by Jennifer Sabin
I WORKED IN newsrooms for twenty years. For most of that time I was a writer for ABC News, both television and radio, and I was a news junkie. I covered just about every kind of national and international story from terrorism to budget battles, elections and floods, scientific discoveries and plane crashes, usually from the safety of a studio. I covered OJ and the Oklahoma City bombing, the death of JFK Jr and the kidnapping of Elizabeth Smart, the Iraq War and the Rhode Island Nightclub fire. For a time I wrote and produced sports segments, despite my ignorance on the subject. I interviewed everyone from politicians to celebrities, to Wall Street analysts and owners of trailer homes that had been chewed up and spit out by tornadoes.
For the most part, none of it hit home, until I had my first baby, a little girl who came to mind any time a child was kidnapped or a family was killed in a tragic accident. But still, I was able to compartmentalize most of it. Everyone I worked with was fairly desensitized to the day in and day out of human misery, until 9/11, when the news became personal for every American journalist, particularly those working in New York. I wasn’t in the newsroom that day – I was awaiting the arrival of my second child who was due September 11th. For the first time in years, I experienced a huge story – the biggest story of my life – from the disquieting distance of my home, and later a maternity ward. But like most Americans, I couldn’t take my eyes off the TV.
I returned to work on a part-time basis for five more years, and stories hit harder and harder as I watched my children grow. I found myself crying more easily as I read moving pieces in the Times or watched emotional features on TV, even when I was at work. Instead of the amusing dreams I’d once had about dining with Castro, or hanging out with Barack and Michelle, I started dreaming about plane crashes and losing my children in a variety of terrible scenarios ripped from the headlines.
I had often written obituaries for the ABC Radio Network – people like Ronald Reagan and Jessica Tandy. But now, especially after reading the “Portraits of Grief” series in The New York Times, post-9/11, I took more care with those profiles, hoping to uncover some elemental truth in the sheen of a celebrated life.
I also found myself more offended by the casual jokes that help anesthetize journalists covering stories from the safety of our Upper West Side newsrooms. One of the old guard in the room, a wonderful editor named Woody, liked to call victims of fires “crispy critters,” and now that turned my stomach. My callouses had been ground down, and as much as I tried to grow them back, it wasn’t that simple.
Fast forward to late January 2015. No longer working in a newsroom, I now read, viewed and listened to the news the way every layman does. I had choices about what I exposed myself to, and so, it dismayed my husband, Steve, when I looked up photos of the Jordanian pilot burned alive by ISIS. I avoided the video – recalling that a friend had watched the videotaped beheading of Daniel Pearl and still had nightmares about it. But I had to see the photos to believe it. Some combination of the journalist that still lived in me - and the outraged citizen I’d become - needed to see the pictures.
It was the very next day that an SUV collided with a train on the Metro North tracks a few miles from my home in Westchester County. The crash sent the live third rail into the SUV and the train’s front car, igniting a terrible explosion and deadly fire. Steve had taken that train line until 2013, and we knew the exact spot where it happened. He came home from work and said, “We’re going to know someone who was injured or killed on that train.”
That night, my husband attended a meeting at our son’s school. Next to him sat the Zimmermans, the parents of one of my thirteen-year-old son’s best friends. There’s no cell service at the school, and when they left the building at 9:30, the Zimmermans appeared alarmingly absorbed in their phones as they stood stalled in the parking lot. Steve was already at his car, ready to go home. The next morning we learned that Lisa Zimmerman’s 53-year-old brother was one of the men killed on that train. Eric Vandercar always rode in the front because it was the “quiet car.”
I read Eric’s obituary in the Times; I sought out his photos online. I learned about his wife and children, his love of music and extreme skiing. And I couldn’t stop thinking about his elderly parents who I knew from birthday parties and the soccer fields where they would watch their grandson play soccer with my son.
It was the first time I had no regrets that I wasn’t working in a newsroom during a major story. It was too close to home: Eric Vandercar could have been my husband, or he could have been me. And David Zimmerman, Eric’s brother-in-law, was angry about the reporters harassing their family. I couldn’t blame him. They were camped out on front lawns, they came to the funeral, they called posing as someone else to sneak their way into an interview. They were invasive when the family needed its privacy most. It’s always terrible to lose someone so young, but worse when it’s so public.
My fiftieth birthday would come a few weeks later, and in the mean time, my husband had decided to take me for a long weekend without children to Naples, Florida. I hate the cold, so the idea of spending a not-so-welcome milestone somewhere warm was uplifting. But suddenly thoughts of my mortality kicked in. We were leaving just two days after the train accident, and I was sure the plane would crash, leaving my children orphans. I was going to be half-a-century old – didn’t that mean my luck could run out any day now? Wasn’t there a limited amount of luck afforded to every family? I remembered the old newsroom superstition that deaths came in threes, usually within a week’s time. There was no logic to my thoughts – of course six people had died on that train. But in my universe it was one, and my husband and I could be the other two. ISIS or Al Qaeda could be readying to hijack another plane, although I told myself they weren’t going to go after a NY-Ft. Myers flight. And besides – there had just been a crash in Asia – wasn’t it too early, statistically speaking, for another one?
Despite my twisted logic, Steve still had to talk me into going. It was, of course, wonderful and warm, and we landed safely back in a snowy, sleety New York four days later, our spirits rejuvenated and our faces a little tanner. I didn’t pick up a paper that weekend until we were on the plane home. I thought about how heavily the news weighed on me, how it got stuck in the roots of my thought processes, and that it was okay to disappear once in a while, to check out and find an alternate reality, if even for a few days. After all, many people live in ignorance of the world’s woes all the time – maybe there was a little bliss to be found there.
Jennifer Sabin's work has appeared in Promethean and The Hook. After two decades in broadcasting, she received an MFA in Creative Writing from The City College of New York.