When Bob Dow reached out by email asking me if I wanted to write again about his loss on Sept. 11, I said yes.
I said yes because Bob’s loss of the love of his life, Ruth Ketler, is resonant even today. I said yes because learning how he had continued in the world over the past 25 years since I wrote a story about his search for Ruth, would also help me — and others — to heal.
I have spent my life as a journalist. I most recently served as editor-in-chief of VTDigger. I now teach journalism at the UC Berkeley School of Journalism, where I tell my students that they are doing a service when they interview people and listen — listen deeply. The gift of your attention, of your presence, is never to be underestimated, I say.
Listening to people’s stories transforms you. Journalism is, in many ways, the discipline of moving toward other people’s pain and listening deeply enough that their stories can be known, shared and borne by the larger world. In this way, it heals.
Bob met Ruth in the mid-1980s, when he was tending bar. They became friendly, but he thought they were too different to be a couple. He was politically liberal; she was a Republican. He was a poet and a writer; she had spent her career in banking. But in 1993, after a dinner together, a romantic relationship began.
On Sept. 11, Bob was 50 years old and living in Manhattan with Ruth. He spent most of the week in the city but commuted to western Massachusetts a few days each week to teach at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Ruth, who was 42, worked as director of research at Fiduciary Trust Co., on the 94th floor of the World Trade Center.
That morning, a friend called to tell him a plane had crashed into one of the towers at the World Trade Center. Then Ruth was on the phone from her office in the south tower.
“Leave the building,” he told her. She’d been told to stay, she said: “I love you. I got to go.”
Minutes later, the second plane hit her building. The attacks that day killed nearly 3,000 people when hijackers flew commercial planes into the twin towers, the Pentagon and a field in Pennsylvania, the deadliest terrorist attack on American soil.
I was at home in Manhattan when the first plane crashed into the World Trade Center. It was a little before 9 a.m., and I was getting ready to leave my children with our babysitter and take the subway to work as a reporter at the Wall Street Journal. I would spend the next month interviewing Bob and others whose loved ones had been killed. Even as the Journal staff fled our offices next door to the World Trade Center, we covered the aftermath from our homes and a back office in New Jersey.
But at home, I turned off the TV and refused to speak about the falling towers. I believed my kids, age 1 and 3, would never sleep peacefully again if they watched on television the buildings falling and overheard grown-ups describing people plunging to their deaths a few blocks away.
I am, by nature, fearful. I do not crane my neck to see what has happened when I pass an accident scene on a highway. Once a doctor sewed a gash on my daughter’s shin, and my sister had to hold her hand because the sight of the needle and the sound of her cries almost made me pass out. “Delicate,” is how my mother kindly referred to my temperament.
But for the three decades that I worked as a newspaper reporter, journalism propelled me toward the pain and loss that I would have otherwise tried to escape.
The grief, the struggle and the courage of Bob and the other people I have interviewed have changed me in ways that I am only now beginning to appreciate. They have turned me into a braver human being, more fully alive for the whole of life, not hunched over in a crash position trying to avoid the pain.
‘A willingness to see and feel’
I entered the field of journalism in 1989, first at a weekly newspaper on Cape Cod, then at the Rutland Herald.
While there, I wrote about a woman who escaped domestic violence and a nurse who became addicted to her child’s Ritalin. I probed how a father came to be wrongly accused of molesting his child. Through the interviews, I learned what it is like to survive the fear of being killed by your partner, sliding into drug addiction and being falsely accused of a crime against your child. And through my stories, the readers of the Herald did, too.
In the years since, I have worked as a foreign correspondent for the Journal and later The New York Times. In 2008, assailants from Pakistan held two of Mumbai’s fanciest hotels hostage for two days. I stood outside the Trident Hotel most of that time with the wife and daughter of a banker who hadn’t emerged since going to dinner inside. When the hotel was finally freed by government forces, the banker’s family learned he had been killed in the early hours of the siege.
I’ve gone on to teach journalism and serve as dean of the UC Berkeley School of Journalism. And last year, I led the newsroom at VTDigger, this pioneering news publication that is part of a movement to reinvent the business model of journalism as a nonprofit, akin to public radio.
At VTDigger, reporter Auditi Guha spent hours interviewing Wilmer Chavarria, a school superintendent in Winooski who was interrogated at George Bush Intercontinental Airport in Houston as he returned from vacation in Nicaragua last year. Chavarria, a U.S. citizen, described being separated from his spouse and questioned in a windowless room without clocks, at times with four officers towering above him as he sat in a metal chair. They mocked his 15-year marriage and his insistence he was employed as a school superintendent.
Through Auditi’s story, Chavarria’s humiliation was known and borne by the larger world.
In my conversation with Bob this past August, I asked him how he has managed to go on after losing Ruth. I told him about my dad, who became an alcoholic after losing his business. How he never recovered from that loss.
In Bob’s case, he said it helped that he continued to teach. Two weeks after Ruth died, he drove up to Amherst to engage his students in his class, “America at War.” He continues to teach, making the same commute between Manhattan and Amherst.
Teaching, as Bob sees it, is “a tool to unlock the heart and soul and mind of others.”
Bob aims to teach his students “a willingness to see and feel — best we can — the suffering of others and empathize and understand that which may be beyond our immediate reach and understanding.”
In many ways, that’s what journalism does, too.
I have a daughter who is a recovering addict, and I attend parents’ meetings every week to hear that same love of life and desire for survival that Bob seeks out in others’ stories. My daughter has been sober for the past 14 months, a testament to her courage and strength. But if left to my own fears, I find myself hunkering down, afraid that she could relapse and die.
At Al Anon Family Group meetings, parents speak openly about how their children are living on the streets or have died of overdoses. I listen, weeping. But knowing these parents have endured such loss and can still laugh on their grandchildren’s birthdays, vacation with friends and support other parents so lovingly, enables me to unfurl from the crash position. It lets me know that if the worst were ever to happen, I just might be able to survive.
As the 25th anniversary of Sept. 11 approached, Bob watched documentaries about the attacks and the survivors. I ask why he moves toward those stories rather than away, as I imagine I might have done.
At first he says he doesn’t know. Then it comes to him.
“I see, I feel, I hear the stories of others,” he says. “It is healing to see the love of life and the desire for survival in others.”
Indeed, Bob tells me, “The reason I listen is the reason I reached out to you.”
Geeta Anand, the former editor-in-chief of VTDigger, lives in Plainfield.
