Out of the Rubble Comes a Need to Connect

A young man learns he has an incurable illness and will soon die. How will he spend the time he has left? More than one television series has milked such a premise, featuring a hero who gorges on experience while the Grim Reaper pursues him as relentlessly as Lt. Gerard dogged the Fugitive.

Since Sept. 11, millions of ordinary people have become stars of their own dramas. Everybody knows that no one here gets out alive, but until recently, many people ignored that truism. Life was a less suspenseful show, one that offered immeasurable promise.

“Until two months ago, I always felt I’d have time to fix it--time to invest, time to create, time to save, time to get in shape, time to fall in love. I thought I’d be around forever, so I took the ability to have and to do for granted,” says Ken Kaufman, a 35-year-old New York fashion designer who’s between jobs and relationships. “Now I’m respecting every day, because you never know when you’ll be running to a business meeting at 9:50 on a Tuesday morning and everything will be taken away from you.”

In the immediate aftermath of the attacks, “It was like a movie,” was repeated so often that the simile soon became trite. The familiar imagery of disaster films provided the easiest way to describe real horrors. And then, echoes of another Hollywood genre emerged from the rubble--the love story.

The most poignant cinematic romances have always been tales of love lost. Yet many people who didn’t know anyone killed in the attacks were touched. They have absorbed tragedy’s residue like a nonsmoker taking in secondary smoke. They weren’t close enough to inhale the most pungent fumes, but they’ve still been transformed. For them, Sept. 11 and its aftershocks prompted soul-searching and reordering of priorities. It’s as if New Year’s Eve, the senior prom and a milestone birthday had all been rolled into one mega-event fraught with self-examination.

Personal reassessment could be a temporary response, this cloudy autumn’s behavioral fad. Nevertheless, with visions of violence still fresh, men and women of diverse ages throughout the country are talking candidly about making major life decisions within earshot of a cosmic clock that’s ticking louder. “If this wasn’t a wake-up call to tell us we have one shot at life, so we’d better make it a good one, I don’t know what could be,” Kaufman says. “I’m not going to make a lifetime commitment to the first man I meet, but I don’t want my dog to be the one who’d miss me most if I died.”

Have cinematic lovers ever been as eloquent as the doomed World Trade Center occupants and airline passengers who used answering machines and cell phones to bid goodbye? When Lisa Beamer, whose husband was one of the heroes of United Flight 93, appeared on NBC’s “Dateline,” she spoke more of gratitude than sorrow. Calm and radiant, the pregnant widow described her 32-year-old husband as the great love of her life, and said memories of him will sustain her as she raises their three children. Tom Hanks, waxing poetic about his dead wife in “Sleepless in Seattle,” didn’t convey the magnitude of his devotion more movingly.

Paul Wagman, the father of two teenagers and a 53-year-old advertising executive in St. Louis, was divorced four years ago from his wife of 11 years. “St. Louis is far enough removed from the locus of the catastrophe that the impact here has been muted,” he says. No one he knows has been taking Cipro or buying gas masks. Yet those emotional cell-phone oaths haunt him.

“I thought about what would have happened if I’d been on one of the planes that went down. Who would I have called? I guess I’d have left a voicemail for my kids. That thought upsets me and makes me feel sad about my present situation. It reinforced my sense of loneliness.”

“Who you gonna call?” used to mean something else. Two months into the scary world that terrorism has wrought, the question isn’t just the goofy refrain of the “Ghostbusters” anthem. It’s the measure of isolation. Who would care if your plane crashed? Who would tell Katie Couric, with conviction, that you’d enriched their lives?

In a crisis, Anastasia Soare, who owns a Beverly Hills eyebrow grooming salon and cosmetics business, would call Ron Cobert, whom she began dating a year and a half ago. Despite the fact that they were instantly and mutually smitten, her first marriage ended after 15 years, and she firmly believed she’d never want to marry again. So she told him her relationship rules: Don’t call her at work, because she’s too busy shaping the eyebrows of her celebrity clientele to chat. Don’t talk about marriage. Don’t even think about more children.

Cobert, a 40-year-old photographer and commercial director who had never been married, obeyed. Then the world changed, and, independently, both changed their minds too. One night at dinner, he slyly dropped a diamond ring into Soare’s glass of champagne and proposed. She accepted, and the two will marry next summer.

“We always had a great time, but we didn’t talk about the future,” she says. “I came to Los Angeles 12 years ago from Romania, and for so long all I did was work, nonstop. After Sept. 11, I felt I had to take a look at my life. I realized being close to Ron and my family is what I want. I’ll still travel to promote my makeup line, and I still want my business to do well, but it’s different than before.”

The way 33-year-old Desiree Gruber sees it, her generation learned arrogance from the baby boomers. “We thought we could control our environment. With enough exercise, vitamins and plastic surgery, we’d never have to age. We had this delusional vanity about being able to put our emotions on hold and make our lives work the way we wanted them to,” she says.

So she and fiance Kyle Mac-Lachlan planned a commuter marriage. He’d be based in L.A., she in New York, where she’s president of Full Picture, a public relations firm. MacLachlan’s acting career requires him to travel frequently, and they were resigned to being together when possible. Terrorism changed all that.

“Now I realize it’s hard enough to find someone who you love and want to spend the rest of your life with, so when you finally do, why wouldn’t you really want to be together? We’d let romance become eclipsed by our careers,” she says. “We’ve made a new commitment to building our lives around our relationship. I want to experience life together, not to debrief each other on the phone at the end of the day.”

Gruber plans to work out of her company’s L.A. office when Mac-Lachlan needs to be in California. He’ll come to New York between jobs. They have reorganized her West Village apartment and his Hollywood Hills house so neither home feels incomplete. Gruber vows to no longer be seduced by the demands of work in New York. “I look out my window every day and see the World Trade Center isn’t there anymore,” she says. “The view shocks me into remembering what I really want.”

“We often have our long-term interests in mind, and try to delay gratification,” says Nancy Etcoff, a psychologist at Harvard Medical School. “When we experience a big trauma like this, the first impulse is to seek comfort. For human beings, the greatest source of well being is love--between men and women or mother and child. We are social creatures and, right from birth, we get the most pleasure from each other. In the face of tragedy, we want to return to powerful feelings of connection with other people.”

First Lady Laura Bush supports that notion so enthusiastically that, in a speech at a Woman’s Day magazine awards luncheon in Manhattan on Oct. 30, she said, “Couples are coming together and staying together. Since Sept. 11, divorce cases have been withdrawn at higher rates, and more people are buying engagement rings and planning weddings.” The only national statistics on marriage and divorce are kept by the Census Bureau, and they aren’t yet available for this year. Los Angeles County records showed no significant increase in marriages during September or October, and divorce rates are not recorded. In other words, Bush’s claims can’t be substantiated; anecdotal evidence, however, suggests America’s new war has motivated as much uncoupling as bonding.

Etcoff treats a 46-year-old Boston man who has spent the past year trying to save his troubled 15-year marriage. “After Sept. 11,” she says, “he came in and said, ‘I’ve decided to give up. As difficult as it is for me, if what I have isn’t working, I want to go out and find something better.’ The events definitely pushed him over.”

Century City divorce attorney Ron Litz has observed a pattern among the 20 men and women contemplating divorce he’s met with since Sept. 11. “Women are more decisive,” he says. “They want to get it over with and go on with their lives. Men are asking for another chance to make their marriages work. The funny thing is, before the attacks, the gender reactions were reversed.”

An urge to keep even flawed families together is only one possible explanation for husbands’ reluctance to split. A cynic could argue that men suddenly willing to try counseling might be nervous about the economy and recognize this isn’t a propitious time to lose half their net worth.

In mid-September, when addiction to television coverage of the disaster was epidemic, a 36-year-old artist huddled at home in Simi Valley with her three children, watching distraught survivors search lower Manhattan for loved ones they would only refer to as “missing.” She and her husband had been having problems for a while. After the attacks, he retreated into silence.

She says, “I saw how devastated those poor people in New York were and I thought, I want that. I want to be able to feel that strongly about my husband and be loved by someone that much. I don’t have that in my life now.”

On Nov. 1, she filed for divorce. “My defining moment was when someone I’d been married to for 10 years shut down, then left when I felt so vulnerable. I cried and mourned with my children, but I couldn’t turn to him. I didn’t initiate the separation or want it, but now I don’t want to waste any time. Life is too short. There’s anthrax out there. I’m going to go on and live my life.”

Life is short. Every day is precious. If not now, when? Reformed procrastinators can pick from a list of post-Sept. 11 mantras.

At the Connecticut trauma center where 24-year-old Christine Hanna works as a nurse, she’s seen how, in a heartbeat, a person’s life can drastically change. “One day, someone can be paralyzed in a car accident and nothing’s ever the same,” she says. Before Sept. 11, she’d thought about moving to California and was scheduled to come here for a vacation Sept. 12. Now, she says, she’s finally internalized the lessons every day at work should have taught her.

“I used to think about doing things and say, ‘Maybe tomorrow.’ I don’t anymore. I don’t know if I’ll be here tomorrow. I’m more eager to say things that I wouldn’t have in the past. I’m more outgoing, more likely to go up to a guy and talk to him. I don’t want to have regrets about not taking a chance.” Three weeks ago, Hanna flew to Los Angeles. By the end of a week here, she’d decided to relocate.

Start a conversation with the person next in line at Starbucks, and before long you’re likely to hear a confession. Gina Lombardi, a divorced 39-year-old personal trainer who lives in Sherman Oaks, has resolved not to date men who don’t share her goals. “Something’s permanently shifted for me. All I’ve been thinking about lately is finding the right person, who wants the same things I do--to have a home and a family. Even with friends, I’m much pickier about who I spend time with now. Everything seems more urgent.”

In scientific studies, controls are enlisted to help pinpoint which variable is responsible for a result. Would couples who’ve recently changed their status have married or divorced if the hijackers had been foiled? Would formerly content single people have vowed to seek a soul mate if the anguish of lovers separated by death hadn’t inspired them? There’s no telling how the psychically wounded might have acted if this country hadn’t gone through a cataclysm.

John Hersey wrote about the lives of Japanese civilians who survived the atomic bombings in his 1946 classic, “Hiroshima.” They called themselves hibakusha , explosion-affected persons. In its own way, Sept. 11 has made a difference to more people than we can count.

And for this century’s hibakusha , there is something life-affirming about discovering love, or the longing for it, among the ruins.