Double Vision: Thoughts on the Boston and Oklahoma City Bombings (article)

Yesterday (Monday, April 15, 2013), two bombs exploded at and near the finishing line of the Patriot’s Day Boston Marathon. I watched television coverage continuously for several hours, then intermittently into the following day. I listened to announcements of the dead, the maimed, the physically injured, and the countless others who were emotionally devastated. I imagined the long shadow that would be cast by these acts of terror and by the bombs discovered that mercifully did not explode.

The Boston Marathon is an international event. Runners

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and their families come to Boston from all over the world, as well as all over the U.S., to participate and watch. The event is a much-anticipated day of joy and celebration. Offices and schools are closed. Hundreds of thousands of people line the 26.2 miles of the run. But on April 15, 2013, calamity intruded upon joy. There were mass casualties. The sense of place would be dramatically changed long into the future.

I felt great compassion (an empathy that includes both imagination and caring) for the physical and emotional victims, for the many kinds of first responders (medical, police, firefighters), and for the people of the entire city of Boston and beyond. I also felt a keen double vision. I had served as an informal counselor for the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner of the State of Oklahoma, and for additional physicians, police, and counselors, back in 1995 and in the following years. So while I watched the sequence unfold in Boston, I also relived the same sequence that had occurred on April 19, 1995, when a truck bomb blew up the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people, injuring hundreds of others, and affecting the sense of place of Oklahoma City for years to come. It not only shook my apartment, but also my sense of wellbeing.

The past both fused with and illuminated the present. Yesterday and today, what I had thought I was emotionally “finished with” and worked-through became uncannily current and alive. I understood once again what “the return of the repressed” meant and felt like. Likewise, I felt I could comprehend “transference,” both individual and group, anew. Further, I realized again that the unimaginable is not simply what cannot be imagined, but often that which has already occurred and is too terrible to think.

I thus felt not only what I hope was a humane empathy toward the people of Boston and all the runners and their families, but also a very specific kinship with Bostonians and the runners because I had emotionally lived through a parallel experience 18 years earlier. I experienced, observed, and tried to understand what was happening now both through empathy and identification. I tried to observe my identification and use it to deepen my experience and empathy.

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My feelings extended not only to the victims—however broadly they might be defined—but also to the yet unknown perpetrator(s). In the years since 1995, I had learned much about Timothy McVeigh, the man who bombed the Oklahoma City Federal Building. I wondered now about what would make a person, or group, terrorize the people of Boston and create a sense of total vulnerability.

I realized that I had to closely monitor my feelings of empathy and identification, lest my sense of “I know exactly what you are going through” blur the boundary between 2013 and 1995, and contaminate my ability to experience, and perhaps understand, the distinctiveness of the present. We have long known that countertransference can be a proverbial double-edged sword: it can be a source of distortion (as defense) as much as it can be a source of insight. As I was watching TV, my early emotional response was an uncomfortable sense of “having been there before”; then came an ambush of emotions; finally I realized that my double-vision was a remembering, even somewhat of a reliving, of the Oklahoma City terrorism as I was watching the aftermath of the Boston bombing unfold.

Later in the evening of the Boston bombings, I wrote a letter to a policeman who had been a first responder in Oklahoma City, a member of our ad hoc support group afterwards, and who later became a close friend. I thought of him while watching the Boston television coverage and wondered whether his feelings and images were similar to mine. I essentially said to him that I remembered him in particular, as well as the bombing and those designated as the official victims.

I also wrote aloud to him, so to speak, about my misgivings about the completeness of the urban renewal in the downtown Oklahoma City area and beyond, in the aftermath of the bombing. “Despite official pronouncements and the wondrous come-back and renaissance in downtown Oklahoma City that go by the name of Bricktown [an adjacent area of retail stores, a hotel, restaurants, a cinema, a ballpark, and other entertainments, an area that had been filled with warehouses and other buildings to support the downtown], what happened here on that terrible day in 1995 is far from entirely past tense. No matter how bright the sunlight of urban re-

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newal, we still live in the shadow of the bombing of the Murrah Federal Building.” In a way, the new lustrous sheen is a kind of makeover for a wound that still festers.

The next morning, April 16^th, I received an e-mail letter from my friend, in which he wrote that having “the same manner of thoughts came to me when I heard of those events [in Boston].” At the end of his letter, he thanked me “for thinking about me and taking time to remember.” I felt understood and as if he had also become a safe vessel for my own memories and feelings. It is important to remember and to be remembered.

This, in turn, made me realize the importance, both in Oklahoma City and Boston, of having people to “contain” (Bion) and serve as a safe “holding environment” (Winnicott) for the torrent of violent images, emotions, and fantasies unleashed by the bombings. Further, it made me realize that the various kinds of responders and medical personnel themselves should also have places of sanctuary and people to talk with to process their experiences and feelings that occur when taking care of people in unimaginable circumstances and of having witnessed things (severed body parts, mutilation, charred limbs) that no one should see.

I understood once again that there are things in life that are utterly impossible to completely contain for oneself because they are too terrible, too uncanny, because they are too traumatic or fulfill forbidden fantasies, or both. Sometimes the most healing thing one can do is to bear witness to what happened to someone—to affirm to that person (or group) that something did in fact happen, to affirm reality by listening to their story.

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