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Making
things happen - with integrity. A weekly CyberMemo designed to keep you on task. Monday September 9, 2002 Volume IV Number 36 |
FOCUS - Amazing Grace
When Joy Shepard retired after more twenty-eight years in the classroom as a high school math teacher, she spent a year relaxing. At age sixty-one, she needed it. She earned it. Education is demanding. She felt a freedom she’d never known. But it only took about nine months before she got restless.
All her life, she only knew full days. From early morning, until late at night, she was chasing after meaningful duties – her three boys, her marriage, her church, her profession. Her students were delightful and exasperating, all at once. But she reveled in the roles she played; she played them well.
Nine months into her retirement, she knew she needed something to replace the professional emptiness that just wouldn’t go away.
Joy reveled in math from her earliest days. It became her college major. She and her husband lived modestly through their working years in Southern California. They saved what they could, building a retirement nest-egg over time, investing carefully with the help of a trusted advisor.
“Joy, someday you ought to consider a second career in my business,” her broker would say. Joy was the kind of client who reviewed every quarterly statement, studied the companies she owned, mulled over her broker’s recommendations, and asked informed questions. Often, she would challenge proposed strategies, and a new twist would emerge, bearing the clear mark of Joy’s individual research and awareness of the marketplace. She and her advisor were partners from the start. Joy’s husband would shrug and admit, “Sounds good to me.”
So no one was surprised, really, when Joy announced to her family that she was off to an interview at the brokerage house at age sixty-one. She wore a classic business jacket, and a smart colored blouse, looking every bit the professional she aspired to be. In the boardroom, she impressed those veteran investment counselors at the firm that she had all the tools to be a successful broker herself. She convinced them of her intentions to add value to the firm and their clients and bring her own unique blend of expertise and personal care to attract new customers. They offered her a job.
The first six months required orientation and training and the passing of exams – several exams. She absorbed the material quickly, and mastered the formulas and definitions. Her peers-in-training seemed envious at her capacity for comprehending the obscure concepts of investment law and practice, and then her ability to repeat what she’d heard and read. As predicted, she passed the exams on the first try, one after the other.
The culmination of her months of preparation as a practicing broker was an intensive three weeks of training in New York City. The brokerage firm maintained their main offices on the Sixty-First Floor of Tower Two of the World Trade Center in downtown Manhattan.
The scheduled first session for some two hundred new brokers – September 10, 2001.
* * * * * * *
Joy and her husband did their share of traveling through the years, mostly in the summertime, and mostly for fun. Their son, an airline employee, provided them with some travel benefits, which they accepted cheerfully, and maintained a growing list of countries and cities and interesting destinations visited in a bulging scrapbook filled with photographs and cancelled tickets and postcards and brochures and memorabilia.
While Kennedy International Airport, the gateway to Europe, was a connecting point more than once, Joy had never really seen New York.
Until her arrival on Saturday, September 8.
The City that Never Sleeps didn’t disappoint. Joy walked the sidewalk, surrounded by the honking and the sirens and the roar of the busses and trucks stopping and starting at every corner and the neon signs and the skyscrapers and the scent of coffee and bratwurst and French fries and fumes and newsprint filling the air. “That’s why they call them ‘SKYSCRAPERS’” she thought as she craned at buildings so enormous it took her breath away. No wonder this place has inspired so many songs. “If I can make it here, I’ll make it anywhere.” She couldn’t look up and walk at the same time.
It made her dizzy.
From her childhood, Joy had been self-diagnosed with a fear of heights. As long as she can remember, she has been unable to get close to the edge… the edge of anything; a bluff, a bridge, a roof, a balcony, the rail of a stadium seat above the playing field. The mere thought of approaching that edge paralyzed her. So she learned to avoid the edge, wherever it might be.
So as her colleagues beckoned her into the elevator of Tower Two that Monday morning when the training started, she was fine until they reached their destination sixty one stories up and the doors opened to a lobby with a wide window view of the world. It was a sunny morning, blue sky, visibility unlimited. Everyone else bee-lined to the glass and the panorama that opened up below – the New York Harbor, the Statue of Liberty, New Jersey across the water, the ships some at the dock and some steaming towards the Atlantic accompanied by little tug boats and the other tall buildings, most of them below, some above, and on the other side, the Empire State and Central Park and Brooklyn Bridge. It was breathtaking. But Joy held back.
As she looked around the conference room at her new colleagues from all over the nation, she felt exhilaration and trepidation all at once. She bargained for a challenge. For an alternative to the tedium of retirement… and this was it.
She sipped her ice water, then opened her notebook and clicked her pen.
She was ready.
* * * * * * *
Tuesday morning, September 11, 2001, Joy felt more comfortable in that same conference room high above the ground level in Tower Two after a first rate dinner the night before and a good night’s rest. She enjoyed her new friends and colleagues who all laughed easily, and the speakers were compelling and interesting and fun and she affirmed to herself that she did the right thing when she signed up for this new career.
Just after nine-thirty that morning, there was a break, and she slipped into the Women’s Room. She was at the mirror when she heard it. And felt it.
Though muffled, it was the eerie whistling whine of jet engines screaming ever louder and then a crushing explosion, a BOOM that cause her image in the mirror to shake and the floor beneath her to move. She braced herself on the counter. It startled Joy so that she stood silent for a moment, and then turned to the woman next to her wide eyed, “What was THAT?”
The loudspeaker in the building announced in official tones, “Please return to your desks. There has been an explosion in Tower One, but TOWER TWO IS SECURE. PLEASE RETURN TO YOUR DESKS.”
She slipped outside into the hallway where she was told there had been a bombing. She walked over to a window, approaching slowly a scene now etched into her mind forever. Tower One, the mirror image of the building she and her colleagues occupied, had in an instant become a towering inferno. “Oh my God,” she whispered as she bit by bit stepped forward to see. Instinctively, her mathematical mind went analytical. Black smoke and orange flames poured out the wide gaping hole spanning the side of the tall building across and above. She counted the floors up, and then the number of windows across, trying to get some sense of the size of the ragged chasm. That’s when it became clear, inside the large cavity she discerned the shape. It was the tail section of a jumbo jet.
She stood in numbed horror. Her knees buckled. She felt sick.
A few minutes later, the announcement was repeated.
Joy turned from the terrible scene responding to the words she heard along with the thousands of other occupants of Tower Two above and below, and like the career teacher she had been, through hundreds of fire and evacuation drills, she obeyed the instructions of the powers that be and returned down the hall to her classroom on floor sixty-one. But something, something powerful, something real, would not let her pass through the doorway to her chair on the front row. She stood frozen, both hands on either side of the opening, pressing against the frame, as though unable to pass through an invisible barrier at the threshold.
She stood stiff, in some sort of shock as her friends beckoned her back inside. “It’ll be OK,” they said, but their voices seemed fuzzy, indistinct. “Forgive me,” she said, “Please forgive me. But I must leave. I’m sorry.” They nodded. And understood. Joy turned to the hallway looking for a lit sign, which she found, and went through the door marked EXIT, and began her walk down from more than sixty stories up, to make her escape.
Only a few others were in the stairwell.
“I’m sure glad I decided to wear flats today,” she said to a stranger walking down beside her. They laughed together, nervously, and kept walking. Step by step, one at a time.
Someone suggested they try the elevator. Joy looked through and open door, and saw a group crowding into an open elevator door in an open lobby, about the fiftieth floor. They motioned for her to join them. She said “No, thank you,” shaking her head. “I’ll keep walking.” (She didn’t think she would do well in an enclosed elevator suspended on cables). They nodded, understanding. The doors closed. Joy turned back to her journey down the stairs.
That’s when she started to pray.
“Our Father, who art in heaven…” she repeated, at first silently, a prayer that she’d memorized long ago, and now came from her heart. “hallowed be Thy name.” After a few floors, she asked the permission of her fellow escapees, “do you mind if I pray?”
“Please do,” was the reply.
“… Thy Kingdom come….Thy will be done…” and as she spoke the words and the others joined in, she never in her life had been so unsure of the outcome. “…on Earth as it is in Heaven.”
BANG!
Another sickening sound, this time her own building jolted, jerking the steps and the handrail laterally some six feet, knocking nearly everyone to the floor. The awful roar of steel bending and glass breaking and people screaming, echoing up and down the stairway, and pipes breaking and metal twisting and lights off, then on, then blinking, and Joy believed for a moment that her life would end. Right then and there. Water poured into the stairwell as sprinklers went off on cue.
The entire structure rocked back then forth several times, finally settling as everyone bruised and shaken pulled themselves up and realized they could still move down.
Joy had reached the forty-fourth floor when the second airliner struck Tower Two.
Her first thought was the people in the elevator.
“We’ve got to stay calm,” someone said.
“Yes.” Strangers hugged and held hands, assuring one another as a herd of refugees from terror crowded in a stairway moved downward in an orderly way.
“Amazing grace, how sweet the sound…” Someone started singing. Everyone joined in, up and down the floors. “…That saved a wretch like me…” Tears streaming down frightened faces. Smoke now filled the enclosure. And dust. “….I once was lost…” The smell of jet fuel heavy in the air. “…But now I’m found…” The man beside her removed his shirt and gave it to Joy with an assuring smile. “Here, use this to cover your nose and mouth so you can breathe,” he said. She took it gratefully. “… I was blind…. But now, I see.” The haunting melody seemed to offset the panicky state of alarm. This collection of innocents, these victims of the terrorist’s evil intent, found profound hope in a most unlikely place. Huddled together, they kept moving. Down, down, down. One step at a time.
“The Lord is My Shepherd, I shall not want…” someone started.
The others joined in. Everyone defaulted to the King James Version of the familiar Psalm. The words of the ancient poem never seemed more meaningful.
“…Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death…”
While a band of brave Firemen charged up the steps on a mission of mercy in other stairwells in the building, refugees from the impact above moved along the wall to the right to let them through. In Joy's stairwell, there was a loud CRACK!, and a zig-zagged fracture in the shape of a lightening bolt opened up to the sunlight and smoke outside.
“… I will fear no evil…”
Joy heard her new friend cough in the thickening smoke. She returned the shirt saying, “Here. I’m OK for awhile, you take this,” and she pulled up the neckline of her blouse to cover her nose. He smiled again and said, “Thanks.”
“… for Thou art with me…”
She breathed in, one hand holding the fabric over her nose and the other and the other holding the hand next to hers, a firm grip, and took one more step. And then another. And another.
“Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me…”
Joy thought of her three boys and the daughters-in-law and the grandchildren and her husband and their home so far away back in California and her career and her students and her friends and her church and she knew, the days had been good. Mercy had indeed followed her all of her days.
“And I will dwell in the house of the Lord…. Forever.”
A Blessed Hope.
It was a long, long tedious walk.
Sixty one floors.
* * * * * * *
When Joy ran through the vast, open lobby and the NYFD command post at ground level, she and her companions were not prepared for what they would find on the other side of the revolving door. Outside, glass and steel and a flurry of confidential documents and office desks and file cabinets and computer monitors and copiers and conference tables rained from the sky, heavy objects crashing into the concrete with full force. But it was the carnage of human remains, bodies and body parts falling from the sky, littering the streets outside in a gruesome and senseless helter-skelter hailstorm of innocent human life, the remnants of some who had jumped, many more who were simply blown out of the building by the force of the explosion, indescribable, that imprinted Joy’s heavy heart forever.
“I don’t talk about it…” Joy explains. “It is beyond words. An unutterable and literal Hell on earth. Those dear good people. Gone. I can only commend their souls to God. That’s all I can do.”
And she somehow made her way outside. Through the horrors of an unspeakable war zone where terror rained from the sky, running, dodging, racing through the falling debris, praying, she made it safely out.
And minutes later, when the building collapsed, she ran again, chased down the city streets by an ominous cloud of billowing dust.
In Greenwich Village, strangers took her in. Gave her water to drink. And a telephone to call home to her husband, who knew where she had been that morning.
“Honey… I’m OK,” she said through her tears. “I made it out.”
A continent apart, they wept together.
* * * * * * *
“I’m not a hero,” Joy says with conviction. “I am a survivor. That’s all.”
In our little town, three thousand miles away from Ground Zero, Joy brings a human face to a tragedy most of us only know through flickering images on the television screen or photographs on a page. “Media sanitizes events,” Joy reminds us. “I want to give people a sense of what it was like. I want to give a voice to the innocents who perished. They did not, they can not, have died in vain.”
* * * * * * *
It’s Monday morning. You are a leader.
One year ago, on the same Monday morning, we had no idea what the following Tuesday would bring.
Some make the case that everything has changed since that fateful day. Others argue that nothing has changed, really. I think more the former than the latter.
For me, a whole lot has changed. I think we have all reconsidered our values. Our real aspirations. Our relationships. Our attitude towards our work. Our sense of home. The place of faith. Our sense of mission.
And then Joy Shepard came into our lives, reminding us that life is tenuous. So short. So fragile. She has brought a human face and a human voice to a far away catastrophe.
May this week’s one year anniversary of America’s tragedy call us all to those higher values. May our loving God, the One who introduced Amazing Grace, the One who calls us to Himself, Who is our very present help in times of trouble, the One who is our Companion as we walk through the valley of the shadow of death and fear no evil, may we all bear witness to His loving-kindness, even in the heart of darkness.
Today. Tomorrow.
And beyond.
Posted in Valley Center, California
© Copyright Kenneth E. Kemp 2002
Special Thanks to my good friend David Belcher, owner of Rhino Media Group and creator of WisdomGram
LeaderFOCUS is a service of Good Stewardship Associates
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