Disasters, and recovering from them

I'll never forget September 11, 2001. It was a beautiful blue-skied day, warm but not too warm. A lot like yesterday. It seemed like a perfect day, with the engines of commerce revved up again after a long summer, for the orderly and routine processes of urban living to unfold. Instead, chaos was brought from the sky on people who had no reason to expect it.

Katrina came with warning, but it brought chaos too. In both cases, reassembling order out of events that took only hours - the moment of destruction - seems almost impossible. In New York, the debate about what to do with the Twin Towers site remains unresolved. Only in Washington, where the Pentagon wing was rebuilt, has even the facade of order been reintegrated. In New Orleans it may be even more difficult. Flood waters do more damage than anything short of an A-bomb, though the damage can be hard to see. The spread of toxic materials has turned the entire city into an enormous brownfield. When you think of how expensive brownfield cleanups can be in urban areas of only a few blocks, imagine having to redo an entire city?

But I only point to the physical reconstruction to point out the bigger and more complex question of rebuilt lives. Having seen my wife's family coping this last year with the loss of her sister has given me only a glimpse of this. A newsmaking calamity may be a big story for the newspapers. But what it really amounts to is an aggregation of ten thousand small stories: ten thousand lives lost, ten thousand families who have to go through that long and protracted process of converting the anarchy of unexpected shock and grief back into the mundane we call everyday life. If it ever happens, I'm sure it takes years. I'm not convinced everyone recovers, though I earnestly hope for it.

What is surprising about the loss of a loved one is how cruel society's response to it is. A person who loses a spouse has an intense legal process to go through, the paperwork for which could break a mule's back! You're made to sign doctor and hospital forms, pick out caskets and flowers, organize a huge amount of visitors, and pull off an event as complex as a wedding within a week. Loving and supportive families step in and handle vast amounts of that. But it continues for months and years, ofttimes, long after the relatives have gone home.

Is there a reason we do this? Is the reimposition of order so important that we dress death in paperwork, insurance forms, legal filings, and legal claims to make it conform to our ideas about the orderly arrangement of the world? And is that why it takes so long to rebuild the organs of commerce in New York, or why New Orleans will be a generational project? Is it coincidence that these endeavours will probably last as long as their grief does?