ollowers of this column have met Brian Cooper before. A refresher: he was the best man at my wedding, a man whose addictive personality nearly cost him everything, a man to whom God delivered a second chance at life. An
ollowers of this column have met Brian Cooper before.
A refresher: he was the best man at my wedding, a man whose addictive personality nearly cost him everything, a man to whom God delivered a second chance at life. An evening of cocaine and vodka near the end of his freshman year at Flagler College in St. Augustine, Fla., should have been his last, if the doctors words are to be heeded.
There’s more to Brian’s story. More that makes the actions he took subsequent to Tuesday’s terrorist attack in New York all the more remarkable.
Brian was born and raised – depending on your interpretation of the word – on Long Island. He is the middle of three boys. The older full of wisdom and a successful New York police officer. The younger his parents’ prized possession. Brian, as so often happens, bore the brunt of his ‘middle’ label. He was estranged from his mother and father early on; little has changed to this day.
Except that Brian has become a better man.
Through college his attitude was more mobster than civilized. He’d sooner spit on you than offer himself in service or otherwise. His M-O was toughness, a deep-seeded brutality that scared not only his enemies, but often his friends. If not in his inner circle, then best not be in his way.
I was the first subway stop on the train of that inner circle, called on by God, I believe, to transform Brian from carnal to compassionate. It was like having a 20-year-old son.
Wednesday, Brian, who works in a fish store on Long Island, took the day from work and made his way into the city. Much of Lower Manhattan, he said, was closed to through traffic. He parked and walked. His destination unknown, Brian sought out an official, interested, he told the man, in doing anything he could to help.
He was directed to a make-shift hospital. Smeared blood on faces, dust and layers of soot a sealant on all within eyeshot. The carnage, I assume he imagined, was the kind Americans traditionally see only on CNN’s coverage of war-torn countries far, far from our borders. Thursday, Brian learned that his had become just such a country, saw first hand the inexplicable destruction wrought by groups of radicals claiming America “the great Satan.”
My best man made his way through the scattered victims, most sufferers, he said, of mild injury. His desire to assist ended at the side of an elderly woman. Mid-70’s, he guessed. She wheezed ferociously. He stood beside her for five hours; never once did she enjoy the satisfaction of a full breath. Short, choppy, uncomfortable. Her eyes, he said, bore the depth of confusion.
Brian was told the woman lived in Lower Manhattan and had been brought to the facility by dust-coated businessmen who’d scooped her from the street. She must have heard the indescribable impact of two airplanes connecting with 110 stories of steel, irrevocably harming two fixtures of global strength. The World Trade Center’s Tower 1 and Tower 2 had fallen by the time she emerged from her apartment; clouds of smoke, like volcano ash, dropping from an otherwise picturesque sky.
She laid in the hospital alone until Brian arrived. That’s how he found her, eyes functioning even as her respiratory system began to destruct. None had come in her name, no family, friends or acquaintances.
So, God sent Brian.
“She was dying, man. Right there in front of me this woman was dying. The doctors told me and her that she didn’t have long to live,” Brian said. “All she asked was that I could stay with her. She just didn’t want to die alone.”
It was a no-brainer. Brian pulled a chair next to her bed and interlaced his fingers with hers. The same right hand he’d once used to contort a man’s face into near unrecognizable patterns now served as an entirely different kind of lifeline.
Outside, he said, chaos could be heard; terror in women’s shrill screams; horror in the way men yelled, “Oh my God.”
Inside, he said, a kind of peace encapsulated him and the elderly woman.
He tried mightily to steal her mind from the shortness of breath. Valiantly, he told funny stories and asked her about the life she’d lived. Her answers were curt; she hadn’t the strength for elaboration.
“Then she died, man. My hand in hers, she died. It’s not something I normally do, but I admit, I cried after that.”
Of late, that’s the American way.
