I got an instant message from one of the young writers in the newsroom yesterday (Saturday).
This one will tear your heart out, she wrote, sending me a cut of a boy, born less than a month after 9/11, speaking in Saint Patrick’s Cathedral on Saturday — a message to his firefighter father who died on that terrible day. Patrick Mate Lyon told that packed church, and all the cameras and microphones and pens taking notes he wished he could have known his dad.
His voice never wavered.
I didn’t know it would be this hard, the young writer wrote to me.
Make a joke, I told her. Watch the US Open for ten minutes. Go look at cats on icanhascheeseburger.com. You have to. If you don’t, you’ll go nuts. It’s not disrespectful. You can only take so much.
I’m awful at work. I make terrible jokes. One story this year involved a guy shooting up his own wedding. I started the shotgun wedding jokes. I criticized Jared Loughner’s choice in mugshot hairstyles. I’m right there with abortion jokes. When I first started in this business, when I was sixteen, I asked my news director how he could make fun of people like that. He told me in a few years, I’d be worse than he was. He was right.
I’ve found the anniversaries are the hardest to cover. When I was reporting, I was supposed to stand back, in the middle of chaos of sadness and despair and chaos, and be calm and dispassionate. It was far easier to do when the event was unfolding. When I covered the Cold Storage Fire in Worcester, Massachusetts, where six firefighters died, so much was happening that night it was impossible to get emotionally involved.
A year later, I had been to the funerals. I had covered all the hearings and investigations. I had gotten to know the guys on the fire department. I knew the families. I had been invited to the Worcester Fire Department’s training academy media day and worn the uniform felt what it was like to be in a burning building.
In December of 2000, I was sent to the burned-out warehouse in Worcester for the anniversary of that fire. It was one of the coldest days of the winter. As the station went to me live, I was describing the six cans of beer someone had left out for the dead. And I lost it.
It was the only time I’ve cried on the air.
I stopped talking for a few seconds, took a deep breath, apologized, and went on.
When I got back to the station, my News Director said, “I guess you are human, after all.”
Let me be clear: I got it easy. I’m not a cop, or a firefighter, or a paramedic, or a Red Cross volunteer, or anybody or who has to look up at that blue sky and remember the people and the places and the experiences and the buildings that were there and are there no more, and who still has to put on a uniform and go out there and be ready for the next time.
You’ll excuse me. I’m off for my hourly check of peopleofwalmart.com.
