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Monday, July 5, 2010

Life after death-Case study

On 11 September, novelist Dirk Wittenborn's wife went into labour as their city was convulsed with terror. He recalls how his private world and history were thrown together in the best and worst of all days.

It is just after nine o' clock in the evening. Ten hijackers in two Boeing 767 passenger jets have reduced the World Trade Centre to a 1.6 million-ton snarl of concrete, steel, and death, which burns like a funeral pyre 50 blocks south of where I am standing. And yet, horrified as I am by this tragedy, I find myself in a happy place.

My daughter, Antonia Lieselotte Wittenborn is 23 minutes old, and already she has a nickname - Lilo. She weighs 7lbs 13oz, has blue eyes, all her fingers and toes, and the way her black hair stands on end would make boxing promoter Don King jealous. She is, quite simply, perfect.

My wife, Kirsten, asks me if I want to hold our daughter. I am excited and nervous being introduced to a life so helpless and new. Lilo wails as the nurse hands her over to me. I am 49 years old, Lilo is my first and only child. I have never been what you would call a baby kind of guy. But something miraculous happens as I take her weight in my arms. Strangely and incredibly, my daughter stops crying, and I am stupefied and comforted by the realisation I am going to enjoy this.

It is the most perfect moment in my life. No thought or word touches us. All is right in the world, until something catches my eye out the eighth story window of New York University Medical Centre. I see an F-16 fighter jet, its wings laden with rockets, screaming low over the East River. In the starlight, the pilot lifts one wing as if to salute us, then banks up over the wounded skyline of Manhattan. The drama and exhilaration of my daughter's birth made me forget the horror of what happened to my city. For a moment, life eclipsed death. Now it and she are staring me in the face.

When the final count is in, 9/11 will have snuffed out 2,823 lives. The funeral pyre will burn into the winter. It will be nine months before the last of the rubble is removed from where those towers stood, and no matter what kind of monument they build, the damage that has been done cannot be repaired.

From the birthing classes I attended in the last months of my wife's pregnancy, I know that newborns can't see. But as Lilo looks up at me and the world she has inherited, wide-eyed and blind as I am to the future, I wonder: can she feel the tangle of souls and sadness that is in the air?

Our world was a decidedly different place three days earlier. At 8.43am, on 11 September 2001, I am snoring soundly in our East Village apartment, and my wife is lying next to me half awake. She remembers hearing the roar of jet engines overhead, and half-dreaming/ half-thinking 'That plane is flying very low.' Three seconds later, Kirsten hears an incredibly loud noise that sounds like thunder right outside our window. Fully awake now, Kirsten looks up. It isn't raining, and the skies are blue. For a millisecond, she thinks to herself, 'Could that plane have crashed?' But immediately dismisses the possibility. 'That's ridiculous,' she tells herself, and wakes me up. Ten minutes later, I am in the other end of our apartment, in the office I have been promising my wife for the last two months I am going to move out of so she can turn it into a nursery for the baby that isn't due until next week.

I call an old friend about the TV pitch I'm scheduled to make that afternoon. He greets me with, 'Are you watching TV?' I respond with an early-morning attempt at humour. 'Unlike some members of my profession, I don't write and watch TV at the same time.' He doesn't laugh. I hear a flat panic in his voice as he tells me what he is seeing on CNN. The jet my wife heard had in fact crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Centre.

I hang up and turn on the TV in my office. Stunned, I watch police and firemen arriving at the disaster scene that is a seven-dollar cab ride from my home. There is a gaping hole in the top of the tower, and it is on fire. Over the past nine months, I have imagined every possible worst-case scenario that could surround my daughter's birth... except for this. I am suddenly certain the minute my wife finds out what has happened, she is going to go into labour. I begin to think of ways I can keep the bad news from her. I'll unhook the cable TV, I'll say the newspapers were sold out, I'll disconnect the phone before any of our friends can call. I'll... when I glance back at the television screen and see the second plane explode into the side of the South Tower, I know there's no way I can protect my wife from what is happening to us.

She already knows. She sits with an untouched bowl of granola in her lap, staring at the television in the living room. People are jumping out of windows 80 storeys up to escape the fire. A third hijacked passenger jet has crashed into the Pentagon. The White House has been evacuated. The President is in Air Force One somewhere over America. They won't say where our Commander-in-Chief is going, or when he's going to land, but the message is clear; it's not safe any more anywhere in America.

My wife is German. Her parents were children during the Second World War. She grew up hearing stories of what it was like being bombed. 'All I was thinking is, World War III is breaking out, and I'm having a baby,' she says. She wants to go to the airport and fly to Europe and have the baby where it's safe. She is about to start packing her suitcase when the television tells us that all the bridges and tunnels in and out of Manhattan are closed. All the airports are shut down. All flights to anywhere have been cancelled. We feel trapped because we are.

As we sit next to one another in front of the TV, the South Tower collapses. I ask Kirsten how the baby's feeling. She tells me she is feeling fine and not to worry. She doesn't reveal that she is really thinking to herself, 'All my life, I've been terrified of the pain of labour, and now when I get to the hospital, there's not going to be any anaesthesiologist around for my epidural. Of course, at the same time I know I'm so lucky to be alive' ... Kirsten calls it 'dual-track thinking: 'This horrible thing is happening to all these people right before your eyes. But at the same time, all I was thinking about was the baby. I just kept telling myself, I have to grit my teeth and get through this.'

A call gets through to us. It is a wealthy and influential friend in New Jersey who has arranged to send a boat across the Hudson to ferry us to the Jersey side of the river. We can have the baby at his local hospital. I thank him for his concern and his generous offer but tell him without hesitation: 'We're having the baby in New York.' Part of my refusal stemmed from the fact that the way our luck was running, I was sure Kirsten would go into labour as soon as we cast off from shore in the boat, and I'd have to deliver our daughter mid-Hudson River. But part of me said no simply because I had had enough. I was tired of being bullied and scared. As corny as it sounds, my fear turned to anger - goddamit, New York was my home, and I wasn't going to run.

At 10 o'clock that night, my wife tells me she thinks her waters might have broken. We call our doctor. Predictably, he's not in the city. We are just falling asleep when the back-up doctor calls. Kirsten doesn't want to go to the hospital until she starts to feel contractions. When she tells the obstetrician her symptoms, he cuts her short. 'Get yourself to the hospital right now,' and adds theatrically, 'or there will be an aftermath.' We are not sure what he means, but it succeeds in making us even more panicky than we already are.

I run to the garage to get our car - it's locked. The garage attendants, like everybody else with any sense, have left the city. I am regretting not taking up my well-heeled friend's offer of the boat ride across the Hudson. All the streets south of 14th Street have been barricaded off and are being guarded by state policemen. I ask one if he can call up an ambulance. He politely tells me to call a cab. The streets are empty. Finally, I see an off-duty taxi. I wave a fistful of cash, and he takes us to the hospital 15 blocks away for $50. We pass through three more police barricades. At each checkpoint, I do not decrease my wife's anxiety by screaming out the window: 'Let us through, my wife is having a baby!'

The maternity ward is bustling with life. There are your usual nervous, expectant fathers and elated grandparents. But the surface of normalcy is undercut by a television in the waiting room tuned to CNN; there is no escaping what is now being called Ground Zero.

Kirsten is taken into an examination room. I am psyching myself up to help with the delivery. Thirty minutes later, my wife reappears looking exasperated and worried. We are told to go home and come back tomorrow for tests.

Overnight, the black wall of the hospital which had been papered with faces of the missing has turned into a shrine. My wife is re-examined and tested. Everything is fine, except the baby isn't quite ready to come out. We are sent home again. Our daughter is clearly in no rush to make her way into the world, and who can blame her. When we exit the hospital, the smell of burnt flesh is in the air. I hurry my wife to the car as I overhear someone say: 'They're unloading bodybags up the street.'

Kirsten wakes up at 4.30am on the morning of the 13th. She's in labour. With Kirsten doubled over in pain in the backseat of our car, I race through those same police barricades, shouting once again, 'My wife's having a baby!' The same cops are on duty. They look at me incredulously, as if to say, 'Again?'

The maternity ward that was half-empty is now overflowing. A young woman whose husband died in the Trade Centre has gone into labour three months early. Doctors fight to save a dead man's child. Kirsten is in serious pain now. The baby's skull is pressing against her vertebrae. Much to her relief, there is an anaesthesiologist available. Unfortunately, it is three hours before she gets her epidural.

We are in the birthing room with a nurse and a boyish-looking resident now. For the past three hours, Kirsten has had the three of us in her face screaming 'PUSH!' As Kirsten recalls, 'Just when I thought I was going to die and couldn't take any more everybody suddenly starts shouting, "You've done it! She's beautiful!"' After 16 hours of labour, Kirsten is exhausted and drenched in sweat. And yet, as Lilo suckles her breast, my wife glows.

The difference between actually watching a child being born and reading about it or seeing it on film is not unlike the reality gulf that separates those who were in New York City on on 11 September and those who watched it on the news. You just can't understand the impact of certain events unless you were there in person.

Kirsten sends me home from the hospital at 11 o'clock. I am too giddy to think about sleep. As I get in my car, I make up my mind to call up all of my friends and wake them with my good news. I am higher than cloud nine, until I pass by the temporary morgue in the Armory on 26th and Lexington. Husbands, wives, lovers and friends are claiming the dead. Suddenly, I feel guilty for being so deliriously happy.

In those first weeks after Lilo's birth, 9/11 is omnipresent. When our daughter is a week old, Kirsten and I strap Lilo to my chest and set off to introduce our daughter to her city. The sun is shining and the dog is on the leash. The air in our neighbourhood no longer tastes of dust and ash. But a half block into our first family outing, we are grimly reminded of those New Yorkers who raced off to the World Trade Centre to save lives and died. Twelve of the 27 firefighters at our local firehouse perished. Ladder Company 3 is draped in purple and black bunting. Flowers surround the photographs of the firemen who were lost that day. I recognise their faces, and remember walking past them when Kirsten was pregnant just a few weeks before. We regret we never said more than hello. We make a donation to a fund for the families of the dead firefighters. It hardly seems an adequate way for the three of us to say thank you.

A 'security alert' is announced just as I am about to drive out of the city to introduce Lilo to my 87-year-old mother. I find myself debating whether terrorists would be more likely to bomb the tunnel or the bridge. I choose the tunnel, and hold my breath until we're out the other side.

My wife and I take Lilo uptown on a shopping spree to Barneys, and buy her a ridiculously expensive have-to-have-it-cute faux leopard-fur bonnet trimmed in pink silk. I am thinking she can wear it when I show her off at a friend's upcoming wedding. I have no idea the bride's sister was killed on 11 September until we get a card in the mail telling us the nuptials have been postponed. More bad news in the mail. A friend of a friend who works at ABC opened a letter stuffed with anthrax. Postal workers are dying - terror is at our doorstep, literally. I wash my hands after I open the mail and before I touch my daughter. My brother, a physician, gives us a prescription for Cipro, in case the anthrax attacks become epidemic. He cautions us that the medication, if administered now, will deform our daughter's teeth. Lilo has only just learnt to smile.

Anthrax, rumours of terrorist plots to unleash biological and chemical weapons, and talk of 'dirty' nuclear bombs supercharge the fearfulness and paranoia we, like all first-time parents, feel for our newborn. We and our friends scare ourselves speculating what form the next attack will take. I keep imagining al-Qaeda infecting us with smallpox. Paranoia prompts me to do the unthinkable. I pass up an invitation to the Yankee Stadium to see the World Series.

My wife remembers feeling incredibly anxious about everything all the time. She tells herself she has to pack an emergency suitcase for us in case we have to run for our lives - bottled water, sneakers, warm clothes, canned food, Cipro. She never gets around to packing that bag. Perhaps because she knows if the terrorists do unleash a plague on us, Manhattan will be quarantined before we can get the car out of the garage. Kirsten watches CNN while she nurses Lilo. Every day, the news gives us new reason to be afraid. I wonder if we are infecting our daughter with our fears.

My wife cries whenever she reads the biographies of the 9/11 victims that are published daily in the New York Times. For the first time in her life, she finds herself worrying about dying. My wife confronts the fear that has infected all of us head-on. On an unseasonably warm afternoon in the first week of December, she and a friend whose son was born the day before 11 September take the babies to Ground Zero. They take each other's pictures. For my wife, visiting the scene of the crime makes her feel triumphant, yet humbled.

A few wekks later, Kirsten, Lilo and I are at the Christmas market in Union Square with two of our friends. It is the season to be jolly. Shoppers ignore the half-dozen lonely souls who are passing out leaflets protesting at the bombing of Afghanistan and the war against terrorism. We make small talk about the decidedly hawkish shift in America, and how differently normally liberal New Yorkers feel about this foreign conflict than they did about Vietnam. One of us notices a pram abandoned in the crowd. No one claims it. Suddenly, one of our friends seems to be having a panic attack. He wants to go home. We don't understand - we just arrived. We were having such a good time. We badger him to stay until he shares his paranoia. A pram in a crowd of Christmas shoppers. What a perfect way for terrorists to plant a bomb. I leave the Christmas market thinking to myself, 'This is absurd, ridiculous,' and then remember that's exactly what my wife told herself when she thought she heard a jet crash on the morning of 11 September.

Valentine's Day is our first real date since Lilo's birth. We begin dinner talking about who Lilo's godparents will be. By the end of the meal, we are having a highly anxious conversation about what will happen to our daughter if we both die simultaneously.

Living in New York is different now. It's not a question of if there's going to be another terrorist attack, but when. As Kirsten puts it: 'When I came to New York 12 years ago, it was a place of safety, invulnerability. That bubble burst.'

As I write this, Lilo plays at my feet. She has teeth, she stands. She says 'Da-da' and 'bye-bye' and sleeps with a pink elephant. In just less than a month, my daughter will have her first birthday. The party will be in New York City.

· Fierce People by Dirk Wittenborn is published by Bloomsbury at £9.99
© Guardian News & Media 2008
Published: 8/18/2002