Imagining A Life in Danger: Empathy for the People of Japan

As I watched the horrific events in Japan unfold during this past week, a few thoughts kept surfacing: 1) that we humans are not in control, no matter how much we like (or need) to believe we are; 2) that disasters don’t discriminate or privilege anyone, and 3) that safety is a relative and temporary illusion. Watching the faces of the survivors and hearing their translated tales, I tried to recall if I ever felt my life to be in danger.

There was the time when I was 9 and in the 4^th grade. It was October 1962 and all the grownups in my world were worried. I heard whispers about Cuba and bombs and Russians (who I’d decided were very dangerous). I was mostly mad because the Russians were responsible for the forbidding of costume-enhanced Halloween celebrations in school for fear costumes might interfere with our ability to respond to a crisis. And then there was the rehearsal for that portended emergency when we were all herded into the gym and directed to board school buses, though confusingly different ones from normal. My worries were the whereabouts and safety of my little sister who was somewhere in the crowd with her second grade class, and whether I would remember the right bus number to look for in a real crisis.  But not death…. I was not afraid I was going to die.

There was the sunny morning in September 2001 when I emerged from my morning subway commute just before 9 a.m. and overheard snippets of a conversation between a food cart worker and a customer as I headed for a meeting at another university. Airplane…. World Trade Center….Crash. Instinctively, I looked south though I was heading north and saw clouds of smoke. I kept going, looking back again and again in disbelief as the beautiful morning turned grim and dark. I listened to the swelling street buzz that hadn’t yet solidified the reality of intent to kill. The next two hours were a blur as confirmation came from different sources that we were under attack. Pentagon bombed…. Another plane headed possibly for the White House….. Air traffic grounded all over the country…. Terrorists… A tower collapsed. Frantic I-love-you’s whispered through increasingly impossible to establish land and cell phone connections. The not-quite-believing eyes of fellow New Yorkers en route to nowhere fast as public transportation ground to a halt. Screaming, screeching sirens raced south. People of every kind clustered around cabs against curbs with open doors, their radios blasting the news as it evolved. I was scared, of course, but my worries were about maintaining contact with my daughter, being able to reach my mom, who would be frantic, to let her know we were ok, and finding a source of accurate information. But not death….. I was not afraid I was going to die.

 There was the snowy night in mid-January 2004 close to midnight when my daughter and I were on the road, less than twenty miles from our destination after having driven over three hundred. My father had been given a few weeks to live and we were driving “home” to see him. We were chatting, the roads were snow-covered, the painted lines and the edge almost impossible to discern. But with over 30 years of experience driving in wintry conditions, I was not afraid. Mom was expecting us and there were sure to be cookies frosted and ready to eat. We had climbed a small incline and coasted down to almost the bottom when my wheels hit the edge of the road. I overcorrected and suddenly we were spinning once, twice in slow motion, spinning off the road. I knew not even which side of it, I was so disoriented. It was pitch black; a two-lane rural road without overhead lighting, and thankfully, little traffic at that hour.  I knew when we left the road because of the thud the tires made when they hit the snowy piles of whatever lay invisible beyond the shoulder. Then the car was on its side – my daughter’s side. I stopped trying to steer. I looked at her, her gaze was fixated on me, her eyes round with fear, her mouth opened in a scream that I don’t remember hearing. Then we were upside down, suspended in place by our seatbelts. I heard the back window shatter all over the back seat. I remember thinking I wished I knew where we were going to end up – in a tree, a phone pole, water, down an embankment. I struggled to recall the terrain during daylight hours. Then the car was on its side again – my side, and finally we landed right-side-up and stopped moving.  Obviously, we lived to tell the story though the car did not. My worries were around how scared my child looked, about being stuck in the middle of nowhere with a thoroughly disabled car, and having to call mom to tell her what happened. But not death.  I wasn’t worried about dying, although I probably should have been.

That’s it. I am unscathed and very, very fortunate. I have tried to imagine how truly terrifying it would be to have the earth knocked off its axis underneath me, to have nowhere to go to be safe, not inside, not outside. And what it would be like to have a wall of black turgid water carry away my home, my car, my pets, my family, my town, making the danger of death real and likely. Stir in the insult-to-injury threat of nuclear meltdown and my imagination simply fails. As I read articles on line published by every major news outlet that began, “Japanese officials acknowledge slow response to nuclear danger was the result of being overwhelmed by the earthquake and tsunami,” I just wanted to scream, “YA THINK??”

I know no single person in Japan although I am aware that a child of the person-who-does-not-want-me-in-their-life lives there somewhere, hopefully safe. My personal connections to Japan are limited to my Honda, my electronics, and wonderfully uniform beads for weaving.  My heart aches though for the human faces I see and do not know. All I can do is to press the “Help Japan” button on my Yahoo! Homepage, which will allow me to donate to the Red Cross effort there.  But that just does not seem like enough.