A trailer door swings open and an architect walks out, rolled-up plans in one hand, iPhone in the other. He looks on as a group of workers weld giant metal skeletons together, sparks flying past ladders and giant spools of cable and tarps covering slats of wood. This is what it looks like to physically rebuild after devastation. But what does it look like to emotionally and spiritually rebuild? This was the question that preoccupied us—a journalist and a psychoanalyst—as we mined the lives of those who had been directly affected by the tragic events of September 11, 2001. We wanted to understand how ordinary people recover from grief, dust off the ashes of devastation, make sense of injustice and just plain bad luck, and emerge new, different, maybe even more whole. We were not aiming for pat lessons. Too much has already been written that tries to reduce what happened on that fateful day into feel-good sound bites, political propaganda, or ratings-hyping melodrama. September 11th, like every historic moment, has been shaped and shifted, prodded and poked, adopted and adapted for various purposes over the past ten years.
