“When her father advised parishioners to seek psychiatric help at Harlem Hospital, they often responded, “‘I’m not going there; they’ll strap me down on a gurney and have the police take me to Bellevue. And if I go there, they’ll send me along to Manhattan State Hospital, where/

I’ll never be heard from again.’ … Wertham encouraged staff to assess the social context of patients carefully and to consider even responses that might appear “crazy” to be based in a disordered society and not simply a disordered self.”

In a conversation with my mother today, 9mo after August 4th, she shared with me a conversation she’d had with her neighbors about the horror they felt when the reality that they often ‘forgot’ they had lost a cousin in the explosion dawned on them when they visited their aunt.

The ‘forgetting’ of collective loss and pain is not simply a psychological response to an incomprehensible event but a direct result of state decision making (or lack thereof), narratives built around the explosion (calling it an ‘opportunity’), and continued escalating crisis.