9/11Ghosts
Edward Cone
News & Record
9-11-05
Doug Gardner and Calvin Gooding went to work four years ago today in the North Tower of the World Trade Center. Of course they did. If you had met them when I did, in college, if you had lived with them as young men, you would not have been surprised at the men they became. Calvin ran an international desk at Cantor Fitzgerald, trading bonds across time zones. He left home before it was light out, careful not to wake the baby and his pregnant wife. Doug was Mr. Responsible, even when we were young and irresponsible, and now as a top Cantor executive the long hours he put in were a given.
I want you to know this because I am not ready for my friends to turn into ghosts. Not yet. I don't want them to fade away or become symbols or saints or pawns in somebody's political game. I want to remember them as they were, as men in full. It is no more than they deserve, and everyone who died on 9/11 deserves as much.
We die twice, first when our bodies fail or are destroyed, and then again as the memory of who we really were dwindles and warps with time, and finally fades away completely when all who knew us also are gone. That's how we become ghosts. For the dead of 9/11 this second death threatens to come as prematurely as came the first. The individuals are lost in the great crowd that died with them, overshadowed by the images of the disaster, obscured by the rush of events that flowed from that day.
I get stuck sometimes on the indelible day of their death and the weeks that followed. I want to think about Cal and Doug, and what I come up with instead are burning buildings and funerals and strangely quiet blue skies without airplanes. More recently there is good news to focus on -- both Jennifer Gardner and LaChanze Sapp-Gooding remarried this year, and LaChanze is up for the lead role in a Broadway production of "The Color Purple" -- but it doesn't take me directly back to Doug and Calvin.
What can I tell you about them that will bring them to life? Doug was a big boy, 6-foot-3 or so, and solid. He was everyone's big brother, truly kind and generous. He returned from his junior year in London with appalling taste in music (think early MTV, circa 1983), and he waged a long and futile campaign to win the respect of our roommate's dog. I can see him now, playing basketball after work on West Fourth Street in Manhattan, or sitting across from me in a booth at the Cedar Bar for our weekly lunch after I moved off his couch and got a job, and I can hear him talking about becoming a father.
Cal was the son of Panamanian immigrants, but the first time I walked into his parents' house in Queens I felt like I had come home. He played point guard on the college basketball team and was a magnet for friends. Women loved him. He had an encyclopedic knowledge of sports and a low tolerance for alcohol. He could argue politics forever but was incapable of remaining awake for the duration of a televised football game. He wanted to work on Wall Street for just a few more years, then enjoy a quieter life with LaChanze and the children.
Doug was a year ahead of me in school, but now I'm older than he will ever be. I still have the invitation to his 40th birthday party that arrived the week he died. He and Calvin are 39 and 38 for good, although in memory they can be 19 just as easily. The rest of us remain for however long in the chronological plod that takes us a little farther each day from them, and from everyone killed on that clear September morning. That's the natural process. But with so much noise around the deaths of these people, so much conversation and action and emotion, their living memory needs special attention.
It's been three years since I wrote in this space that the experience of disaster and terrorism had not changed me much, just left me "older and sadder and with two fewer friends." All of that is still true. I'm just trying to keep those friends around a little longer. They are gone, but they are not ghosts. Not yet.
Edward Cone (www.edcone.com, efcone@mindspring.com) writes a column for the News & Record most Sundays.
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Last update: 9/16/2005; 9:22:54 AM .
