The Daddy Man (2016)

I used to think my father was fearless.

Standing with a strong, 6’4 stature and never sporting anything less casual than a pair of khakis, to see my father, my seven-year-old eyes would have to forever gaze up, making the superhero in my life— that me and my siblings called the Daddy Man—that more magical. He could do anything—reach the cookie jar from the top shelf in the kitchen, kill the spiders in our bathroom, even brave the scary darkness and rid it of monsters, holding my hand until I could fall asleep. To me he feared nothing, and everything feared him.

But then it happened. The towers next to my father’s building—and where he used to work for years before — disappeared, and everything changed.

Being only a second-grader in a New York commuter-based town in Connecticut, they didn’t tell us what happened until we got home from school — too many parents, too many family members might have been affected. But when my teacher received a phone call after our morning reading session, bursting into tears, we could sense that something wasn’t right.

Getting off the bus on that sunny September day, I glanced at my mother, who was holding a box of tissues, hugging the other parents on our street corner. ‘Was she sick?’ I wondered. She hurried me and my two siblings home, and silently clicked on the television, where we could see the horror that had filled downtown New York. Every single channel showed the same loop of video—the towers, the planes, the smoke, the collapse. Over and over, the images flashed onto the screen, and me and my siblings silently stared, not sure if something like this was even possible. Through the smoke, I could see the dome of my father’s building, still standing next to the rubble. I looked at my mother, puzzled.

“Daddy’s okay, remember that.... Daddy’s okay.” My mother seemed to be reassuring herself more than her children, who at just seven and nine didn’t process what was going on right way. She was reminding herself that my father was able to get a cell phone signal and call that he was in midtown that day, and that he was safe.

I don’t remember my dad coming home that day—I’m not sure if he was able to make it out of the city, or if he just got home very late. But what I do remember is that he wasn’t the same. After that, he didn’t return to work for three months, waiting for his building to be cleared, and the smoked to subside. I was delighted that my dad starting working from home—as a kid I rarely saw him besides on weekends — but was soon disappointed when he began to shut the door to the office, a door that was only closed when he had an important call. Through the glass of the French doors, I could see that something was different, something had changed. The stress lines on his forehead and eyes seemed deeper, the playful twinkle in his eyes changed to a distracted glaze, his smile was replaced by a permanent, solemn frown. I didn’t get what was happening—we were all safe, wasn’t that enough?

And then I realized—he was afraid.

Years later, my mother would confide in me that my father’s distracted eyes were from not being able to sleep, seeing the towers smoke, and then fall—something he witnessed on a fifth avenue street corner—constantly play over and over, causing him to bring the very Blackberry that was able to reach my mother to bed, clutching it until he could finally drift to a fitful sleep. My father—the same person who could conquer any fright my childish imagination could think of, from monsters in my closet to a mysterious sound outside—was terrified.

But this wasn’t the same type of fear I knew.  Unlike the spiders my father protected me from, I couldn’t roll up an issue of the Times and squash away his night terrors, throw away his recurring visions, or have him hold my hand instead of his cell phone so he could fall asleep. This was the kind of fear that was invisible, the kind of fear that even made saying “I’m so scared” terrifying. It was deep, it was earth shattering, and there was nothing I could do.

Fourteen years and four moves later, my father still hasn’t spoken to me about that fateful day, what he saw, or his PTSD. I can never tell if it’s a matter of his masculine pride that he doesn’t divulge his feelings, or the fact that he to wanted to hold onto his status as the Daddy Man for as long as he could. Looking back, I know my father is not fearless, for he is, like all of us, human.

But I realized that fearlessness, in actuality, isn't the trait we should honor. It’s the strength and the determination to move on with life after something like this changes you, to not let the change control who you are. And he didn’t; after working from home, he returned to the office, continued working, but never forgetting.

And for that, he’ll forever be my superhero.