Grief & Gardening #2: Five Years After, “Ths Transetorey Life”

Posted on 2006-09-09 by admin

There are three sections to this post:

Trinity

This is a flower border at one of my favorite gardens to visit. Earlier in the year, there has been a succession of Iris, Hemerocallis (Daylilies), Hosta, and other common and sturdy garden perennials. There are ferns, and flowering cherry trees on the grounds.

The garden is the cemetery at Trinity Church in downtown Manhattan, just down the block from Ground Zero. The photo above is looking south, toward the church itself. Here’s another view looking east, toward Broadway, which is just on the other side of the wrought iron fence surrounding the cemetery.

This really is one of my favorite gardens to visit. First off, I love cemeteries. During my troubled adolescence, a cemetery at the end of our street was a refuge for me, a place I could go where no one would bother me, a place of solitude, and quiet. I came to enjoy the history of it, reading the stones to learn about people’s lives, how young they died, how many of them were children, and infants.

This garden cemetery also reminds me of impermanence. When I walk through it, I’m on my way to work, in the financial district of downtown Manhattan. It’s easy to get stressed about work. This walk helps me keep a healthier perspective on things. Check out the engraving on this headstone.

“Here Lyes ye Body of John Craig Who Departed ths Transetorey Life September ye 14 1747 Aged 47 years” At 47 years, he was an old man when he died. He could have easily been a grandfather. And yet, “ths Transetorey Life” … Next week is the 259th anniversary of his death. How many lifetimes, how many generations, is 259 years?

Another thing I enjoy about visiting this garden cemetery is the ritual I’ve developed for entering it. There’s really only one way: from the Rector Street station on the R/W subway line. This lets me out on Church Street. After emerging from the subway, the streetscape is the photo below.

This is Church Street, looking north. Ground Zero (of which more below) is just one block away, where the buildings end on the left-hand side. On the right-hand side is a massive, and seemingly ancient, sandstone block wall. See the trees peeking out over the top of it? Those are from the garden cemetery. Here’s a view of the church from this vantage.

That’s right: the cemetery is two stories above your head. Behind those stone blocks are the dead. To reach the cemetery, we have to climb still further, through the street-level opening in the wall, of which we only see the top of its gothic arch in the photo above, and up another two flights of stairs. Lest one forget, the sculpture set in the stone above the passageway is no cherub.

Ground Zero

I wrote earlier this week about the arbitrariness of anniversaries. But I have been feeling this one, the 5th anniversary of 9/11. The city is feeling it, too. Peoples’ grief is closer to the surface, more accessible. Mine certainly is. I’ve also been remembering a lot of what it was like in the city right after. There are reminders of it everywhere, on the news, in the papers, special exhibits and events, and especially, at Ground Zero.

A Tribute Center was dedicated this week on Liberty Street, on the south side of Ground Zero. I’d heard about it and I went there after work on Thursday. The doors had signs on them which said “Closed.” There was a couple next to me also looking at the signs. Someone inside saw them and opened the door for them. I thought they were just closing for the day, and let us in anyway. I tailgated in. I didn’t realize that it’s not open to the public until September 18.

Anyway, it’s quite a collection. They have artifacts. It took me a while to figure out what this object was. When I did, it just shocked me. I didn’t have my camera with me, just my camera-phone/phonecam. It’s a lousy picture, and I’ll go back and get a better one.

Another thing which shook me was some photographs in one of the display cases. There was a contact print of a couple of frames from a still camera, with some clear problems with light leakage along the top of the frame. The text explained that these photographs were taken by a photographer on the scene. His camera was damaged, and he was killed, when the first tower fell. His camera and film were recovered, and those prints were made.

Outside the PATH (Light rail/Subway to New Jersey) station, on the fence surrounding the site, is an exhibit of photographs from September 11 and the recovery efforts. The photographs are incredible, from all different photographers.

The names of the photographers and explanations of each scene are displayed alongside the photos. I didn’t make notes of their names. I’m hoping I can find a catalog of them online somewhere. Here’s one of the photographs.

St. Paul’s

This shows the tower of St. Paul’s Church about to be engulfed by the debris cloud from the collapse of the first tower. I’m pretty sure this was taken from an office building to the east, looking west toward the church and the World Trade Center site. St. Paul’s is directly across the street from the PATH station, and just a couple of blocks up the street from Trinity Church.

St. Paul’s sustained heavy damage, but it survived, and it served as one of the centers for recovery efforts downtown. Its fence was covered with memorials for months. Right now it’s housing the Threads Project, which collected threads, ribbons, and so on from all over the world and distributed it to weavers all over the world to create the works you see below.

One of the losses at St. Paul’s was a large Sycamore from the cemetery. If the tree had not been there, the church would have sustained even greater damage from debris which felled the tree instead. The tree has been captured as a symbol of the day, by casting its root system as a sculpture in bronze. This sculpture is permanently placed in a courtyard outside Trinity Church. The sculpture is called “Trinity Root.”

And so we’ve come full circle. From Trinity, to Ground Zero, to St. Paul’s, and back again. We grieve the loss of a great tree, whose death saved others’ lives, and celebrate it. We grieve the garden, and grieve through the garden. It’s the weekend before five years after. I will be mowing the lawn, weeding, maybe sifting some compost, and preparing the garden to receive the bulbs which should arrive in a few weeks. I will do all these ordinary things. And when I return to work on Monday, I will look up, and turn my face to the hole in the sky, and remember again.

Grief & Gardening #1: 1, 5 and 25

Posted on 2006-09-05 by admin

[Updated 2006.09.09 02:45 EDT: Retitled; new URL. Cosmetic changes. Added link to Grief & Gardening #2.]
[Updated 2006.09.07 13:59 EDT: Updated Links section.]
[Updated 2006.09.06 17:17 EDT: Comments added.]

This may be a little long. It will come round to gardening. There’s a connection. I promise.

A couple of anniversaries have been on my mind:

1 year ago last Tuesday: Katrina strikes Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama.
5 years ago next Monday: Terrorists strike the United States.
25 years this past June: AIDS “strikes” with the first CDC report of a cluster of pneumonia cases among gay men in Los Angeles.

Each of these has been in the news recently. Each has reminded me of my own experience of these, my own shock, grief, and trauma.

The ways we observe anniversaries is arbitrary. For example, I was shocked to tears for weeks by the Indian Ocean Tsunami of 2004, which killed 100 times more people than Katrina. The earthquake which precipitated it left the entire planet ringing like a bell. The observation of “25 Years of AIDS” at this year’s World AIDS Congress is pinned only to the first official report of a cluster of unusual deaths by the Centers for Disease Control in June of 1981. The timelines of epidemics don’t follow our categorizations of them.

Katrina

NOAA radar loop of Katrina

The night before Katrina made landfall, I was tracking its development and watching its progress through the radar loops on NOAA’s National Hurricane Center. I remember in particular the clearly visible eye. I knew this was bad, as this was an indication of the strength and organization of the storm. The morning after, I learned how bad it had been. The height of the storm surge, which hit Mississippi the worst, especially surprised me. The “secondary” impact following rupture of the levees in New Orleans underscored for me a truth I’ve learned from Zen: Pain is inevitable. People cause suffering.

9/11

I work in downtown Manhattan, just two blocks from Ground Zero. The week of September 10, 2001, my partner and I were vacationing in upstate New York. The morning of 9/11, we learned the towers had been struck from another hiker on the trail. The first tower had not yet collapsed. I wrote the following on September 14, 2001:

Monday we drove to Mohonk Mountain House, a grand and rustic retreat in the Shawangunk Mountains outside of New Paltz. None of the rooms have televisions. Our room had a wood-burning fireplace. Our balcony looked over Mohonk Lake to the surrounding cliffs and mountains. Mostly I said “Wow” a lot.

Across the lake from the lodge a peak, called Sky Top, rises several hundred feet [not quite, maybe 150 feet] above the lake. On Sky Top is a stone observation tower which looks over the lake, the lodge, and the surrounding cliffs and mountains. Tuesday morning [we] hiked to the peak and climbed to the top of the tower. On the way to the trailhead I overheard one woman saying to another something about a plane being hijacked. I didn’t think anything about it at the time. [We] were joyful to be together in such a beautiful setting. We were at peace with each other, and surrounded by nature.

As we climbed down the stairs inside the tower I was singing, “I love to go a-wandering …” As we turned the third flight of stairs down, we met an old man climbing up. I joked to him “Don’t mind me.” He looked up at us. His eyes were welled with tears. He said to us “Did you hear what happened?” That’s how [we] first learned that both towers of the World Trade Center had been struck by hijacked planes.

By the time we got back to the lodge, the staff had setup several televisions in public rooms. None of these went unattended before we left on Wednesday. Most of the afternoon and evening activities at Mohonk were cancelled. The evening’s scheduled film, “Deep Impact,” in which the world is struck by an asteroid, destroying the eastern seaboard cities of the United States, was replaced by “City Slickers.” By sundown, the flag flying over Mohonk Mountain House’s highest tower was at half-mast.

Sometime Tuesday morning the initial denial had broken and I was able to watch one of the large-screen videos setup in one of the rooms. I watched for the first of many times the South Tower explode and crumble.

Like most of the world, my initial experience of the events of that day was remote. However, I also worried about my colleagues downtown. I learned they were all okay, that none had been physically harmed, and our workplace was unscathed, though everything was closed down for the first week, and gradually resumed normal operations over the following weeks. I wrote the following on October 15, 2001:

I work two blocks from where the towers were. I’ve seen it from the street, from the roof of my office building, from our lunch room … I try to approach my presence in the city at this time as a naturalist, observing and recording changes in the physical environment and the behavior of its inhabitants. I want to remain present without withdrawing, so I can bear witness.The fires still burn. [They burned for months, into the winter.] Smoke still scents the surrounding streets and buildings. While rain has rinsed most of the gutters, ash still coats statues, windows and rooftops. In low and sheltered areas, the rain and ash mixed with shredded documents from the towers to create a gray papier mache. The “Missing Person” posters – and only those closest to them held any hope they would be “found” – and sidewalk memorials of candles and the poetry of anguish, rage, and hope, are slowly eroding.

AIDS

Preceding all these singular events of recent history is the AIDS epidemic. I moved to New York City in the winter of 1979, and shortly thereafter settled in the East Village. This was an epicenter of what was first called “gay cancer,” then GRID, Gay-Related Immunodeficiency Disease, and, finally, AIDS, Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome.

Years ago, I gave up trying to keep track of how many people I’ve lost to AIDS. Lovers, boyfriends, friends, neighbors, acquaintances, shopkeepers, bar buddies … Where do you draw the line? I estimate that half of everyone I ever knew from that time of my life has died, but I will never know, and there is no way to know. A community, a way of life, was destroyed. I took solace in reading about the Black Death in Europe in the 14th Century, during which 30-50% of whole towns died. The devastation was so great and sudden that it led to the collapse of the feudal system: there simply were not enough people to work the land. That level of disruption was something I could relate to; I was living it.

This is a poem I wrote in July of 1993 on learning of the death of one of these friends, David Kirschenbaum, whom I knew from the New York City Gay & Lesbian Anti-Violence Project:

what would it mean
even to say goodbye
my words do not grant
another breath

searching for the grief
that must be felt
as I recall other men
other names

if I could let go
lose control
permit my tears
what would it change

it ends, it is final
no room for regrets
no hopes for another chance
it is over

helpless, in the face of death
living is the best revenge

Gardening

How does all this connect me to my garden, to gardening? The following also comes from my journal entry of October 15, 2001. I don’t think I could say it better today:

As I tend my garden, I recall how it was a minute, a day, a year ago. That flower was, or was not, blooming yesterday. This plant has grown over the years and now crowds its neighbors. A label in the ground shows where another plant has vanished. Should I replace it, or try something new? I weed. I plant. I water. I sit. The garden asks me to see it as it really is, not just how I remember it, or how I wish it to be. Gardening continues to teach me many lessons. Gardening is my prayer.

So I must be in the world. Remembering what was. Observing what is. Hoping for what can be. Acting to bring it into being. When we struggle to understand, we question what is. Science can ask, and eventually answer, “What?” and “How?” It cannot answer the one question that matters, the question for which Man created God: “Why?” Now, as with each new loss, I ask again: Why am I here? Why am I alive?

The only answer I’ve come across which satisfies me at all comes from Zen: The purpose of life is to relieve suffering. Not to relieve pain, or grief, or loss. These cannot be avoided. But to relieve suffering, which we ourselves bring into the world. Because death is senseless, the only sense to be found is that which we manifest in our own lives. The only meaning there can be in life is what we impart.

News, August 1, 2006: NASA Earth Observatory Maps NYC’s Heat Island, Block by Block

Posted on 2006-08-01 by admin

Timely enough, given the record temperatures we’re experiencing this week. Tomorrow’s forecast has been “upgraded” from what I reported yesterday: the THI may reach 117F tomorrow.

Temperatures in New York City as measured by Landsat on August 14, 2002, at 10:30am, during a heat wave. Cooler temperatures are blue, hotter are yellow.
Source: NASA Earth Observatory. Map by Robert Simmon, using data from the Landsat Program.

The ability of vegetation to moderate urban temperatures is graphically demonstrated in these paired images from NASA’s Earth Observatory. The spatial resolution of these images is 60 meters per pixel. At that scale, I can just about make out the block where I garden:

Closeup of the vegetation map, centered on central Brooklyn. The green area at the left is Greenwood Cemetery. Prospect Park is the dark green area at the top; the white area within it is Prospect Lake.

Below the park, to the south, Victorian Flatbush, with its tree-lined streets, detached wood frame houses, and front lawns, spreads out as a series of olive green areas. The beige areas in-between the olive are rowhouses and apartment buildings. You can even make out a curving green line across the southern end of this area: That’s the old LIRR right-of-way, long abandoned, and overgrown with trees.

NASA has just published a report on urban heat islands highlighting the research of Stuart Gaffin, an associate research scientist with the Earth Institute at Columbia University in New York City, and his colleagues:

In the summer of 2002, Gaffin and his colleagues used satellite temperature data, city-wide land cover maps, and weather data, along with a regional climate model to identify the best strategies for cooling the city. The team estimated how much cooling the city could achieve by planting trees, replacing dark surfaces with lighter ones, and installing vegetation-covered “green roofs.”
The team studied the city as a whole, as well as six “hotspot” areas—including parts of Manhattan, the Bronx, Queens, and Brooklyn—where air temperatures near the ground were higher than the city-wide average. Each area was serviced by Con Edison, the local power company, so the scientists could compare electricity use. Each area also had available space so that the mitigation strategies the team considered could be modeled in the study and potentially implemented later on.
August 14 fell on one of the hottest heat wave days in New York’s summer of 2002, making it a good day to take the city’s temperature. Measuring the temperature of every last sidewalk, street, parking lot, roof, garden, and grassy area in an entire city isn’t easily done from the ground, so the researchers relied on NASA to take the city’s temperature from the sky. NASA’s Landsat Enhanced Thematic Mapper collected thermal infrared satellite data. …
– Beating the Heat in the World’s Big Cities

Urban Forestry

Without God

Posted on 2001-10-15 by admin

Posted on September 11, 2010, the 9th Anniversary of the attacks.

October 15, 2001

An open letter to Joanna Tipple, pastor of the Craryville and Copake Churches in New York State.

Dear Joanna:

Sorry I missed you when you came to the city to deliver the bears. I’ve been wanting to write you. I’ve found it hard to write at all. There are no words.

I want to thank you and the congregations of the Craryville and Copake churches for welcoming me at your services that first Sunday after September 11. While it may have helped to be the preacher’s wife, I know there was more to it than that! It was comforting to feel held there, knowing that John and I had to return to our homes in New York City that afternoon. I didn’t know what we’d be returning to. I wept during both services. I’ve wept a lot since.

I work two blocks from where the towers were. I’ve seen it from the street, from the roof of my office building, from our lunch room twenty-seven floors up. I try to approach my presence in the city at this time as a naturalist, observing and recording changes in the physical environment and the behavior of its inhabitants. I want to remain present without withdrawing, so I can bear witness.

The fires still burn. Smoke still scents the surrounding streets and buildings. While rain has rinsed most of the gutters, ash still coats statues, windows and rooftops. In low and sheltered areas, the rain and ash mixed with shredded documents from the towers to create a gray papier mache. The “Missing Person” posters – and only those closest to them held any hope they would be “found” – and sidewalk memorials of candles and the poetry of anguish, rage, and hope, are slowly eroding.

I’ve been thinking a lot about something you said during one of your sermons that Sunday. I think it was at the Copake service, while speaking to the shock and terrible loss of the preceding week, you said something like “I don’t know how someone could get through this without God.” I heard this as a question. I want to respond. I want to give something back to you and the congregations. For myself, once again I must make sense of senseless loss.

The Friday after John and I got back to the city was my first visit back to my office, and downtown. Power had been restored to our buildings and some of us went in to ready our offices and equipment for our colleagues’ return that Monday, two weeks after the attacks. My colleagues and I hugged when we saw each other. In a conversation that day with one of our vice presidents, she observed “Nothing is permanent, except God.” What struck me was that she seemed to be realizing this for the first time.

Nothing lasts. Not the smoke and ash, not the wreckage of the towers, not even our grief or the memorials we will erect. Everything that is, all we experience, survive, and celebrate, occurs without God. Nothing is always. This makes it all the more mysterious, not less, all the more wonderful, precious and beautiful.

Most of my twenty-three years in New York City I’ve been surrounded, touched, by death. Death from AIDS. Death from suicide. Death from overdose. The slow deaths of addiction, of abuse. I do not consider death a friend, but it is not my enemy. It is familiar to me. I have grieved, and grieved again, and more, and each new loss touches all the others through me. Through countless repeated uses over the years, my grief has become burnished, polished through use like a favorite tool. Comfortable to hold. Fitting my hand. Perfectly balanced for the task. I can pick it up when I need to. I can set it down when this work is done.

In the past I’ve described myself as a rabid atheist. John has known me a long time and can attest to the accuracy of this assessment. I’ve mellowed somewhat over the years, but nothing in my experience has yet to dissuade me from my fundamental disbelief. By the age of ten I realized that what was being taught to me as the Word of God was simply wrong. Not wrong as in incorrect, but immoral, unethical, unjust. The vision of heaven conveyed to me was no place I’d want to be. The God I was supposed to worship was nothing I could respect. Growing up gay in a world rife with homophobic cultures didn’t change my disbelief. If I were to believe so-called religious leaders, my love is an abomination, my kind deserving of extermination. There seems little point to believing in any of their hateful Gods.

Again, and still, horrors are committed in the name of God. A month ago, more than five thousand people lost their lives in a smoking crater, killed in the name of God. It makes no difference to me whether the banner reads “Holy War” or “God Bless America.” This crisis has brought out both the best and worst in people. Like any tool, the idea of God is used for evil as well as good. Then what good is God?

A problem with the word “atheist” is that it simply means “without god.” The word doesn’t summon anything new. It doesn’t suggest any alternatives. It doesn’t address your question. It’s as useless and inadequate as “non-white.” There are within me other beliefs, moral convictions, even something I am sometimes willing to call spirituality, which transcend God.

As I tend my garden, I recall how it was a minute, a day, a year ago. That flower was, or was not, blooming yesterday. This plant has grown over the years and now crowds its neighbors. A label in the ground shows where another plant has vanished. Should I replace it, or try something new? I weed. I plant. I water. I sit. The garden asks me to see it as it really is, not just how I remember it, or how I wish it to be. Gardening continues to teach me many lessons. Gardening is my prayer.

So I must be in the world. Remembering what was. Observing what is. Hoping for what can be. Acting to bring it into being. When we struggle to understand, we question what is. Science can ask, and eventually answer, “What?” and “How?” It cannot answer the one question that matters, the question for which Man created God: “Why?” Now, as with each new loss, I ask again: Why am I here? Why am I alive?

The only answer I’ve come across which satisfies me at all comes from Zen: The purpose of life is to relieve suffering. Not to relieve pain, or grief, or loss. These cannot be avoided. But to relieve suffering, which we ourselves bring into the world. Because death is senseless, the only sense to be found is that which we manifest in our own lives. The only meaning there can be in life is what we impart.

Or, as someone else might say, the kingdom of god is within each of us.

[bit.ly]

Flatbush Gardener

Urban Habitat Gardening with Native Plants

Tag Archives: Grief

Grief & Gardening #2: Five Years After, “Ths Transetorey Life”

Trinity

Ground Zero

St. Paul’s

Related content

Grief & Gardening #1: 1, 5 and 25

Related Contents

Links

Katrina

September 11

AIDS

News, August 1, 2006: NASA Earth Observatory Maps NYC’s Heat Island, Block by Block

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Without God