A smaller circle of friends
September 8, 2002 Sunday ALL EDITIONS
by EDWARD CONE
As soon as I got to a television on the morning of Sept. 11, I was sure that Doug and Calvin were dead or about to die. I knew they had gone to work that morning at Cantor Fitzgerald, the bond-trading firm with offices at the top of the World Trade Center's north tower. Doug had reached his wife and his dad by cell phone to say he was looking for a way out, but nobody was coming off those floors.
Doug Gardner and Calvin Gooding were close friends of mine, guys I lived with in college and remained tight with in later years. Doug was a big brother figure to me and many others. Calvin and I made each other laugh to the point of tears. If they had died together in a car wreck on the way home from a Knicks game, leaving behind their wives and young children, it would have been overwhelming. Instead they died in a national tragedy, and it was surreal.
At first I didn't think I should write about my personal thoughts and feelings. Thousands of people were dead, including Greensboro's own Sandy Bradshaw, who died on the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania. This was their story, not mine, and I didn't want to make it about me. But over time I realized that this was something that had happened to all Americans, and I was a witness to some small part of it.
Doug's funeral was held in New York just five days after the attack. My wife, Lisa, asked an airline clerk on the phone about a bereavement fare. He said he needed the name of the funeral home. Lisa paused. There is no body, she said. The clerk understood instantly and asked for the name of the deceased. Doug Gardner, she said, and started to cry. Doug Gardner, repeated the clerk, and he started to cry, too.
We could see smoke in the sky as we drove into the city. Doug's wife, Jennifer, spoke to the standing-room only crowd in a big synagogue on the Upper West Side. She read the Valentine cards he had sent her, pausing to breathe deeply and push downward with her hand, as if to physically control her emotions. On the way out of the building, we passed mourners entering for the next funeral.
In early October, I went back to New York for Calvin's funeral. Cal's wife, LaChanze, spoke to an enormous crowd at the Christian Cultural Center in Brooklyn. She was days away from having their second child. Looking out from the lectern as I delivered my eulogy, I focused on two housemates of Calvin's and mine in our senior year. They looked old and tired. Howard Lutnick, the chief executive of Cantor who was manhandled by the press but made good on his commitment to the long-term financial support of the affected families, spoke as well. "I feel so much love in this room," he said. "Can I take just a little of it with me?"
I traded e-mail with Jennifer and phone calls with LaChanze throughout the fall, and I was absorbed by the details of their personal drama. These strong and accomplished women - LaChanze is a Broadway actress, Jennifer a Harvard-trained lawyer - gave me more comfort and inspiration than I could ever give them. But when the shock wore off and the frenzy of activity diminished, I began to dwell on Cal and Doug themselves, how they had died, all that they would miss as their kids grew up. It was like the swelling around a wound going down, and the wound itself coming into view.
At Christmas, we visited LaChanze and her daughters in New York. Celia, a happy toddler with her dad's outgoing personality, met us at the door, while her baby sister slept quietly. Through my friendship with LaChanze and Jennifer, my mental image of widows went from old and sad to young and strong. Meanwhile, the love and support I shared with my own wife and children were critical elements to my own equilibrium.
And all the time I was following closely the news from Afghanistan and Washington, but the personal and the geopolitical always unfolded on parallel tracks. I have not heard anyone close to my friends, even those who favor robust military action, speak in terms of revenge. The other day I heard Rush Limbaugh invoke the friends and family of the dead to blast a political target, and I just smiled and changed the station.
As for the religious revival that was supposed to sweep the nation, it missed at least some of the people I know. Two people close to the event, each from a different religious background, have told me that Sept. 11 convinced them there was no God who intervenes in human affairs, and another said it confirmed his lifelong disbelief. Some have found comfort in the structure and ritual of religion, but nobody I've spoken with has had a religious awakening.
In August, a large group of friends including Doug's sister, Danielle, gathered on the banks of the Fryingpan River in Colorado. We talked about Calvin and Doug, even joked a little at their expense as we always have, but mostly we were just happy to be together with people who knew without words what we all felt. The passing of a year is symbolic and meaningful, but remembrance is more than an annual event.
Did the experience and the aftermath change me, the way we were all supposed to be changed? It was a reason I resumed writing this column after putting it down for a year. But in fundamental ways it left me much as I have been, just sadder and older and with two fewer friends.
Edward Cone (efcone@mindspring.com, www.edcone.com), a magazine journalist and Greensboro native, contributes a column to the News & Record each Sunday.
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