An Unintentional Life

 Ten years after losing her husband Arron Dack on 911, author Abigail Carter reflects on her "unintentional" life.                                                    

 

An Unintentional Life

by Abigail Carter

On that sunny September morning as I was stuffing our daughter Olivia’s lunch into her backpack and getting ready to leave the house to put her on the school bus for her second day of first grade, our son Carter clinging to my hip, my husband Arron called explaining carefully that he was at Windows on the World in the World Trade Center. His voice was urgent but not panicked. He asked me to call 9-1-1 because he thought there’d been a bomb. I didn’t ask if he was OK. I didn’t tell him I loved him. I didn’t know that I would never speak to him again.


Just two weeks before, I had watched six-year old Olivia flip-flop her way down a peaty forest path, peeping into an old stump pocked with moss looking for the fairies her grandmother convincingly assured her lived there. Carter, pillowy knees clasped around my waist, pushed away from me determined to hop down and get a look at the sleeping fairies for himself. As we continued down the path, I warned the kids’ away from the long line of frayed extension cords that were snaking their way down to the dock from the house, my grandfather’s genius at work. From the flimsy bridge, a gap-toothed smile across a tiny stream, I heard Arron running up the path from the beach toward us, warning us of the electric cords.


“Seriously?” I said to him.

“Don’t say anything, Ab. You know your Grandfather.” He was right. I did know my grandfather, a product of the depression when nothing, not even a dangerous and frayed extension cord was ever thrown away. Perhaps the danger was real, or perhaps Arron just sensed the danger that loomed ahead, a danger I could not yet fathom. I just shook my head and followed him and the kids to the water’s edge and the partially constructed dock.

I handed Arron a beer, his dark hair and bare chest peppered with sawdust, a leather tool belt slung loosely around his hips. I gave another beer to my grandfather, a spry eighty-eight year-old in a pale blue cap, clearly the director of the construction operation. He and Arron had spent the last two days building the new dock at our tiny lake in Quebec a replacement for the relic of splintered wood and dangerous rusty nails that had preceded it. “The dock’s looking good,” I said sitting on the freshly cut floor, its piney smell pungent as Arron helped Carter hammer a nail into it while Olivia peered over its edge looking for frogs. Across the lake I watched a solitary loon dip noiselessly under the water and I inhaled the moment – a perfect peacefulness. Less than two weeks later that perfect moment would become a memory that I cherished like a well-thumbed photograph.


How to explain to a two-year old the death of his father? I spoke of “big boo-boos” and “buildings falling down” until he began pointing at tall buildings asking if daddy was there. Each new developmental milestone required a renewed explanation of his father’s death. What I told him at two needed to be explained again at four and with each new piece of information came new fears. Fear of flying, fear of losing his mom. He wouldn’t let me out of his sight and I had to unhook his hands from around my waist each morning when I dropped him off at school.


Our daughter refused to speak of her dad, asking when we could go back to being “happy people.” She told friends who asked about her dad that he was at a meeting in Florida. If I cried when I tucked her into bed at night, she would look at me with horror, as if my face had just turned purple, a condition that might be contagious. Over the years, I’ve battled my kids’ out of control temper tantrums, anxiety, obsessive-compulsive disorder, learning issues – conditions that other, non-grieving families face, but that I had to handle alone as a grieving single mom, constantly questioning what was normal child behavior and what was grief. At times I longed to run away or have a night off when my only option was to sit in a heap on the floor and cry. I forgot what it was like to have someone else to take the garbage out, or to talk to about my day over dinner. I was lonely. I too wondered if we would ever be those “happy people” again. I couldn’t see how it would ever be possible.

I have been asked the question over and over, “so how ARE you ten years on?” It’s a difficult question to answer. My life is nothing like I imagined it would be when I married Arron almost 21 years ago, thinking we would raise our kids in tandem and grow old and crotchety together. My life is nothing like I thought it might be the day he died and I wondered if I would have to sell the house. And yet here I sit in a beautiful home that overlooks Lake Washington and the Cascade Mountains, a published book under my belt, 3,000 miles from New Jersey on a sunny Seattle day, two beautiful children upstairs hunched over computers, a tiny Boston Terrier on my lap and I think, “whose life is this?”


Ten years later I’m baffled that in many ways our lives are better now than when Arron was alive – what I have come to think of as my “unintentional life.” If Arron strode through our door today he would walk into a beautiful house in Seattle instead of New Jersey. It was a move I felt was essential – to escape New Jersey and what I was sure would be the persistent recognition of my kids and me throughout Montclair as “that 9/11 family.” How could he not marvel that his beautiful daughter now drives, has his knack for languages, his giggle? Or that his son looks like him, is kind and generous and can play Taps on the trumpet? I would laugh at his astonishment that my memoir was published in four countries. He would admire his happy-again family, living their unintentional lives.


There is a heavy debt of guilt whenever I realize that our new life wouldn’t exist had Arron not died. Through the pain of our grief, we discovered strength we didn’t know we possessed, learned to appreciate the gifts of life and have empathy for others who were themselves in pain. We were awakened into life by death. Experiencing death head-on opened the door to new opportunities in our lives. In my longing to be with Arron, willing him to exist in some new form, I lost my fear of death – something I’ve come to see as the unexpected gift of grief – a lack of fear that unmasks an entirely new universe of possibility – move across the country alone with two kids? No problem. Write a book? Why not? Teach a class on grief? A fulfilling experience. I stopped worrying what people thought and began thinking almost magically, realizing that the only person standing in the way of, say, writing a book, was myself. I learned to be brave enough to trust my intuition, get help when we needed it, find allies and live with no expectations – a flexibility that invited what I can only express as mindful evolution. Some might call it a growing spiritualism, though I don’t want to get all new age-y about it. Certainly, I began to question fate and faith in my quest to make peace with Arron’s death.


I muddled through “dad” experiences, like starting the lawn mower, knotting Carter’s necktie for a band recital and teaching our daughter to drive. The kids in turn have developed a sense of compassion beyond their years. Olivia, during a trip to Rwanda to help girls affected by the Genocide also learned about the power of forgiveness. Still, we have all had to learn to live with an un-namable absence, always wondering what life would be like if Arron were still a part of it.


This summer at the lake in Quebec, I watched that once pudgy-legged two-year old, now a lanky, tanned twelve-year old, hold the hand of his younger cousin pointing out the fairy’s stump, bestowing its magic upon a new generation. Our daughter, a lithe sixteen-year old enthralled the family who were gathered for my grandfather’s memorial with her effortless beauty and wit. The snake of extension cords no longer posed any threat as I stood again on the dock that Arron and my grandfather built that August in 2001, now adorned with a carved wooden plaque bearing Arron’s name. The family watched quietly as my mother and uncle peddled the paddle boat into the middle of the lake and sprinkled my grandfather’s ashes onto the water’s glassy surface, a ceremony whose dignity my grandfather would have appreciated. Arron too felt present in the breeze that caressed our hair. Just beyond the boat, a lone loon skimmed majestically across the water until I blinked and he was gone.

Abigail Carter's book "The Alchemy of Loss" is available on Amazon.  You can also visit her website.

The Mind Body Spirit Odyssey also interviewed Abby last year for our blog.  You can read that interview here. 

Thank you to photographer Karen Casey Smith for allowing us to use her photograph "Dandelion Clock".  Prints are available in her Etsy and Artfire Shops.

 Follow our daily updates for the Mind Body Spirit Marketplace on Facebook .

An Interview with Author Abigail Carter on her Book, "The Alchemy of Loss: A Young Widow's Transformation"

Whenever I hear the phrase "resilience of the human spirit", I think about Abigail Carter.  I hope you will enjoy this interview with her as much as I did. 
On a personal note; yes, we were one of the families she mentioned who hung with her “in the trenches” during those long dark days.

To the Carter/Dack/Boland family…I raise my glass and wish you well!
                                                                                      ~ diane fergurson

1. For those who may not be familiar with the premise of your book, will you give us a brief overview?

-Essentially my book is about my journey after the loss of my husband on 9/11. Its about discovering the silver lining that can be a part of grief, and the opportunities that loss can offer if you choose to see and take them. It delves into the morass of grief, the messiness of family relationships during a loss, raising grieving kids in the process and coming out the other end.

 2.  "Coming out the other end" involves healing.  What have you learned about the healing process over the last 8 1/2 years?

-Grief and healing do not necessarily go together. In many ways I am not sure anyone ever truly heals from grief. I sort of think of it as one of those diseases that lies in remission and then strikes again when you least expect it.

Here are some other things I have learned about grief:

• Grief doesn’t have “stages” that follow a specified progression as in the Kubler-Ross stages of grief. You can feel both anger and numbness at the same time. You can be in denial and acceptance at once as well. And no matter how hard one tries to avoid it, anger and grief go hand in hand.
• You can’t “put off” grief. It will eventually find you one way or another
• Grief can settle in the body and form a kind of muscle memory that is reluctant to let go and can be quite painful in a literal sense
• Loss can act as a sort of defibrillator that awakens you to new possibilities. Suddenly life seems too short to put off dreams or desires; perceptions of others no longer matter as they once did; priorities change dramatically. It can be a frighteningly liberating experience. I know people whose entire personalities have changed after loss.
• Views on spirituality are often questioned and revised sometimes resulting in a deeper understanding of faith, fate and a more open and accepting attitude towards spirituality in general.
• Grief often brings out creativity in people as they shed societal handicaps and become more independent and non-conformist.
• In general, grief spurs us to appreciate life.

   3. If you feel that people never really heal from grief, then tell us about your remission process. What has helped you?  Writing the book, speaking engagements, working with others who have experienced loss? You've done all these things over the years. What have you learned that may benefit others? 

-Certainly writing the book was extremely cathartic and I recommend everyone experiencing grief to write their experiences down, even if it’s just in a journal. Its amazing the perspective it gives you, even if you are writing years after the fact. I often started writing about one thing and found myself writing about something I hadn’t even thought of and having lots of “aha” moments along the way.

Helping others has also been amazing. From my book I have gotten so many emails from people who my book has touched. These are often very personal emails from people telling me things that they have not told another living soul. I feel very honored by that and encourage them to keep writing me. I also volunteer and am on the Board of The Healing Center in Seattle which is a place for grieving families to come and get support. I work with a group of people who are a few years out from their loss, a group we call the “Perspectives” group, named for the notion that we are no longer looking back at our loss, but have now turned and are looking forward to what’s next. The group has had some life altering affects on people.

And yes, I have also done a few speaking engagements. I have spoken to caregivers of ALS (Lou Gehrig’s Disease) which was very powerful given that the people I was speaking to hadn’t yet experienced their loss, but were preparing for it. I also spoke to a group of social workers and caregivers who work with the bereaved in many different ways about the silver lining side of grief, something one of the other speakers dubbed “Post Traumatic Growth” which I found incredibly apt.

All this to say, that although it can be very emotional helping others through their grief, it can also be incredibly rewarding and life affirming.

4. One of the things which I found so interesting in the book was your ability to describe having to take on the roll of a juggler.  On one hand you had death and widowhood to deal with, then layered on top there was the circus associated with being a 911 widow.  Your family thrown into the mix presented a whole other set of interesting, sometimes humorous issues.  Deciding to date again and making the decision to move away from the New York area...what is your perspective on all of this looking back?
   It really is quite a unique slice of life during a specific period of time (as they say).

-Yes, that period in my life was really crazy. I honestly don’t know how I got through it. Partly it was grief that got me through – there is a period where you are sort of in shock and there was a long period where I felt quite detached, like I was sort of a stranger looking into someone else’s life, not really having a say in the direction it took. I remember often thinking, “huh. These people are acting really crazy. I sure wish I could help them.” The odd thing was, it was incredibly liberating. I didn’t have to take responsibility for everyone, something that I had spent my life doing.

After that effect wore off, I remember thinking I just had to put one foot in front of the other which is how I managed to get from day to day. I wasn’t really able to plan ahead, I just got through each day.

There was a period of freedom too, where my mantra was “life is short,” where I felt I had to experience life to the fullest. This was the period when I dated and ultimately moved from New Jersey to Seattle. The move, though also had to do with trying to escape all my drama, and my identity as a 9/11 widow. In that respect the move has been a really good thing.

These days, I think I have managed to simplify my life. Its easier too now that the kids are older. I find I prefer quiet much more than I used to (though that may simply be an effect of getting old!). The down side of this though, is that I have become a bit of a hermit (typical of a writer’s life I suppose), which perhaps a way of countering all the past drama. I do worry about it sometimes too, that maybe some of that early detachment is creeping back in. I suspect this detachment though has to do with the overload of responsibility I have on an ongoing basis – sometimes I just need to check out for a while.

5. Do you feel moving out of the New York area was beneficial for you and your family?
   If so, how?

-Yes, moving has been beneficial for a bunch of reasons. One, obviously was to escape the cloud of 9/11 that was, and probably still is to a certain extent, pervasive there. I seemed to bump into it everywhere I went. As well, the house that we had lived in as a family, though at first comforting had begun to feel sort of tomb-like, and I felt that if I stayed, I would become stuck in my 9/11 widow identity. The entire community seemed to know our family’s history, and I worried that the kids would grow up always being “9/11” kids.

In Seattle, the event was very removed for people here. They were much less traumatized by it, so we are able to live in relative anonymity with regards to the event. Many of the people we know don’t know our history or if they do, it doesn’t have the same heart-wrenching response that it does in NY/NJ. Just recently, Olivia’s class was studying the book “The Kite Runner” where the events of 9/11 are mentioned. There was a big discussion about 9/11 where towards the end, Olivia finally confessed her history much to the shock of her teacher and class. Some of the kids even thought she was lying. It was a huge leap for her to do that, as it is something she doesn’t talk about very much. I felt that had we stayed in Montclair, we always would have been treated as “special” in some way, and my gut told me that that would be detrimental to the kids. Either they would expect to always be treated differently or that they would feel pressure to always behave a certain way. It may have been a false premise, but it was something I worried about. In Seattle, they able to just be normal kids.

The downside was that we gave up a great deal of support that the community offered, which really hasn’t been replaced. We had some incredible caregivers in the form of therapists and doctors and widow communities that were integral to our survival in those first years. Giving those people up was very difficult. Also, many of our friends hung with me “in the trenches” so to speak, which provided a strong bond of friendship. I miss those easy friendships a great deal and I know the kids do too. But I know through the experience of moving as much as we did that good friends remain in your life no matter where you live.

6.  Any new books or articles in the works?

-Well, I had a lot of requests to write a sequel which I would love to do, but I doubt that I would be able to sell it to a publisher. It turns out that people won’t buy anything that they perceive to be a 9/11 memoir. Even though my memoir was so much more than 9/11 -- its really a self-help book on recovering from grief -- the 9/11 thing is an albatross when it comes to selling it. The book, oddly enough was far more successful in Canada, Holland and Australia than it ever was in the US.

Because of this, I am working on a fictional novel written from the perspective of a dead husband. I wanted to be able to delve into post loss relationships, what grief is like after the first year, and some of the issues around raising kids who have experienced early trauma and I am trying this out as a vehicle. Its been much harder to write than the memoir, but also a little more fun. I get to imagine a place where dead people go when they die. My ghost is very human-like and must rehash his life. It gets fun when he tries to set his wife up on dates that don’t go so well.

    7.  Well that sound like it would leave itself open to all kinds of possibilities! 
Since you are veering in that direction, you have also had many interesting incidents "from the other side" since this chapter in your life occurred.  Would you care to share any for our readers?
In addition, what insight have you gained from these experiences?
How did it impact your spirituality?

-Sure. There were a number of incidences, but here are a couple:

I guess the first one was about 10 days after 9/11 when there was still talk of people surviving in air pockets and we still held out that tiny bit of hope. It was 4am and I was lying in bed imagining Arron beside me, when the hall light suddenly went on. I got up thinking Olivia might have gotten out of bed, but she was sound asleep and then I thought perhaps my brother had stumbled in from the city really late, but there was no noise from him (and he didn’t get back until the next morning) and as I stood there, I just knew it was Arron, telling me he was gone.

On our wedding anniversary, a year after his death, Olivia and I were sitting and eating dinner. Carter had fallen asleep on the couch. It was very quiet, when suddenly the CD player came on. The CD that we had last played was Macy Gray, which had been our family favorite, and Olivia knew all the words to most of the songs. We just sat there amazed as Macy Gray sang to us and Olivia pointed to the ceiling, and I nodded and we just kept eating to the music.

I also have had quite a few very uncanny readings from Psychics.

I don’t know if we just manifest these incidents because we need to believe that our loved ones still exist in some way, or if there really is life beyond death, but I do know that believing there was life after death comforted me a great deal. I think I sort of believed in reincarnation and life beyond death before 9/11 but these and many other serendipitous experiences certainly solidified that belief. I still struggle with the idea of fate and whether it’s predetermined or not, though if I was to embrace a psychic’s view of life-after-death dogma, then I suppose I would need to accept that we map out our fate ahead of each lifetime on earth, making it both predetermined and self-directed. I’m still a little wobbly on that one, but I like its ability to embrace both theories at once.

I do like the thought of Arron up there guiding me in my decisions in a helpful sort of way, though I have to say that the encounters from beyond have dropped off dramatically since moving to Seattle. Perhaps I am just stronger now and need him less, which is a good thing. But I wouldn’t mind him dropping by a little more often.

Thank you for the interview...
If you would ever like to do a guest blog spot for the Mind Body Spirit Odyssey, we'd love to read more from you!

Abigail’s book is available through “Amazon”

You can also visit her website at http://www.abigailcarter.com

--------------------------------------------------

Abigail Carter wrote The Alchemy of Loss: A Young Widow’s Transformation  after her husband’s death in the World Trade Center on September 11th, 2001. Toronto's Globe and Mail calls it “Eloquent and honest. . . and listed the book as one of it’s top 100 books of 2008.  A Canadian National Bestseller, The Alchemy of Loss is also published in Australia, the United States and translated into Dutch. Carter’s work has appeared in SELF magazine, Reader’s Digest Canada, MSN.com and MORE.com. Abigail moved from New Jersey to Seattle in 2005, where she now lives with her two children.

Follow our daily updates for the Mind Body Spirit Marketplace on Facebook