It took a few days for the sky to return to blue. The subways and trading floors refilled with bodies and dreams, all quietly trying to find some way to more. More wealth, more laughter. More time and life. And America, after taking a sucker punch for the ages, staggered to its feet.
But death is not so easily boxed up and buried. Worry appeared where innocence and invulnerability had been. It mixed with rage and hung in the air, like the fog of invisible asbestos.
My oldest friend, John [Duggan], called me that morning from his Wall Street office. His voice shook as he watched the second plane explode any pretense of peace. Later, when he caught his reflection in a window, he saw that his blue suit had become entirely white. His face was chalky, covered with a mist of drywall and asbestos.
“I looked like my own ghost,” he said.
Neither of us knew then that the dust he breathed that day might follow him for the rest of his life.
Years earlier, after school ended, we lived together for a couple of years and used to run at night. Like all young men, we were in a hurry to catch up to our futures.
In the city, happiness has a geography. We were sure where it lived — across the river. So we ran the 59th Street Bridge at night, waiting for the lights to reach out and embrace us.
Happiness has always been fast. Hope, as ever, is slow. Like everyone else we knew, we became chasers — chasing wealth and love, trying to outrun doubt and worry. Each night, we headed toward the bright lights on the other side of the bridge.
John was always faster than me. Always the first home.
Eventually, he began to run toward love. He chased the tried-and-true path to happiness: a wife and children. He believed you had to walk the floor with a baby in your arms at 3 a.m. and worry about the mortgage before happiness would let you close.
Later, John ran to Wall Street, trying to find happiness in its cousin, fortune.
And life rolled on that way until September 2001, when everything exploded.
For a time, it seemed to stumble and stop.
But Wall Street waited 10 days — an eternity — before reopening. Then the traders and legions of salesmen returned to their desks.
We rebuilt. We wanted to believe the dying had been fenced into that one terrible day.
But the day did not end there.
The air at Ground Zero left a different kind of legacy. In the years that followed came persistent coughs, sleepless nights, struggles for breath and a growing toll of cancer among those who had been there.
Twenty-five years later, the meter still runs on that day.
Pancreatic cancer can take years to become lethal. For John, the toxic remnant of that day had become part of his story, quietly following him into the future.
Good men are not granted a reprieve from suffering. John’s suffering during those last few months is a memory now. My old friend, who had spent his life chasing the light with me, found it difficult to stand in his final days.
Yet near the end, through courage and will, he somehow walked his little girl into the arms of her new husband.
And for a moment, happiness and light slowed enough to be caught.
I talked to him near the end, like only old friends can. I told him it was like crossing the bridge at night.
“You remember. Running ahead in the dark. Heading for the lights.”
You were always faster, John.
Once again, you beat me to the other side.
Always the first one home.
