Zibby's Essay, 10 LESSONS I LEARNED FROM MY FRIEND'S 9/11 DEATH
[0:00]Hi, today in honor of the 9-eleven anniversary, I'm going to read a few essays that I've written about the last I experienced that day.
[0:08]I lost my best friend and call a roommate Stacey Sanders on 9-eleven.
[0:12]She worked in the North Tower on the 93rd floor and we'll never really know what happened, but she vanished that morning.
[0:19]When we were both 25 and it has completely changed my life in so many ways, it wasn't just obviously my loss.
[0:27]It was the loss of, first of all, Stacey's entire world and then I'm at a larger scale, obviously, the entire nation and world.
[0:33]I'm not trying to take 9-eleven as my own personal, you know, Dave Grief, but I wanted to share my experience with my loss and my one little life.
[0:43]And hopefully people can relate and maybe if you've lost someone, not necessarily in a mass of terrorist attack.
[0:50]But, you know, just from all day, loss is loss and I hope my words help you.
[0:56]I thought it might be interesting for me to read three essays all short.
[1:00]The first one I wrote for my business school newspaper just two weeks after 9-eleven.
[1:05]The next I wrote 10 years later and one I've just published today on modernloss.com.
[1:11]So I hope that these essays, I don't know, I'm not going to say make you feel better, maybe you weren't feeling bad.
[1:18]But just resonate with you in some way and at least give Stacey some airspace on a day that I wish like anything that she could be with us instead of just in my words.
[1:30]So I'll try to get through these.
[1:32]The first essay I wrote is called Moving On.
[1:34]Again, this is written for the harvest.
[1:35]I was at Harvard Business School.
[1:36]I had just started school two weeks before.
[1:38]It's called Moving On.
[1:39]I lost my best friend last week in the World Trade Center incident.
[1:43]Although I'm trying very hard to make my life go back to normal, I'm slowly realizing that this may be one goal that's just unattainable even for a first year HBS student.
[1:52]Stacey and I met the first day of college and became best friends practically overnight.
[1:56]We lived across the hall from each other freshman year and then lived together for the following three years at Yale.
[2:01]I moved to LA after graduation, but when I moved back home to New York I lived with Stacey for another year until I left for school this summer.
[2:08]And I think she came on more family vacations with me than my brother did.
[2:11]The fact that Stacey was killed by terrorists while just sitting at her desk on the 96 floor of Tower One is still incomprehensible to me.
[2:18]How could this have happened?
[2:20]Why Stacey?
[2:21]Why my best friend?
[2:22]Why those 6400 people?
[2:24]If the plane had struck an hour before she'd be alive and well and we could be dealing with the terrifying world events together not a part.
[2:30]If she could be killed in such a random way, does that mean that my life is as much at risk as hers was?
[2:36]I could ask these questions all day and some days I do.
[2:39]But there aren't any answers.
[2:41]I can't crack this case.
[2:43]Instead I have to just move on, unsettled, incomplete, rattled.
[2:47]I went home for almost two weeks first to try to help find Stacey in the many New York hospitals post missing signs and search websites for news.
[2:54]Then I went home again to comfort her family, our friends, myself.
[2:59]While my peers were attending section parties and negotiating group deals for fleeces, I was taking samples of her DNA to the armory.
[3:06]While my classmates were learning about the operations of the donor company, I was speaking at her memorial service in front of a thousand people.
[3:13]But now I'm back.
[3:14]I'm sitting in my wretched front row center seat in section contributing to class.
[3:19]I'm going to shared reading my cases on the elliptical machine.
[3:22]I'm signing up for clubs to seven really too many, going to career services events, having dinner with new friends.
[3:27]I'm smiling at classmates. I pass on campus. I'm laughing at funny stories.
[3:31]I'm analyzing marketing decisions of random companies and I'm deleting the eight million emails I get a day from various on campus organizations.
[3:38]How is this possible? Just last week, I couldn't get out of bed.
[3:42]I couldn't see a movie with having a breakdown in the ladies' room. I couldn't talk or think about anything else.
[3:47]I couldn't go 10 minutes without consuming another thousand calories. Thank you, Entomence. What happened?
[3:53]Well, for one, I came back to school to an unbelievably supportive, amazing group of people.
[3:58]I came back to lengthy compassionate emails from classmates. I barely knew. I came back to new acquaintances hugging me in the hallways.
[4:04]I came back to professors who went out of their way to include me in class and encouraged me to speak.
[4:09]I came back to administrators who asked me how everything was going and offered help and guidance.
[4:13]I came back to an abs class at SHAD which I actually won the who can sustain the plank physician the longest contest.
[4:19]I came back to a community that listened, the cared, that knew just what I needed and how to make me feel better.
[4:24]And for that, I am beyond grateful. I know my sense of personal loss will never fade. I know that no one will ever be able to replace Stacy.
[4:31]And I know that few people actually know how I feel right now, but that's okay.
[4:35]The most important thing is that I know that people here care, and I know that HBS will serve as a refuge from the trauma in my hometown.
[4:42]As a place where I can be distracted enough to just keep going, a place where I can contribute, and a place where I know I can be happy again.
[4:49]And that has made all the difference.
[4:52]Wow, that feels like so long ago that I wrote that. That was two weeks after 9-11, and I definitely was not, you know, back to normal.
[4:59]At the time, after writing that essay, either it took a very long time to function normally, but at least I could go through the motions.
[5:06]Also, some of the facts and figures were not accurate because things were still so new. It was before we knew all the final information.
[5:14]Okay, 10 years later, on September 13th, 2011, I wrote another short article this time for Red Book.
[5:21]And this was called from her closet with love.
[5:23]I can't remember where or when Stacy got her red feather boa, but it was a permanent fixture in the many places we lived together.
[5:30]We met during our freshman year at college, and immediately spent all our time in each other's rooms.
[5:34]Me cross-legged on her rag rug or Stacy on my striped duvet, her strong leg stretched out over my desk chair.
[5:41]The next year we shared a room so small that I had to crawl onto my bunk if she needed to get to her desk.
[5:46]There were off-campus apartments junior and senior year, then an apartment in New York City decorated with posters tucked to the walls.
[5:52]Her feather boa was there, of course. She would grab it playfully on her weighted dinner, wrap it around her neck dramatically to watch the Oscars on her hand me down sofa, or dance provocatively with it during parties we hosted.
[6:03]Really, Stacy, I'd think, and occasionally say, a boa? She couldn't have cared less.
[6:08]We both planned to get our MBAs, but while I packed up for business school in the summer of 2001, she stayed on in New York, settling easily into her new job at Martian McClellan,
[6:17]a sky high in the north tower of the World Trade Center.
[6:19]When I left, it was harder to say goodbye to Stacy than anything else.
[6:22]I have a picture of the two of us hugging at our moving out party.
[6:25]She smashed together as close physically as we were emotionally.
[6:29]On the morning of September 11th, when she rushed to work as she always did, her boa must have swayed on the back of her bedroom door next to her blue fuzzy robe with the moon and stars on it.
[6:38]I found it there after I raced back to New York on the 12th to sit vigil in her apartment waiting for her to return.
[6:44]Then I helped pack it up, weeks later, once we realized that like thousands of others, she was never coming back.
[6:51]I've always felt like Stacy and I were more than just best friends.
[6:54]We both had serious boyfriends during the seven years we knew each other, but our relationship went deeper than those romances ever did.
[7:00]In some ways, we were as attached in our 20s as I feel to my husband now, tip towing toward 40.
[7:05]We seemed to fill in the pieces we were each missing, like spilled paint spreading slowly into the colorless bits of our personalities,
[7:12]until we were both fully shaded just the right amount.
[7:15]I was always a bit shy, a perfectionist, on time or early for everything, an avid rule follower and people pleaser.
[7:21]Stacy, hugely popular now going, pleased people in her own terms.
[7:25]It was Stacy who pulled me up on the restaurant stage at my 21st birthday dinner.
[7:29]Her arms waving overhead, woo-hooing, her index fingers pointing, and she made me dance the ripples under the night.
[7:35]Hold on, I'm sorry.
[7:37]She made me dance laughing.
[7:40]I like to think I helped Stacy also tethering her down when she drifted off too far, urging her to focus.
[7:46]She was probably annoyed when I made her change from a short skirt with a giant slit up the leg into a boring black dress for a job interview,
[7:52]but I know she appreciated it once she landed the job.
[7:55]Losing Stacy felt as if structure, I'd trusted to hold me up, had irreparably broken.
[8:00]The ground beneath me had shattered.
[8:02]When I returned to school, I got emails from classmates about drinks, a friend we confirmed her wedding that Saturday night.
[8:08]How could I possibly be a part of any of that again?
[8:10]I deleted all and spent weeks and tears.
[8:13]Stacy's mother was kind enough to send me some of her clothes, including a few things of my own that had mixed in with hers over the years.
[8:20]I remember taking them all to the dry cleaner and trying to explain to the man behind the desk how precious they were.
[8:25]A leopard print skirt, a brightly floured one, her beaded belt.
[8:28]I hung them in my closet and I'd touch them just to say hello as I put on my own more conservative clothes.
[8:34]Occasionally I'd rip off the dry cleaners plastic bag and slip a piece on.
[8:38]When I left the house dressed in something of stasis, I felt a thrilling boost of energy, a sweet secret I was carrying around.
[8:44]In fact, I was wearing one of her favorite tops on the night I decided to get together with a man who became my husband.
[8:49]Over time, I no longer needed Stacy to wrap that bow around me and yell zibs to get up and have fun.
[8:55]I did it on my own.
[8:57]Twelve years after her death, I still think of her as I say, why not to all sorts of new situations as I dance enthusiastically with friends.
[9:05]If I scratch down to the root of some of my best qualities, my most fun adventures, I find Stacy there.
[9:11]A few months ago, I met Stacy's mother for lunch near my home in New York.
[9:15]It was, as my six-year-old daughter would say, happy, sad, happy, sad to sit with her again.
[9:20]Stacy had so many friends, her mom said as we finished our salads, but you two were soulmates.
[9:25]Stacy always told me that.
[9:26]Then she reached into a bag beside her and pulled out Stacy's red boa.
[9:30]My fork froze in mid-air, sound stopped.
[9:33]All I could hear was my heart pounding, and I felt tears coming to my eyes.
[9:37]I hadn't seen her boa since the day that October when I helped box up her belongings.
[9:42]I might have glimpsed it as I worked with her mom when quiet afternoon in Connecticut, sitting back on my heels, holding her hair to the light streaming in from the window, wondering how this could be all that was left on Earth of my best friend.
[9:54]Here, her mother said it lent as she handed the boa across the table.
[9:57]Stacy would have wanted Phoebe to have it.
[9:59]My daughter.
[10:00]The bow was worn, some feathers gone, but it still radiated the vibrant energy that was
[10:04]stacy.
[10:05]I brought it home that afternoon and walked it down to the playroom where my kids were
[10:08]skittering around happily.
[10:10]When I told Phoebe that the bow used to be stasis, she said, your friend, who died in
[10:14]that building, then she reached for it.
[10:16]I was tempted to say no to clutch it to my chest, but I knew that no matter how protective
[10:20]I was, nothing would bring stacy back, so I sat on the stairs and watched my daughter
[10:25]dance around the room, draped in the bow up blissful.
[10:29]I tried unsuccessfully to hide my crying.
[10:31]It's okay, they're happy tears, I said, as my son came over to see what was wrong,
[10:36]and they were.
[10:37]I tried to explain that when someone dies, their possessions or precious things to remember
[10:41]them by, but that stacy would have wanted us to enjoy her boa if it becomes threadbare
[10:46]after a million dress-up sessions.
[10:47]That's okay.
[10:48]Oh, that was tough to read.
[10:51]Oh my god.
[10:52]Okay, I have one more essay to read, and that is from modern loss it was published today,
[10:58]and I guess I was wrong.
[10:59]I guess it was 13 years after, not 10 years after 9-11, that the red book article
[11:04]came out, but anyway, bear with me, this is my last one.
[11:07]Right now it's called my 11 life rules post 9-11, what losing my best friend taught me,
[11:12]but I don't think that's going to be the final title.
[11:14]First of all, they're only 10 rules, so anyway, I'm sure modern loss will give it a new
[11:19]title today, but anyway, here's the essay.
[11:23]I'd like to think stacy was sitting in her desk when it happened.
[11:25]My best friend in college roommate, Stacey Sanders, died without a trace on 9-11.
[11:29]I don't know any details, and I never will.
[11:32]I know she worked on the 93rd floor of the North Tower of the World Trade Center at
[11:35]Martian McLellan, a job she just started several months before.
[11:39]I know she smiled and waved goodbye to our close friend in roommate on 6th Avenue, that
[11:43]sunny morning, and descended into the subway to head to work.
[11:47]I know she usually called her mother at home in Connecticut when she got to her desk.
[11:50]Her mother's phone rang just once that morning, no one was on the line.
[11:54]I know the first plane struck the building she worked in right at her floor at 846 AM.
[11:59]I know that no one ever saw her heard from her again.
[12:02]I know that that morning changed everything 18 years ago, clearly for the city and country,
[12:07]but also very deeply for me.
[12:09]All for ever more in Stacey's absence, her radiant energy, the way she danced whenever
[12:14]she heard music pointing two fingers up to the sky, her impulsive flare that made her
[12:18]tire red boa around her neck on her way out the door, her ability to connect with everyone,
[12:22]the mist of his wink in her eye, her love of adventure and skinny dipping.
[12:26]Her death at our shared age 25 taught me a few things that have certainly changed the trajectory
[12:30]of my life, and her memory continues to do so nearly two decades on.
[12:34]Number one, never turned down champagne.
[12:37]Stacey would celebrate anything from successfully roasting a chicken to the first snowfall.
[12:41]Everything was exciting and worth commemorating.
[12:44]So now for me, anything can be caused for celebration.
[12:46]I don't care how small or seemingly insignificant the occasion bring out the bubbly, buy some
[12:51]balloons.
[12:53]Mark the victories.
[12:55]Number two, express yourself.
[12:57]Stacey chose her job as a means to an end, a way to ensure her admission to business school,
[13:01]but she still tried to incorporate things she loved after work, such as running, fashion design
[13:05]or learning Italian.
[13:06]Now my philosophy is that if you could get killed sitting at your desk, make sure that
[13:10]you do as much as possible to make what you're doing at that desk.
[13:13]Feel important.
[13:14]Bring your unique set of skills, your uneness to a project.
[13:17]Write that children's book.
[13:18]Learn to knit.
[13:19]Start a blog.
[13:20]Three, don't settle in your life, partner.
[13:23]Stacey died years before I got divorced.
[13:25]She always made sure that her partner treated her exactly how she would want to be treated.
[13:29]If things aren't good with someone at the beginning, she taught me that chances are they
[13:32]won't get better over time.
[13:34]Find someone who you enjoy being with, someone who appreciates the things about you that
[13:37]you think are pretty neat and is happy to live with the aspects that aren't shares in
[13:41]basic interests.
[13:43]And philosophy is on life.
[13:45]If there's something toxic in your relationship and it doesn't get better with effort, run,
[13:48]don't walk.
[13:49]Number four, life's too short to be miserable.
[13:51]The realization that you can banish without a trace except for an errand strand of hair
[13:55]on a discarded sweater reminds me to live in the moment.
[13:58]I've learned that you better figure out the root of what's making you upset.
[14:01]Brainstorm, get help, try medication, learn some coping mechanisms.
[14:05]Life is not always fun, but if something is routinely getting you down, that unfinished
[14:09]manuscript, the friend you didn't invite to your birthday party or relationship with
[14:13]your mom, tackle it as best you can, make amends.
[14:16]We only get to do this once.
[14:18]All I have to choose friends wisely, Stacey didn't suffer fools.
[14:21]She knew she was too valuable for that.
[14:23]Jettison the ones who make you feel small.
[14:26]This year old college friend routinely puts you down, does that X demand more of you than
[14:29]you can give?
[14:30]Does the new mom friend make you feel terrible about how long it took to party trainers
[14:33]then?
[14:34]Buh-bye.
[14:35]Six, say yes, Stacey always did, a trip to Italy, New Year's Eve in London, studying architecture
[14:41]just for fun, experimenting with peaches in the bedroom.
[14:43]She was always up for anything, a glint of excitement in her eye.
[14:47]A friend invites you to game night, go.
[14:49]A new play sounds interesting, go.
[14:51]Girls, yoga trip to Costa Rica, if you can afford it, book a ticket.
[14:54]You might not have the exact experience you wanted, but saying yes, we'll lead to moments
[14:57]that can't be replicated, and sometimes it's a lot nicer to know you tried something than
[15:01]which you had.
[15:03]Number seven, it will get easier.
[15:05]Some things that happen in life are terrible and inexplicable, but you will survive them.
[15:09]Trust yourself to get through them, the grief, the pain, one step, then another, and another.
[15:14]I didn't think I'd ever be able to function again when I lost Stacey.
[15:17]I tried to drop out of school.
[15:18]I cried constantly.
[15:20]My family decided it had gone on for way too long and begged me to snap out of it, but
[15:24]I couldn't.
[15:25]Now, I keep Stacey in my heart, but I don't let her loss floor me anymore.
[15:29]Back then, I don't think I could have imagined a functional version of myself again.
[15:32]Eight, join a community.
[15:34]I don't care if it's your religion, your school, or even a Facebook group.
[15:38]Connect with others by letting their stories and experiences help you get through every stage
[15:41]of life.
[15:42]Business school community helped me through 9-11 by reaching out, listening, being there.
[15:46]I'm still grateful all these years later.
[15:48]9.
[15:49]Let go of stuff.
[15:50]When papers and files in possession start building up, trash them.
[15:54]I flashed back to the day I had to sift through all of Stacey's belongings, figuring out
[15:58]what to keep and what to toss.
[15:59]I don't want to put my loved ones in that position.
[16:01]If you don't really need it, toss it.
[16:04]Number 10, laugh.
[16:06]I can still hear Stacey's laugh.
[16:07]I can still see her throwing her head back, joyous, eyes twinkling.
[16:11]I try to channel a little bit of the joy she can no longer experience whenever I can.
[16:15]I can't give her anything back, but I can use her life as a role model, just like I did
[16:19]when she was alive.
[16:20]At dinner every night, my family shares what made us laugh the hardest that day.
[16:24]Find the humor in the everyday, even if you have to find it online with some stupid
[16:27]meme.
[16:28]Throw your head back, giggle, gackle, smile, uncover the joy.
[16:33]Do it for those who can't.
[16:35]So those are my essays.
[16:37]Let me know what you think.
[16:38]Send me a direct message on Instagram at ZB Owens or email me zippy at ZB Owens.com and
[16:45]reach out to the people who you love and the friends that are important in your life
[16:48]because they might not always be there to let them know how much they mean to you while
[16:52]you still can.