Carolyn Ellis's Shattered Lives

This opportunistic but evocative autoethnography focuses on the experiences of Ellis on and after the terrorist attacks of September 11^th. She was a solo passenger on an airline headed for Virginia when the pilot announced they would be landing in Charlotte, NC due to terrorist attacks in NYC. She started writing this immediately after the attacks and continued writing and revising over a period of several months, tracing her experiences from Sept. 11^th 2001 to Jan 2002. She used this writing as a form of catharsis for herself, to help her reframe the experience to have some meaning within her life. However, she also wants to demonstrate why the “everyday stories” of Sept 11^th—those stories from people who were not in NYC that day or who did not lose loved ones in the attacks—deserve to be told and how telling those stories can help those individuals reframe the experience for themselves, as telling her story helped her to reframe and heal. She also hopes that this piece may start a dialogue among social scientists and qualitative researchers to help in understanding and coping with the tragedy.

Ellis works chronologically through the events of Sept. 11^th, providing commentary on her thoughts and on her surroundings, documenting the confusion she was feeling and that others appeared to be feeling. She discusses blame, fear, and hatred, and a general sense of being uncertain of what to do next and how the world and her life will go on. She provides conversations with and quotes from others to illustrate her feelings and provide insight into theirs, though the accuracy of these quotes and conversations can be called into question because she wrote these from memory and not from extensive recorded and transcribed conversations. She also mentions phone calls and how long certain calls would last (based on her bill) as well as her memory of how many attempts were necessary before she got through. This ethnography is primarily a sample size of 1, severely limiting generalizability.

Her writing that occurs in Oct. centers on Ellis’s attempts to make sense of the attacks. She describes a sense of “looming vulnerability” (395) that expresses a fear of further loss, making her feel “depressed, anxious, and fearful” (395).  She feels that harnessing these feelings through framing and sense making may help her gain healing and control. Ellis had to reframe her perception, first accepting that terrorism did and can happen then examine other frames in her life at that time that also had an influence—her location on an airplane at the time of the attacks and her personal experience with loss (her mother and mother-in-law in poor health at the time and a brother who died in a plane crash 20 years before). She does state that “unpredictability, fear, fragility, and looming vulnerability continue to be a part of my daily life” (400). She wants to attempt to control or deny these feelings, but fears this may lead to “psychic numbing” that may prevent the integration of terrorism into her new life scheme. According to Ellis, understanding offers the possibility of turning something chaotic into something potentially meaningful” (401). She uses her writing to dive further into the tragedy, choosing to express the importance of personal stories to provide healing, hoping to influence others to do the same.

Ellis suggests that we are “humbled by looming vulnerability” (401) and that the fear and vulnerability everyone felt led to a sense of collective belonging, a renewed appreciation for life, and helped us understand those who never had the illusion of the safe world. “I face the terror in hopes that it will help me (and others) live more giving and rewarding lives. At the very least, I face the terror to find ways to talk about experiences of vulnerability in an unpredictable and dangerous world” (403).

Ellis ends with a discussion of an experience in January 2002, which Ellis visited Ground Zero, and discovers that being at Ground Zero was not about seeing but about “feeling and remembering” (407). She asserts that within the tragedy of Sept 11^th lies a variety of lessons that we risk forgetting if we try to repress our feelings. She suggests instead that we turn to framing and sense-making to tell our personal stories, no matter how insignificant they may seem.