Lessons in grief: Las Vegans seek support, counseling to cope with attacks

Tuesday, Oct. 2, 2001 | 8:18 a.m.

Life will never be the same for Karen Lockhart-Chavez.

The 58-year-old employee of Bechtel Nevada was 2,500 miles from the World Trade Center when two hijacked airliners crashed into the center's two towers on Sept. 11, but her heart was with the thousands of people who died in the terrorist attack.

"I didn't know anybody there, fortunately it hasn't touched me in that way, but it has made me look at life differently," Lockhart-Chavez said. "Family and friends always have been important, but now they are more important. Now, my job is just a job, part of my daily routine. It's just not as important as it once was."

She was getting ready for work the morning of the attack. The television was on.

"News broke in about the first tower accidentally being hit by an airplane," Lockhart-Chavez said. "Then, all of a sudden, the other plane flew into the second tower and I knew it was deliberate.

"I went into the bedroom and woke up my husband and said they are attacking us. I became engrossed in the event. I couldn't leave the TV."

Finally, she went to work at Bechtel, which operates the Nevada Test Site north of Las Vegas, but the company sent all employees home for the day.

"Everyone was very depressed over the loss of all those lives," Lockhart-Chavez said. "It just made you sick, all the devastation."

The night of the attack she was to attend a group counseling session on grief and bereavement at the St. Thomas Catholic Church on Smoke Ranch Road. The weekly sessions had begun several weeks earlier and she was attending to help cope with grief about other issues that were bothering her. The group didn't meet that night.

Instead the church held mass.

"We were off work Wednesday and came back Thursday. It was very difficult, but I think people understand you need to get back to business, back to your normal life," Lockhart-Chavez said. "But what is normal now? Life will never be the same."

Jo Anne Mathis, another member of the grief and bereavement group sponsored by the church, said she was in shock as she watched the television coverage of the planes crashing into the towers.

"I knew I had to go to work, but I was worried," Mathis, 56, said. "I don't have any family here in Las Vegas. All my family lives elsewhere and my first concern was for their safety. My son is in Chicago and I thought the Sears Tower might be the next target."

Her son doesn't work in the Sears Tower, but in her state of mind she thought he might be in danger.

"Once I got to work that day, everybody was feeling the same," Mathis, a quality improvement specialist, said. "Everyone was worried about their families, and about the country. Everyone was distraught. People were crying. Radios were on all day."

Over the next several days Mathis, a native of Chicago who moved to Las Vegas in 1994, said she couldn't pull herself away from the news.

"I got into a syndrome of staying up very late watching all the news I could late into the night," she said. "I fell into an odd sleep cycle. I watched everything I could until, finally, it got to the saturation point. I couldn't watch it anymore. I broke down into tears. I felt very isolated.

"I would like to go see my family (in California and Chicago) but I'm afraid to fly right now."

Mathis said she has seen a whole range of reactions to the terrorist attacks.

"Some people are more angry than others. Some are outspoken. Some are very quiet," she said.

Grief sessions

Counselor Aurore Leigh Barrett organized the grief and bereavement sessions at the church.

"It's open to all types of people who are suffering grief and bereavement from such things as a divorce, job loss, death of a child or loss of a pet," Barrett said. "All of these things bring grief."

The terrorist attacks prompted Barrett to create a special session for those suffering stress due to the horrific events. The first meeting was held Saturday. More may be held if there is a demand.

"There is not a direct connection between the event and the people in the session," Barrett said. "These are just average people who have been very affected."

One woman is upset because she said her husband's death was hastened by the attack.

"Her husband died a week later," Barrett said. "He hadn't been real well ... he had a weak heart. He couldn't stop watching (the news). She feels stress from that triggered a heart attack."

Even though people may not have had a direct connection to the event, many have been affected by it.

"Loss of sleep is one of the biggest problems," Barrett said. "One gentleman said he just can't sleep. This is in his mind all the time -- man's inhumanity to man, the disbelief that somebody could do that."

She said the grief from the attacks has triggered other feelings of grief that have been long forgotten by some people.

"Grief will stay inside of you until something brings it to the surface," Barrett said. "If you haven't gone through the grieving process, then the grief will stay there, hidden inside. Then, something like this hits and brings up so many things (out of the past)."

Barrett said there are many symptoms of grief, among them fatigue, nausea, muscle tremors, difficulty in breathing, elevated blood pressure, thirst and headaches.

People may find it difficult to think, feel disoriented and suffer from nightmares. They may feel guilty, anxious, fearful, depressed or helpless.

"A lot of times people may have physical symptoms of grief, but they think it may be something else, the flu or something," Barrett said.

She also said most children locally have not been deeply affected by the attacks.

"Children don't appreciate the magnitude of the event," Barrett said. "They don't understand the concept of finality, and they have been desensitized by movies and video games."

Those who are suffering from grief, she said, need to talk about their feelings.

"Going to a psychologist is not necessarily the best thing to do," Barrett said. "Just going to a group of peers and talking and knowing that nobody is going to judge you may be best.

"We are afraid of being judged. We think somebody is going to laugh at us, so you need to go to a place where you feel fairly secure, where you will be allowed to say that you just couldn't sleep because you were so worried, or that you felt so much empathy for those people that you took on their pain.

"You have to get it out of you. This is the problem of grief of any kind. We keep it inside, and the longer we keep it inside the more it builds up, and the more it builds up the more difficult it becomes. There is a grieving process that you have to go through."

Professional counseling

Psychologist Kevin Roby, of Southern Nevada Adult Mental Health Services, said the terrorism on the East Coast is the first time the nation has simultaneously experienced such a horrendous event.

"There is not really anything to compare with this," Roby said. "With today's instan- taneous news, the entire nation watched the whole thing happen. Everyone may not have been under the falling rubble per se, but they did watch live all of this happening, knowing there were people in the buildings.

"This was up close and personal, not something you read about the second day. We all experienced it first hand. This wasn't sanitized."

Many people who watched the events unfold on television were traumatized by what they saw. Conversely, many who were at the scene and saw it in person were not dramatically affected.

"You can't predict who is going to be the most affected by something like this," Roby said. "Proximity is not necessarily a factor."

Dr. David Rosin, medical director of Southern Nevada Adult Mental Health Services, said he was at McCarran International Airport when the attacks occurred. All flights were canceled and he returned to his office. When he arrived, a woman who was distraught over the attack was already there.

"She was profoundly upset and seeking our services," Rosin said. "She was upset that her son (who is in the military reserves) might be activated."

The agency has several field offices around Clark County. All of them were put on alert immediately after the attacks. Counselors were told to be prepared for a possible onrush of people who were distressed.

The flood of patients didn't come, but a few people did.

One person even said that because he bought an Abbott and Costello movie he may have caused the attack.

"In his reality, he caused it because the movie took place in the desert and it was about Arabs," Mark Stets, a counselor with the agency, said. "That was an extreme case, but we have to deal with that kind of extreme -- all the way from reality based issues to the sub-issues of their own (pre-existing) illness.

"We've had high-functioning clients come in worried about how this was going to affect their world. A college student came in, very concerned that her boyfriend was of draft age and how was it going to affect her life? She was wondering how her world was going to be impacted.

"Another college student, an everyday, high-functioning person, was dealing with grief issues over her father's suicide and then this came along on top of it -- so we see a lot of building upon of very dramatic layers (of grief)."

Rosin compared the emotional stress brought about by the attacks to the stress veterans experienced following the Vietnam War.

"In World War II soldiers fought on the front lines as a whole unit and they knew who the enemy was and they had the support of people back home," Rosin said. "In Vietnam there were no front lines and there was no popular support for (the soldiers)."

The experiences in Vietnam caused many soldiers to experience what became known as post-traumatic stress disorder.

"At some level, most of the cities in this country are undergoing some kind of stress response (similar to that)," Rosin said.

He said the responses may include everything from insomnia to increased patriotism.

"The issue, in my mind, is that unless people pay attention to the stresses they have now relative to this incident -- whether it is a loss of appetite or sleep disturbance -- we will have a whole new bout of post-traumatic stress disorder, whether you were in New York or not."

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