I am a freelance foreign correspondent now. And that is thanks to that terrible day.
On that fateful morning in Washington, DC 10 years ago, I began covering the dead and the living desperately looking for them. For one year, I was confronted with pain and more pain. Inevitably, in a country that somehow couldn't make sense of what happened, it looked somewhat to us, the reporters, not to make sense but to translate the agony and the bewilderment into something shared, because that somehow became so important in the weeks and months that followed. That need was insatiable. It was filled by the stories of ordinary people made extraordinary by word or deed, sometimes just because they died -- or lived -- that day, transformed into the words on a flimsy page. It was devastating. And it was universal.
So day after day, for one year, that pain seeped into me. It had to and I had to allow it -- it was necessary to fuel those stories. Sometimes I found the lyrical in the people I spoke to, and sometimes in myself, taking that raw emotion and turning it into language. And of course, as it left me for the page, some of it remained, turned into essays, poems, rage and tears.
On the one-year anniversary, I thought I was done. I had spent weeks reporting on two survivors for a special feature that I had initially interviewed soon after 9/11: Robert Hogue, the man who led his colleagues out of a burning Pentagon, a man full of repressed poetry, a man called a hero; and Louise Kurtz, the most physically devastated survivor of the three attacks with a strength that was fierce, hidden in a raw plain-speak and the folds of an army wife's frock. It took every bit of me to do those two features, closeting myself in my house to write them, creating new structures and special tones for them -- it took a week, an extraordinary amount of time for a daily news reporter -- and then complete collapse: I was unable to write a single word for weeks afterward. I had given everything I had to give in anticipation of an ending. Because when you write such features, as I learned, you have to get under their skin. And that is a difficult place to be.
Afterward, I knew I had to get out. What started as a passing idea became an all-consuming need. So I looked for fellowships and I received a few offers. And I got out, across-an-ocean out.
On the second anniversary, I got very drunk and cried. But it didn't hurt me as much as the first. By that time, I was in Germany for a few months of a year-long fellowship. But measured in emotional distance, I was very far.
When the third one rolled around, I was in Germany to stay with no deadline, the fellowship over, and a freelance career just starting. I had severed ties with most of my old life, and my former beat, with occasional peeks at my earlier 9/11 features, with no rational explanation. I didn't want to pay attention anymore to these anniversaries. And so it went with the fourth, the fifth, the sixth...
But it never really goes away, does it. I can still get very weepy with a mention of that day. I don't exactly understand it. An editor once told me that many of us who cover disasters have PTSD and that makes you more vulnerable and extra sensitive. I think that when you report on tragedies such as a 5-year-old boy killed by a car, a 14-year old shot at a bus stop or even the DC sniper, those are stories you might not be prepared for but they only last for a few days or weeks at most. So you take the pain, cry a little secretly, write the story and move on. But when you cover something like September 11 where somehow EVERYONE is involved and the tragedy and the stories are unending, it never leaves you.
And so it never has.
It is 10 years now. And for months, I debated going back to my former newspaper and offering to temporarily help out on the anniversary coverage. Then I was asked for ideas for the September 11 special issue which I wanted to contribute to but somehow couldn't bring myself to pitch to in time. I was also contacted by my former editor because two reporters were going to revisit Hogue and Kurtz, the way I did after the first anniversary, and wanted their contact details. I wanted to help, I wanted to contact them, and I didn't. Even though somehow, I feel closer to them about all of this than anyone.
And in the end, I was asked to contribute from Europe -- to world coverage of the commemoration ceremonies. That I could live with, I thought. But I already knew I couldn't go to the ceremonies. Ten years isn't long enough for the scab to fall off. I have come to realize, forever is just not long enough.
So I sent reporters. And I put together the story they mostly reported. I did it in pieces, in fits and starts, through involuntary tears and unwanted lumps and aches. Most of the reporters are not American. They could keep a certain emotional distance that almost everyone around me these past eight years has had because I am surrounded by non-Americans, or those Americans abroad that were here in Europe when it happened. It is different for us, the September 11 reporters.
And over the past month as well as today, I read about how the survivors had changed. I thought about how my life also changed after the attacks, and in many ways, how it needed to. I know that when I left the US for Germany, no matter how much I tried to convince myself to the contrary during that year, that I wasn't going home after my fellowship ended. I couldn't. It doesn't exactly have to do with the attacks and it has everything to do with them. It is something I'll never be able to fully explain.
But like many people, I accept that that day changed the course of my life as it changed me. It will always hurt to read the raw reporting on anything directly related to it, such as its 10th anniversary: Call it repulsion and attraction. And if there was one thing I have noticed, in the coverage I was bombarded with during my trip home to Maryland in August and since then, it is that while people want to remember, they also want to move on, learn from it, and make good come from it.
Sometimes, we learn to make the best of things and on rare occasions, they make the best of us. That day might have pushed me into hell but it also propelled me forward in a wonderful direction: Growing up, I used to watch the foreign correspondents in trench coats on the network news and I wanted to be them. When I graduated from journalism school 14 years ago, my mother bought me that trench coat. These days, I wear it while reporting from around the world. I am a foreign correspondent now, due in part to that day.
- Jabeen Bhatti, Berlin
