One of the hardest parts of my New York tours was how disoriented my life became. Working on the night shift meant that I practically never saw the daylight. I'd leave for work at six p.m., when it was already dark, and return home at seven a.m., when the sun had not yet quite come up. And when you work all night long for more than a month, you begin to lose all sense of time. The hours blend into one another and so do the days, because every day is exactly like the one before and the one you know will come after. It's hard on a practical level-how do you manage to do your laundry, or get a haircut, or call your niece to say “Happy Birthday”? But it's hard on a psychological level, too-a sustained course of sensory deprivation and lack of sunlight that I found almost as wearing as the pervasive grief.
One day, though, my routine was broken-though not necessarily in a way I would have chosen. Late one afternoon near the middle of October, DMORT regional commander Todd Ellis made an urgent call to my room, telling me to go immediately to the command post that filled the top floor of the Sheraton New York Hotel, where we were now staying. Lieutenant William Keegan, the night shift recovery supervisor at Ground Zero, needed my help recovering some incinerated bones on top of what they now called “the pile”-the mountain of debris that had once been the Twin Towers.
Until recently, several fires had smoldered in and around the pile, and firefighters had only recently managed to put them out. As a result, searchers were just now starting to gain access to this area, a mass of rubble and concrete that rose up steeply, supported only by the enormous steel beams that had somehow survived the blast. As soon as workers had seen the burned bone fragments, they halted that particular excavation effort until I could get there and help with the bones' removal.
Two uniformed NYPD officers rushed me to the site in a nerve-wracking trip: speeding through the streets of New York in a police car with flashing lights and a siren that pierced the air, skirting other vehicles and pedestrians with only inches to spare. Finally, we reached our destination, the battle-scarred face of Engine 10 fire station, where Lieutenant Keegan was waiting for me. Quickly, he led me to an area where dozens of police officers were sifting through buckets of fragmented concrete, searching desperately for the bones of their fallen brothers.
“We found a weapon and a charred NYPD badge up there by that grappling crane, so we know at least one police officer was up there,” Keegan explained. “But we're not sure how to get the rest of the bones out without any more damage.” He pointed almost straight up, past a bulldozer and a huge crane that now seemed to be poised in mid-swing. Their diesel engines were rumbling at idle as the operators sat quietly, watching the sifters down below.
“We'd like you to come up there with us,” Keegan continued. I wished I could say no-but how could I refuse? With my heart in my throat, I inched my way up the face of the pile, gripping the slabs of broken concrete and picking my way carefully across pieces of steel that spanned cavernous spaces below. I looked down once into a seemingly bottomless abyss, where glowing embers from somewhere below sent up tendrils of smoke that stung my eyes. I tried not to look down again-but looking up was almost as frightening. The steel framework that had formed the towers' façade rose to incredible heights in front of me, and I could swear that it seemed to move. Then, I realized that it was actually the ground that was moving, in what felt like a sustained minor earthquake, a subtle shifting and an almost constant vibration of the materials under my feet.
“That movement is from all the heavy equipment working on other sections of the site,” Keegan explained. “This whole mass of debris is sort of suspended like jackstraws, so when one piece shifts, sometimes the whole thing moves.”
“Oh, boy,” I said to myself. “I thought all those days spent in sinkholes, coal mines, and limestone ravines back home had made you tough, Emily. But this is almost too much for the old girl.” I bluffed myself past my fear and kept going.
I'd taken to heart Keegan's sense of emergency, so the moment I reached the top of the pile, I began suggesting to the cops and firefighters what I thought we should do. Almost immediately, I could see, they began to get their backs up, rolling their eyes and muttering to each other. But I'd been in this situation before, though, and I had some idea how to handle it.
“Now, gentlemen,” I said, with just a hint of smile and my best Southern drawl. “I know you are all experienced rescuers. After all, you are New York 's Finest and Bravest, and I'm nothing but a blonde from Kentucky. But I think we can level the playing field here a little if y'all call me ‘Doc' and I call y'all ‘Sugar.'”
After a shocked pause, they burst out laughing, and that was all it took. For the next hour, we sifted bones out of the ash, working together as colleagues. They taught me how to recognize artifacts buried in the odd assortment of debris we were digging through, and I taught them how to recognize fragments of calcined bone.
A standard DMORT tour of duty is two weeks long. After my first two weeks were up, DMORT asked me to stay for a second tour and I readily agreed. Then, a few days before my second tour of duty ended-when I would have served thirty nights without a break-DMORT asked me to stay on for a third tour.
“I just can't do it,” I told my commander. “I haven't seen daylight in four weeks. I'm brain-dead, I'm exhausted, and I have a mountain of work waiting for me back in Kentucky. Please, cut me my orders and send me home.” What I thought but didn't say was that I was also emotionally wrung out. As the head of night shift triage and one of the older workers on-site, I was the person on whom the others had leaned. They counted on me to keep it together when someone burst into uncontrollable tears or wandered outside in a daze, overcome by the realization that the remains on the table belonged to a person he or she had known. I was more than willing to provide any support I could-but now I simply had nothing left to give.
My commander agreed to send me back to Kentucky with the understanding that I'd be called later and asked to return to New York. I didn't say anything to anyone, but I guess the word spread. My last night of that first month, when we hit a little lull, Carmen said, “Oh, Doc, we've got one more bag here that we missed somehow.” Wearily, I unzipped it-and there were two ceramic angels and a card that everyone had signed. As I hugged and kissed every single one of my amazing colleagues, I wondered if I'd ever find the strength to return.
When I got off the plane in Kentucky the next afternoon, I felt dazed and bewildered. This was home, and it was so familiar. But I'd been away for a month, and I'd seen and done things that would change me forever. It felt strange and disorienting to be without my “combat buddies,” the men and women with whom I'd worked side by side on a job that, I now realized, I'd never really be able to explain to anybody else. We'd shared something that only made sense to those of us who'd been through it, and now I had no one to share it with. I was looking forward to seeing my friends and talking with my family-but I also felt terribly alone.
My first stop on the way home was Daisy Hill Kennel, where my beloved springer spaniel had spent the past month. I hated to leave Savannah in a kennel, even for a short time. But my neighbors Suzanne and Bill Cassity had introduced me to the people at this long-term animal facility right before I'd left for New York, and I felt confident that my pet would be well cared for there. To my amazement, when I went to pick her up, I found notes and letters from strangers who had left not only words of encouragement for me and my colleagues, but also enough money to pay my kennel bill.