Jolted by Tragedy, Many See Life With New Eyes

Dennis Ryerson, 53, calls himself a “recovering Norwegian,” a nose-to-the-grindstone newspaper editor whose idea of a treat after a week’s hard work is to go back to the office.

Two weeks ago, he had toyed with the thought of leaving his home state of Iowa, where he was vice president and editor of the Des Moines Register, and joining the San Jose Mercury News to start a new life that might also include hiking, sailing, cycling and Bay Area cultural events. Then came the terrorist attacks and a grueling week of exposure to sudden and bewildering death on a massive scale. He made up his mind to move west.

“It struck me,” he said of those who perished, “these people were not going to take any risks anymore. They weren’t going to pursue the next adventure, next week or next month. That it could be me. It put me right over the edge.”

It’s like the star made visible only by the darkest night, the treasure discovered amid the ruins. It’s the paradoxical nature of almost any catastrophe, whether it involves the death of a single beloved or more than 6,000 strangers, to immediately reveal what really matters, to push people to reorder their priorities. Over the last five years, interest has grown in what behavioral scientists call post-traumatic growth, the way traumatic events can alter lives in personal and positive ways.

A significant number of victims of violence and natural disasters, for instance, have seen new possibilities for themselves, felt increased faith and trust in other people and felt stronger for having survived, said psychologist Grant Marshall, a Rand Corp. behavioral scientist. Others have found or rediscovered God.

Some evidence indicates that a person’s tendency to be optimistic determines whether he or she might experience growth from tragedy; it also may depend on the severity of the experience, he said. “It’s not how massive the hurricane was, but how much distress the event caused early on. Perhaps the people most distressed are most capable of deriving benefits,” he said. “Maybe the nagging nuisances and hassles of everyday life aren’t salient enough to make people pause and think, to shuffle people’s priorities around,” he said.

Scott McAuley, a Santa Monica software consultant, said he and his wife, Paddy, were in New York on a business trip when the tragedy hit. “It immediately became clear what mattered to us was whether the family was OK,” he said. They placed calls to their children and her mother to say, “Turn on the TV. We love you. We’re fine, we’re far away. We’ll call again later,” he said.

A self-described perfectionist, he said he suddenly realized “pressing business problems” were relatively unimportant, that a “good enough” job would suffice. More than simply appreciating life itself, he said his epiphany was about “making sure the things I truly care about get the attention they deserve.” Two days later, he sent an e-mail to friends and colleagues saying, “If this tragedy teaches us anything, I hope this is it: We are defined as humans by the love we show one another.”

Many who experienced the tragedy secondhand through the media also felt their own problems fade to insignificance. Even people in therapy who have been dealing with traumas and anxieties over the course of a lifetime say their issues now seem petty, said Santa Monica psychiatrist Loren Woodson. Some are shocked to realize that in or out of therapy sessions, “we actually are, every day, absorbed in ourselves and turn a blind eye and deaf ear to a massive amount of suffering that goes on in the world all the time,” he said. “It’s a startling awareness to people, how we live in our own bubbles. Something like this bursts it.” Some people have become ashamed of their consumerism, “buying that 11th pair of running shoes when you haven’t used more than the first two,” said Mark Goulston, psychiatrist and author. He said the tragedy has thawed some of his own cynicism.

Marshall said it is unclear how long such transforming insights can last. After the trauma is over, some people go back to the person they were before; but for some, the change is permanent.

Some, like Ryerson, say the events have galvanized a weak resolve within themselves to make changes. Some have told friends they’ve decided to get out of dead-end relationships. Others have rushed to get married.

A New York receptionist named Roxanne, born and raised in Brooklyn, said she had been thinking for a few months of moving to upstate New York. “I wanted to go up there where it’s more peaceful, for the mountains and the beauty. I used to joke the [World Trade Center] towers were my mountains. If you’re a city dweller, those are your Alps,” she said. Roxanne said she watched the towers collapse from her home. She’s determined now to follow her dream.

“That cemented it,” she said. “Nothing matters except life, really.”

To many people, including the scientists, the simultaneous mixture of joy and sorrow, gratitude and grief remains mysterious. Perhaps it is best expressed by poets. In the 1988 poem “Thanks,” W.S. Merwin wrote:

Listen,

with the night falling we are saying thank you

we are stopping on the bridge to bow from the railings

we are running out of the glass rooms ...

after news of the dead

whether or not we knew them we are saying thank you ... .

we are saying thank you and waving

dark though it is