By Matthew Ralph (originally published on Sept. 17, 2002)
Inadequate.
When he said the word, I suddenly started to feel a lot better about the assignment at hand, perhaps the most difficult I have ever taken on in my young career as a journalist.
After all, that’s exactly how I felt on the phone two days earlier when I set up the interview and how I was still feeling at the time sitting in a small cubicle office space on the third floor of city hall, stumbling over my words and preconceived notions of how an interview with the father of a bright 28-year-old vice president who died a tragic death on the 105th floor that dreadful day in September, would go.
Concentrating my glances on the baseball pennants hung around the small office space allotted to a city housing inspector, I started to feel like Kevin Spacey’s character in “The Usual Suspects,” only I was using the words and objects behind the man I was interviewing as a means to change the subject and create some, if any, comfort or connection between the two of us.
A phone call disobeying the “hold my calls” request broke the awkward silence and fumbling of pen on paper, my hand scrawling three times over the number 28 I had jotted down.
Twenty-eight years were all this particular fun-loving, former offensive lineman who never had trouble landing summer bouncing jobs at bars along the Jersey Shore, was given and here I was asking his father how he’s dealt with it, how the community has done what seemed and still seems so impossible to those of us unconnected by a loved one lost in the tragedy.
“A lot of people feel inadequate,” he said. “They feel like nothing they say or do is going to make a difference, but it’s the support of this community that has rallied behind us and been there for us that has really helped. It really has made a difference.”
Many of the people who still offer condolences and contribute to a fund set up in his son’s memory, never knew him in the 14 years he spent living in the city I myself make only occasional trips to for an assignment or two a month. I never knew him and yet seeing the picture of him on this man’s desk, a bright-eyed smile and two large arms around the love of his life, I had to fight back the tears.
The man I was interviewing had hit the nail straight on the head with that word inadequate, because how could I feel anything but that at a time like this. I had not even a tiny notion of what he was going through and yet an editor at one of our sister paper’s office was expecting me to capture it into 20 inches by that Friday.
“I’ve had some reporters ask some of the most hair-brained things,” the man said as the lunch break he had taken to speak with me started to come to an end and some of his co-workers started to file into their respective cubicle spaces. “If you had asked anything stupid though I would have sent you packing as soon as you walked through the door.”
“But you did a pretty good job,” he went on. “Now, can I ask you do something?”
At this point I felt on the spot as though maybe he was going to shift gears and turn the interview on me, which wouldn’t have been the first time (try interviewing an HR director some time), but my own humble confidence that had been shattered a couple times when I walked in 10 minutes late and saw the expression on his face when he shook my hand and rebuilt slightly with his compliment told me everything would be fine.
“Ask me a question you were afraid to ask,” he said.
Letting out a huge sigh of relief, I stammered to try and find the words to even begin. There were so many things I had avoided in my mind for fear of the reaction or the perception that I was just another cold-hearted, self-seeking journalist.
The best I could come up with was to ask him about that day, to ask him to describe what he went through, how he found out and what was running through his mind those fateful hours.
From that point on, I think the interview really began. A similar God-given strength my interviewee spoke about in coping with the past year of his life had just as mysteriously filled the room and answered my hastily prayed prayers in the car as I battled the strange layout of one way streets to find a parking place.
“By far the hardest thing is playing it over and over in my head, wondering why things had to happen the way they did,” he said. “But I know things happen for a reason and I believe that God gives strength to people to endure difficult times.”
Otherwise, like some who have given up and been unable to cope, he would throw in the towel on life altogether. “I just feel sorry for those who can’t see that.”
In the end, he shared with me that talking about it, though difficult, is part of how he deals with it all and more importantly, the reason why he granted such an interview in the first place.
He understood my feelings of inadequacy as soon as I walked in the door. He recognized my nervous tension when I asked about his Memorial Stadium pennant to break the silence in between the one phone call he wasn’t supposed to receive being cut off and the person calling back.
When I got back to the office a few hours later, my more than sympathetic editor was there to ask me how it went. Somehow I think he already knew how mixed my response would be.
Having experienced the murder of a family member and the death of other loved ones, I’ve seen firsthand the pain of losing someone both naturally and by the senseless act of one person, but my experience that day interviewing this father whose only peace is a belief in the afterlife and only tangible burial site is a leveled plot of land in the city, it was just far more overwhelming than anything I could have ever tried to cram or contemplate into my mind. For this man was only one of thousands who on the very same day at the very same moment had everything they knew and loved stolen right out from under them. And all for what?
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Matthew Ralph is the editor of Tangzine.com. When this essay was written and originally published, Ralph was a staff writer at the Bridgeton-Millville News in Bridgeton, N.J.
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