FACING DEMONS / MARY JUMBELIC
I shuddered. The FEMA markings still stained the house fronts in New Orleans. It had been a decade since Katrina slammed into this Cajun town and I had first seen them. During the searches, rescue workers spray painted an X on buildings after they completed their tasks indicating the date, team number, hazards and people found. The lowest digits sitting in the legs of the X were most familiar to me in my work. They represented the dead, my patients. I am a forensic pathologist.
Marc, my husband, and I sat side by side in the backseat of a taxi. We spent the morning traveling from New York to Louisiana. I had been looking forward to this trip, a conference for Marc and relaxation for me. I didn’t expect to confront my memories before I’d even stepped into the city.
“What’s wrong?” Marc said as he saw me crying.
He had asked this question often enough in our 30 years of marriage. Not only was I a Chief Medical Examiner but a specialist in mass disaster incidents. He knew the demons that haunted me especially after 9-11. He had helped to exorcise them.
After working for three weeks at Ground Zero––examining body parts, calming firefighters, breathing in the smoke––I didn’t return to New York City for four years. The thousands who had died were like an army holding the city in siege. Marc, hailing from Brooklyn, had been back. I couldn’t cross the barricade.
Then a cousin was getting married. It was to be a grand Russian affair in the Jewish tradition. We were very close. I did not want to miss the wedding.
When we arrived in Manhattan, I felt edgy and fragile, the city, unfamiliar and uncomfortable.
“Come take a walk with me,” Marc said.
Blue sky peeked between skyscrapers, visible through the hotel’s window sheers. We headed to the street.
“I’ve got an idea,” Marc said. “I’ll interview you.”
I hadn’t anticipated this. I shook my head and turned around to go back.
“No, don’t,” he said. “I think this will be great for you to talk about your time here.”
He knew better than anyone the toll that working at Ground Zero had exacted on me––sleepless nights, abandonment of the city, the tears. It had taken two years to rid myself of the desire to cry every time I heard the national anthem, which was often since we had season tickets to Syracuse University basketball games. Bagpipes still brought profound melancholy.
Marc began to question me like a journalist interested in the details. He had brought a video recorder. I haltingly talked about the rubble, the smoke, the bodies. He asked me about a story he remembered.
One day examining a severed arm, I saw that the watch on the deceased was identical to that on the wrist of the forensic anthropologist working with me. My colleague held the severed arm in such a way that the two watch faces were side by side: the crystals almost touching, one working, one not, like the arms to which they were attached. I stared at the moving hand ticking the seconds as if the timepiece itself had a heartbeat.
We passed the gaping hole, awaiting construction of the World Trade Center memorial. Chain link fence surrounded the chasm. This space had been a mountain of debris when I last saw it. We stood at the side, transfixed by the enormity of the destruction.
Heading down Vesey Street, I saw a crack in the sidewalk and halted. I remembered this fissure. It had been steps away from my post at the temporary morgue and I passed it multiple times a day.
I wept. The camcorder whirred on. I have never watched this video.
In the months and years that followed, Marc and I resumed our trips to the Big Apple. Our oldest son had lived in New York for five years. Yet I have never toured the National September 11 Memorial and Museum.
My reaction in New Orleans surprised me. Perhaps because I had gotten past my feelings in NYC enough to visit and have fun or because I had spent most of my time during Katrina 65 miles away at the morgue in St. Gabriel or because so much time had passed. My grief startled me.
As we rode in the taxi past the houses marked by FEMA, I envisioned the wet and mud and smelled the muck and decay. The devastated Ninth Ward shimmered through the passenger window. Hundreds of dead recovered from this city held power over me. Many were elderly and poor. Some wore hospital bands, others janitorial uniforms. They drowned or suffered blunt trauma. They died of heat exposure or lack of water. They had heart attacks or succumbed to diabetes or emphysema. Some had wounds that festered into sepsis. A few were murdered or took their own lives.
Finally arriving at the quaint bed and breakfast, I relaxed into the soft mattress only to be reminded of the military cot beneath me where I had slept for two weeks as I worked for the federal government identifying the dead.
I closed my eyes and conjured remembrances of happier times in this city. As a young couple, Marc and I had strolled through the French Quarter marveling at the elaborate architecture, heard trombones, fiddles, and the percussion of 5-gallon buckets.
For this trip, I hoped to see the decorations and floats at Mardi Gras World. I wanted to taste jambalaya, gumbo, crawfish etouffee, and oysters and see the beauty of St. Louis Cathedral. I drifted off to sleep.
When I awoke it was late afternoon.
“You must have needed that nap,” Marc said. He was sitting in an overstuffed chair reading the daily Times-Picayune. “Want to go for a beignet and a cup of Cafe du Monde?”
“Think we can get one at this time of day?” I said.
“Sure,” he said and reached out his hand to pull me up.
MARY JUMBELIC / FAYETTEVILLE, NY
Mary Jumbelic has been haunted since she lost her father at the age of 13. His ghost was joined by thousands of others keeping her up at night, reliving their last moments, from the streets of Chicago, Peoria, and Syracuse, singly, or in devastatingly large numbers in places like Ground Zero or the shores of the Andaman Sea. Death remained an intimate companion throughout her 20-year career as a forensic pathologist, a confidant but not a friend. When they meet for the last time, she wishes to be at home, with family surrounding her emulating her mother’s rendezvous, and not in a hospital, like her father, with only the monitors making conversation.
maryjumbelic.com