Portals

After he Died in the World Trade Center disaster I thought back to his dreams. Our last session, on September 4, had been unexceptional. The unprecedented sporadic flashes of panic he had been feeling over the summer seemed to have subsided. There had been times when he felt suddenly claustrophobic in the subway. One time, while watching his children play with their friends in a swimming pool, he took fright that one of them had drowned, and he counted and counted over and over to assure himself, feeling silly, that all of them were there. They were. Life went on as usual, with his gladness in his children, his deepening bond with his wife, his restlessness with his job, and what had become our therapeutic puzzle: his sense that even if work were satisfactorily to engage his ambition, and if his money worries were to abate, still it might not be enough—still there would be the inevitable unreeling of time, the perpetual passing away.

And so a week passed and the terror planes flew into the towers, trapping him on a high floor on what should have been the day of our next session. He and so many others died. And I, in that ancillary position peculiar to psychoanalysis—where with him I knew his life so well yet stood outside it—I was left with the puzzling mystery of passing away. Partly out of my own sadness and loss, partly out of wanting to find him still, partly in uneasy approach to the mystery, I looked back through the cursory jottings of my notes and was jarred to remember one of his dreams.

On July 17, when sparks of anxiety could surprise him in waking life, he dreamt that he was in a dark scene, needing to flee. At first—was he in a building?—there were corridors and obstructions and then he was on rooftops, going from this one to that, and there were police, teams of police all over, not chasing him, but also going this way and that, in chaos and confusion, until somehow he found a way out and away. He found himself trying to ignite the extinguished pilot lig