Quote:
Originally Posted by MuseumGhost
Have Hope, your husband's response to the 9/11 anniversary is very much like mine. I did not lose anyone I knew, but it still felt like a horrendous and overwhelmingly horrible attack...and it DID feel very personal (I grew up in NYS, and had many college friends who lived in or near NYC.).
It was a hellishly long day, too. The days that followed were agonizing, and I didn't know anybody who was there (at least, I don't think so)...but I have friends of friends who lost someone.
I personally felt like every neuron in my body had been pulled through a knothole. And I know that the onset of my major depression is largely down to the attacks on that fateful day, because I cannot really get over it.
Your husband's grief is perfectly understandable to me. I have a very hard time watching documentaries about it, but I do it as a kind of exposure therapy. Every fiber of my being reaches out to the souls who were lost, and the families of those people. It must be unimaginable pain.
I think it collectively changed all our neural pathways, I really do.
To me, 21 years has zoomed by, in comparison with the way grief can linger and revisit us.
You have both been through so much. Sending love...  |
Thank you so much.
I can understand how deeply 9/11 impacted you, especially having grown up in NYS.
Every year 9/11 is agonizing to get through - I experience my husband's deepest grief and I cry & mourn too. I also had an acquaintance I Knew in college
who died in one of the planes - he is one of the heros who rushed the cockpit. I am proud of him for that. Every year my classmates put up photos of him all over Facebook to commemorate him.
You mentioned exposure therapy - sometimes, on 9/11, I have thought that it's not the best idea for my husband to watch the incident over and over again, because it just traumatizes him every year. So he re-experiences the trauma every time. I didn't think this was the best way to heal... in fact, I think there are better ways to heal like visiting his memorial, which we also do, and going to services, which we've done. But to continue watching the event and reliving it every year? I don't know - for me it only is just deeply upsetting. But I cannot tell my husband what to do, how to handle it or how to heal himself. That's all his own process.
That being said, 9/11 most certainly will never be forgotten - nor all those who tragically died and their families.