Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. Abstract Disaster volunteers and professional first responders are trained to rescue, restore and comfort disaster survivors. They are severely challenged by a disaster in which there are no survivors, where the task is one of recovery rather than rescue. This paper describes the powerful but subtle dynamics and coping methods observed among workers at two major airplane crash sites. _____________________________________________________________________________________________ The Poetry of Recovery There are many things that drive people crazy. The worst of these is unpredictability. We struggle with it even more than we do with love, or loss. Certainly more than we do with freedom, justice or creativity.Unpredictability creates in us a sense of unease; a disease. The scientifically inclined search for the principles they can rely upon to behave....well, predictably. Artists find or create patterns. Beauty is symmetry. We like harmony in music, repetition gives us predictability. A design is elegant when we know where the line is going - when it is predictable.
We are hardwired to make sense out of our experiences. “Sense” , or understanding conveys predictability. In a way, much of the human endeavor is about prediction.
Some people try rigidity as a means of making life predictable. We all relax within the familiar. A breakfast of cornflakes, black shoes on our feet...it’s easy, it’s soothing when things are predictable.
Even those who seek novelty want it surrounded by, or just next door to predictability.
This authors of this special issue and those attending the conference from which the this issue is based, are an unusual group of people because of our attraction to disasters. But not that unusual. Many people rubberneck past the twisted wreck of a car accident; a few stop to help. Even fewer become ambulance drivers and EMS technicians.
Like the firefighter who shares with the arsonist an intense attraction to flames, we disaster specialists share an attraction to unpredictability. Firefighters learn to put out the fire. We deal with unpredictability by rolling up our sleeves and becoming part of the solution. We put out the fire of unpredictability by restoring (imposing) order on the work of chaos. Disaster relief is the work of turning disaster’s leftovers into a recognizable, nourishing meal. Our role in mental health is to encourage survivors and workers alike to eat that meal, and be nourished.
Like firefighters’ protective clothing, rescue workers use defenses that enable them to help strangers felled by unpredictability. Helping survivors is innately satisfying. Among other things, it helps restore predictability. Life has been cruel, but we are kind. There has been arbitrary harm, but here we are here with arbitrary help. In an odd way, the rescue workers are helped - affirmed - by the survivors. Things are awful, but they improve. Things can go out of control, but we can do something. The victims, survivors, suffer, but we bring them hope for the future.
And for the rescuers, the delicate balance of empathy and detachment, sympathy and perspective is maintained by the larger disaster relief system. Our role is to monitor that system, maintaining the balance the way a gardener maintains his plot - a little mulch there, pulling a weed here, regular watering, prayers for sunshine. So do we maintain a kind of predictability for the workers in disaster.
We’ve got that pretty well figured out. They hurt, we help. They’re working hard at helping, we watching out for them. Pretty neat. Everyone wins.
But when a disaster occurs, say, a plane crash, where there are no survivors, only victims, we are faced with the ultimate in unpredictability - and we are struck dumb.
That’s where the poetry comes in. In trying to understand how rescue workers deal with a recovery- only situation, the usual methods fall short. Emergency workers are deprived of emergency when the task is only recovery. The loss of urgency is the loss of meaning. Our tools are useless, our weapons absurd. We have failed.
Helping the Worker Helping the worker involved in recovery is an exercise in stillness. Too much talking hurts. Words are superfluous, intrusive, and are more likely to serve the anxiety of the speaker than the needs of the client. In a recovery situation we learn more by watching than by listening. Here’s what I saw:Body parts, airplane debris, and personal effects were being salvaged from the Everglades after the crash of a Value jet flight leaving Miami in 1996. The divers doing the recovery were professionals who stayed within their own group and didn’t interact much with the other personnel. They were the front line workers in the recovery mission, facing the dangers of biohazards, alligators, and the mysteries of the deep. One afternoon my stomach turned when I saw them - from a distance, behind the lines - eating their lunch together as if at a picnic, in the presence of corpses and body parts they had just brought to the surface. I knew about being blase -- I have piloted a plane and blase is the pilots’ culture. I knew about the value of black humor -- I’ve worked in hospitals. But this scene got my attention. It seemed so callous and disrespectful. Then I looked more closely.
The divers ate quietly, speaking softly to one another. I noticed the way they glanced over and over again at the covered pile of bodies. As I watched, I was reminded of the way mothers in the park continually monitor their children. I realized that the divers were anything but disrespectful. They were standing guard over their charges. Once I understood what I was seeing, I was touched by the tenderness of the scene. The divers were attentive and loyal, and would stay with the bodies until they were removed.
Poetry is both representational and symbolic. The concrete communicates with an immediacy that shortcuts explanation. Divers who could not save the victims would nevertheless not abandon them. It is with such gestures that the dignity of our species is preserved in the face of chaos and destruction.
Poetry is immediate and fresh. Like a Zen master or a young child, the poet sees things as they are in the moment, without the categories and qualifications that civilize, organize and obfuscate. In poetry, the part often represents the whole. And that’s how it was when one day divers brought up a woman’s purse.
The airplane had crashed a few weeks before, so most of us were past the initial shock. We were taking care of business, moving on with our tasks. Since the families of the victims were housed elsewhere (or had gone home), we workers dealt with our grief by being efficient at our work. Then they brought up a purse which amazingly had all of its contents inside. Intact. The owner of the purse had apparently been a women on the move. She had a filofax. She was a mother. There were pictures of a daughter, and a husband. She had had places to go and things to do. People to love. She was busy. Active. A few weeks ago she had been just like us, among us.
It was as if the plane crashed all over again.
* * * * * Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. Clinician in Private Practice, Washington, DC
Editor, Adoption Quarterly
2924 M Street, NW Washington, DC 20007 Email: reneeg@erols.com
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