He was at Ground Zero for approximately five days. He later described working shifts of around twelve hours. He returned to ordinary life — or what passed for it in New York in September 2001 — and found that stopping was in some ways harder than being there had been. The work had given his grief a form. When the form was removed, the grief was simply itself.
“It wasn’t until I stopped that I really felt the full impact of what had happened,” he has said. He described depression, anxiety, an inability to make simple decisions. He described PTSD — his word, his attribution, given in interviews well after the fact. He had been in therapy before September 11 and returned to it; having a structure for processing the experience was, he said, a consolation. “It’s still with me,” he told a reporter in 2021. “There are times when I talk about 9/11 and I’m right back there.”
## The Dust and the Body Count That Kept Growing
The coworker’s remark he recorded in his TIME essay — “This is probably going to kill us in 20 years” — turned out to be more accurate than anyone at Ground Zero wanted to believe. The air at the World Trade Center site had been declared safe by government officials in the days after the attacks, a claim that proved to be catastrophically wrong. The dust contained asbestos from the towers’ construction, pulverized glass, heavy metals including lead and mercury, volatile organic compounds from thousands of tons of office furniture and equipment, and combustion byproducts from fires that burned for weeks. Workers who spent extended time at the site without adequate respiratory protection — and many worked without it, either because the equipment was unavailable, inadequate, or impractical in the conditions — absorbed concentrations of this material that the body was not designed to process.