survivable. I am Wile E. Coyote. I’ve run off the edge of a cliff and I’m suspended in mid-air, high above the desert floor, but I won’t fall until I look down. In this precarious, life-threating state, I know that if I look at what happened to me, really look, I will be consumed and die.
After a trigger, in the forest, the valve wheel on the tank unperceptively start to turn, and the soft, pink, poisoness gas starts to stir. Both the trigger and my response are unavailable to me, I don’t know the wheel is turning, I don’t know the gas is rising up, then crawling across the ground.
Then, coming out from the haze, are heav ily armed soldiers pulling themselves forward through the mist using using their elbows. Their radios are turned down, they have camo grease pain on their faces, and they are spreading out, moving slowly in the hovering cloud of pink. They are usually invisible to me, but they are always there, beyond the cloud, training or at rest; the gas stirring in the ground is their reveille.
If the trigger is mild, I may not even feel it. It shows up as an unexplained moment of fear or anger. In this case, the soldiers will come forward a few feet, then realize there is no real danger and move backwards, like Homer Simpson retreating into the shrubs. If the trigger is bigger, the wheel turns faster. Again, I’m not aware of it happening, but it will manifest as a bad mood, or unexplained sadness, and as more gas comes out my, I start to be depressed and or aggressive.
Depression lies and tell you everything you are is wrong. Aggressions lies and tells you everything about someone else is wrong. Aggression is my drug of choice. I become a whirl of rage, my brain racing from one idiot to the next, hoping someone, anyone, will fuck with me so I can rain down fury.
The day I drove past the mailbox, I had been triggered for at least a week. I don’t know why the mailbox made me aware, but once it did I realized the valve was turning and the soldiers were on the move. I was able to look back in time and see it had been happening for a while; earlier that day I had hissed in rage at a gas pump when it started playing a stupid, jangly ad at me. “Shut the fuck up,” I told it. A woman standing nearby looked up.
So, now I knew I was triggered, but I didn’t know by or about what. It came to me later in the day. It was the immigaration raids, arests – the kidnappings – I was seeing across my social media. The faces and sounds of women wailing and screaming was upsetting to anyone, of course, but for me it was something more. It reminded me of a plane, a plane that crashed to the ground.
American Airlines Flight 587 crashed the morning of November 12, 2001, minuetes after taking off from JFK airport. The flight was full, with 251 passengers and 9 crew memebers. The plane was on it’s way to the Dominican Republic; more than half of the passengers were Dominicans. Given that it was almost exactly two months after 9/11, everyone assumed it was another terrorist attack. It was clear early it wasn’t, so despite being the second largest aviation disaster in American history, it never made it far up the media radar. Most people don’t know it even happened.
If people don’t know about the crash, they don’t know about what happened after the crash. Most images and video after are when it happens, people who survived, and the attempts to find the injured and the trapped. I protected myself as much as possible from footage of 9/11 and the aftermath, I have not watched footage about the World Trade Center and the aftermath but It’s slipped in though; it’s always the planes crashing into the towers, survivors covered in dust, and first responders on what was known as The Pile.
For Flight 587, there was little video of the crash itself, so it was pictures of the fire and some film on the ground of first responders putting it out. What no one saw on television was what happened after the fire was out: the collection of the dead. Many of the New York City Police officers I worked with were called to the crash site. The fire department was already on site and many others already lived in the are and responded. A nearby decomissioned plane hanger was turned into the collection area.
When I next saw the people who had gone to help, they all had one thing that surrounded everything they did, that would haunt them forever, and made what was already impossible more impossible: the smell of jet fuel. Jet fuel is a refined and modified version of kerosene. The Airbus A300B4-605R that crashed had a capacity of 18,000 gallon. And it was at the beginning of its journey, not the end. The fuel started the fire, but it also soaked everything on the ground, including the bodies of the dead. And the body parts of the dead. After 6 months on the pile, 20,000 body parts had been brought to the medical examiners for the roughtly 3,000 vicimts. The plane crash was much better (or whatever the word is), but still.
Another part of a disaster that
Who repsonds to the scene? Who picks up the bodies? Where do they go?
Jet fuel is a refined and modified version of kerosene. The Airbus A300B4-605R that crashed carried18,000 gallons of it.
The second largest aviation crash in American history happened in Queens, New York on November 12, 2001. Flight 597, an Airbus 3300 on its way to the Dominican Republic, spiraled out of control shortly after takeoff and crashed into a neighbnorhood known as Belle Harbor. All 260 people on board were killed. Miraculously, only five people on the ground died. The crash was caused by the pilot’s overresponse to the wake caused by the 747 that took off just before them. They literally went into a tailspin. And everyone died.
So, how did this tank become full of pink gas? What activated this army and left it waiting in the wings? Well, I worked at the medical examiner’s office in New York City during the aftermath of 9/11. I did this work for almost four years. I with I could just put the events into your brain like an upload in the Matrix. I am so tired of trying to sum up what happened. It’s impossible; it’s trying to fit the story of World War II on the back of matchbook. In The Evil Hours, David Morris, a reporter embedded in Iraq talking about PTSD, alludes to the fact that some experiences are so intense they cannot be processed normall To much is compressed into too little time and if it keeps happening, you run out of time to spread them out and dilute them.
You know what, I’m not going to start in on 9/11. I don’t want to explain it. I’ve done it too much. I’m going to let myself off the hook. Besides, the soldiers were not brought out by something evoking 9/11. It was a diffenet plane altogether.
On the morning of November 12, 2001, the second largest aviation crash in American history happened in Queens, New York. Flight 597, an Airbus 3300 on its way to the Dominican Republic, spiraled out of control shortly after takeoff and crashed into a neighbnorhood known as Belle Harbor. All 260 people on board were killed. Miraculously, only five people on the ground died. The crash was caused by the pilot’s overresponse to the wake caused by the 747 that took off just before them. They literally went into a tailspin. And everyone died.
Like everyone in New York City, we assumed it was another terrorist attack. How could it possibly be a coincidnence? But it was a coincidence. And it was a mass fatality event. It was a disaster that would normally have been all over the national media, but most people don’t even know it happened because once it was determined it wasn’t a terrorist attack, the news of the crash dissapeared in the tsunmai of 9/11. But, for us, like all the other agencies responding to 9/11, were going to have to respond, clearn up the site, catolgue and inspect the remains, issue death certificates, release identified remains to funeral homes, collect personal effects, help the families of the victims, deal with the media, subject ourselves to another flood of trauma and stress.
Most people know it takes time to have a death certificate issued for someone who has disappeared. What most people don’t know that there is a lot of information on a death certificate besides the cause and manner of death. It differs depending on jurisdiction, but you need the full name of the decedent, their date of birth, their parents’ names, their occupation, maiden names, other names used, things a lot of spouses might not know, much less further out family members or friends.
In a plane crash, the starting point for identification and death certificates is the flight manifest. Unlike with 9/11, we knew who was on the plane. We had a list. A contained universe. There were five people on the ground killed, but that was easy enough to gather.
Along with the similarities to 9/11, there were important differences. For one thing, we had a manifest of the passengers and crew. It’s twenty years since I left the medical examiner’s office and I know the list of victims is not, nor will it ever be, complete. A few weeks after 9/11, an attempt of a list had thousands and thousands of names. A family assistance center was set up after 9/11 as a place for people to give (there was very little to get) information. Many, many people who were reported missing were fine, either never in the towers or had gotten out safely. One person could be reported by multiple people under a wide variety of names and/or other identifying information.
The biggest burden of not knowing who was there was in the use of DNA to make identifications.
Unlike 9/11 we had the capacity to collect antemortem data quickly. There were dozens of funeral directors volunteering from a federal disaster response team at our office. They went off to Macy’s to buy suits. Each one would be assigned to a family with a form designed to gather this information.
Members of the NYPD who were assigned to our office joined other first responders at the site to collect the bodies. I remember how haunted they were after, for a lot of reasons, but one of them was the reek of jet fuel that was all over everything and everyone. I remember them talking about it for weeks afterwards. Some first responders came to the Jacob Javits Center to help with families. Others transported and unloaded the bodies at our morgue. Forensic physicians and anthropologists came to the morgue to process, describe and photograph the bodies. Analysts from the DNA lab came down to take samples both from bodies and from the other, um, parts.
Another difference in the crash was the immediacy of identification. In a plane crash, bodies are not obliterated by the falling of massive buildings. Someone once said to me that concrete at the World Trade Center was rendered to dust. A body didn’t have a chance. We would end up with more than 20,000 remains for 3,000 people. But with a plane crash, you could often use the photographs of the people, their scars, or tattoos. But you had to talk to the families to get these things (called antemortem data) to compare.
I spent more than 15 hours at the Jacob Javits center that day. As the day wore on, someone set up curtains on frames to create visual privacy for families being given the news from one of our staff members that we’d found their loved one. There were large, circular tables with families and their supporters where they could meet with one of our funeral directors to give information.
And a lot of everything going on at the Jacob Javits Center was done in Spanish. Many employees in NYC government offices, including ours and the NYPD, are bilingual. Most of the funeral directors, overwhelmingly from red states, were not. Many of the family members spoke some level of English. Some spoke none. But in my memory, all of it was done in Spanish, a language I don’t speak
To me, all the Spanish meant I could not understand a lot of the words being said around me. I didn’t meet with families, but I could hear them, but not understand what they were saying. Concurrently, I didn’t need to know the language to understand what they were saying. The soaring ceilings were not enough to contain the grief, fear and sense of shock happening in the room. It filled the huge room. And when it hit the ceiling, not being able to escape, the grief in the air swelled. It was dense. And it was everywhere.
For me personally, one of the biggest differences was the photographs. Instead of individual shots, they were pictures of families. These pictures were formally taken at a studio and everyone was dressed up in fine clothing. The little girls were all lacey with their hair filled with bows and beads. The little boys were in tiny black suits. The older kids were dressed somewhere in between, often looking awkward. I don’t remember anything about the parents. These children, though, they broke my heart.
There were very few children killed on 9/11. I think there were two on the flights. I only remember one, a little boy who was adopted by two gay men. Gay marriage was not legal in New York yet, so gay death wasn’t either. The birth certificates say mother and father. It took the strength of a thousand men to get a death certificate that said Parent 1 and Parent 2. The World Trade Center happened on a Tuesday in September. Kids were in school. Most people weren’t going on vacation that time of year. Most of them were traveling for work.
But Flight 587 was different. It was a connection between New York City and the Dominican Republic, a kind of regularly-scheduled bus for people who had a foot in both places. Families and groups travelled together.
Or so I thought. So I’ve believed for more than twenty years.
When I got to the paragraph above, I went online to see how many children were on the flight. I never Google anything related to that time in history and my life, but I thought I could just see a quick count to show the difference and verify the numbers of passengers and crew. And in some ways I did. But there was another side.
There were only five children on Flight 587. I don’t know why I didn’t connect the two – this was also a flight on a random day in the fall. But I do know why. It was the photographs. I had seen all these pictures of families. I took that and somehow made it into something it wasn’t. But I do know. Imagining a family dying together was better in my mind than random sons, daughters, husbands, wives, sisters, brothers dying. This makes absolutely no sense. It is obviously much worse for an entire family to die, but nothing I was doing made sense. And I took comfort where I could.
Five children.
As I looked at the number I realized all those photographs were not of children, but of parents. Those people I didn’t see when I was looking at the photograph were the ones who were dead. The children were the orphans left behind. I was devastated. I still am. And right before my eyes stopped skimming the first sentence of the web page telling me the numbers, I saw that a dog had died. There was a dog on the plane. It’s too much. But here I am.
But what caused the release valve to turn? What brought out the pink gass? Who activated the soldiers?
ICE raids.
So for some reason seeing my mailbox triggered me to realize I’m triggered. But it’s different because I’m not triggered by 9/11 and the chaos of so much death, it’s from Flight 587. I don’t think much about Flight 587 in part because it gets wrapped into my whole experience at the medical examiner’s office, but it was the second largest aviation disaster in the United States, a plane on the way to Puerto Rico that crashed into the ground in Queens, just a few minutes after take off.
It happened just two months after 9/11, and people thought it was another terrorist attack. But it wasn’t, and it quickly fell off the media radar. But for those of us involved in the aftermath, it added another ton of bricks to a load we were struggling to carry. It was a mini 9/11: Bodies had to be collected from the site. Families were sent by the airlines to the Jacob Javits center where we were scrambling to get set up to both give us information and to receive what information we had.
But there were also big differences. Unlike 9/11 we had the capacity to collect antemortem data quickly. There were dozens of funeral directors volunteering from a federal disaster response team at our office. They went off to Macy’s to buy suits. Each one would be assigned to a family with a form designed to gather this information.
Members of the NYPD who were assigned to our office joined other first responders at the site to collect the bodies. I remember how haunted they were after, for a lot of reasons, but one of them was the reek of jet fuel that was all over everything and everyone. I remember them talking about it for weeks afterwards. Some first responders came to the Jacob Javits Center to help with families. Others transported and unloaded the bodies at our morgue. Forensic physicians and anthropologists came to the morgue to process, describe and photograph the bodies. Analysts from the DNA lab came down to take samples both from bodies and from the other, um, parts.
Another difference in the crash was the immediacy of identification. In a plane crash, bodies are not obliterated by the falling of massive buildings. Someone once said to me that concrete at the World Trade Center was rendered to dust. A body didn’t have a chance. We would end up with more than 20,000 remains for 3,000 people. But with a plane crash, you could often use the photographs of the people, their scars, or tattoos. But you had to talk to the families to get these things (called antemortem data) to compare.
I spent more than 15 hours at the Jacob Javits center that day. As the day wore on, someone set up curtains on frames to create visual privacy for families being given the news from one of our staff members that we’d found their loved one. There were large, circular tables with families and their supporters where they could meet with one of our funeral directors to give information.
And a lot of everything going on at the Jacob Javits Center was done in Spanish. Many employees in NYC government offices, including ours and the NYPD, are bilingual. Most of the funeral directors, overwhelmingly from red states, were not. Many of the family members spoke some level of English. Some spoke none. But in my memory, all of it was done in Spanish, a language I don’t speak
To me, all the Spanish meant I could not understand a lot of the words being said around me. I didn’t meet with families, but I could hear them, but not understand what they were saying. Concurrently, I didn’t need to know the language to understand what they were saying. The soaring ceilings were not enough to contain the grief, fear and sense of shock happening in the room. It filled the huge room. And when it hit the ceiling, not being able to escape, the grief in the air swelled. It was dense. And it was everywhere.
For me personally, one of the biggest differences was the photographs. Instead of individual shots, they were pictures of families. These pictures were formally taken at a studio and everyone was dressed up in fine clothing. The little girls were all lacey with their hair filled with bows and beads. The little boys were in tiny black suits. The older kids were dressed somewhere in between, often looking awkward. I don’t remember anything about the parents. These children, though, they broke my heart.
There were very few children killed on 9/11. I think there were two on the flights. I only remember one, a little boy who was adopted by two gay men. Gay marriage was not legal in New York yet, so gay death wasn’t either. The birth certificates say mother and father. It took the strength of a thousand men to get a death certificate that said Parent 1 and Parent 2. The World Trade Center happened on a Tuesday in September. Kids were in school. Most people weren’t going on vacation that time of year. Most of them were traveling for work.
But Flight 587 was different. It was a connection between New York City and the Dominican Republic, a kind of regularly-scheduled bus for people who had a foot in both places. Families and groups travelled together.
Or so I thought. So I’ve believed for more than twenty years.
When I got to the paragraph above, I went online to see how many children were on the flight. I never Google anything related to that time in history and my life, but I thought I could just see a quick count to show the difference and verify the numbers of passengers and crew. And in some ways I did. But there was another side.
There were only five children on Flight 587. I don’t know why I didn’t connect the two – this was also a flight on a random day in the fall. But I do know why. It was the photographs. I had seen all these pictures of families. I took that and somehow made it into something it wasn’t. But I do know. Imagining a family dying together was better in my mind than random sons, daughters, husbands, wives, sisters, brothers dying. This makes absolutely no sense. It is obviously much worse for an entire family to die, but nothing I was doing made sense. And I took comfort where I could.
Five children.
As I looked at the number I realized all those photographs were not of children, but of parents. Those people I didn’t see when I was looking at the photograph were the ones who were dead. The children were the orphans left behind. I was devastated. I still am. And right before my eyes stopped skimming the first sentence of the web page telling me the numbers, I saw that a dog had died. There was a dog on the plane. It’s too much. But here I am.
And how did I get here? What brought up the trauma of Flight 587? Why was it there now, causing my mind’s disquiet and my body’s fear?
ICE.
That’s how I got here.
Seeing the ICE raids triggered it. Watching people being snatched out of nowhere and taken away. The loss. The experiences I saw people having reminded me of the families being blow apart by horror: the grief, the fear and the sense of shock. In Spanish. Not the Spanish of the ICE men, of course, they are more like the funeral directors from the red states than those in actual law enforcement. That adds to the horror. Someone is snatching you up and you can’t have a conversation with them. And they are not required to identify themselves. Or show you a warrant. Or do anything to treat you like a human being.
It has stirred up my trauma like a flame on a puddle of gasoline. And now I am thinking about the metaphorical orphans, those left behind. Where are they? How are they? How are they going to eat? Where are they going to go? Are they alone? Is their mom with them? Are they safe.
And I imagine their kitchen tables to be like the tables in the Jacob Javits Center, with people sitting around them crying, wailing, lost, confused, helpless, scared and traumatized. And we have people laughing about it all. Sneering at what’s going on. Taking selfies at Alligator Alcatraz. Is this where these men are? Do their families know where they are?
And then I thought about the dog on the plane. What is happening to their dogs? Where do the dogs go? Are the dogs scared? Lost? Confused?
You can’t just pluck someone out of their own lives without leaving behind a disaster.
I wish the politicians were forced to sit at that dining room table and listen to the families cry. I wished all the people making money off of this – and there are many – would have their own loved ones kidnapped, even just for a day. I wish they would suffer in tandem to the suffering they are causing. I wish the money they are making would burn like hellfire.
I’m triggered right now because it feels like the same things I saw and felt. And it isn’t so many people at once, and it isn’t people dying (I’m sure that’s not true) but it’s so many people, so many. And they are so spread out and invisible to “us”, their individual stories run silent.
I don’t know what to do.
I was driving by my mailbox, which sits on a wooden post at the end of my long gravel driveway, when I realized that my PTSD had been triggered, and yes, it gets triggered, despite the mocking of conservatives who co- opted that term into a way to infantilize liberals. But PTSD does get triggered by things happening that resonate with the trauma,and if you’ve never had to experience the particular pain and fear that comes with it – to the point you’re able to use the term to mock people – then you’re lucky. And a piece of shit.
