52 | SUNRAYS
SEPTEMBER 2013
ONLINE:
SCTXCA.ORG
I
t had been two months since terrorists
had flown planes into New York City’s
World Trade Center and, standing
near Ground Zero, Susan Hoppenworth
was surprised by the flames and chaos
that still surrounded the site. She had
temporarily closed her mental health
practice in Iowa to be in New York
where she felt she was more needed,
but struggled to manage her own feel-
ings in response to the devastation and
grief she found.
GROUND ZERO
The clients assigned to her by the Red
Cross were varied in ethnicity, age and
economic status, but all were taxed al-
most beyond endurance by their recent
experiences. There was a 50-year-old
man from India contemplating suicide.
He had been a limo driver at the World
Trade Center (WTC) and was now being
chastised by his family for having previ-
ously been so generous with his money
and now having none.
There was the 70-year-old woman whose
third floor apartment overlooked the
WTC, a block away. When she looked out
her window on 9/11 after hearing a loud
noise, she saw the first tower in flames;
watched in disbelief as a plane crashed
into the second tower; sawwith horror the
first tower fall and engulf the firefighters
on the street below. She was back in her
apartment when Susan saw her, but un-
able to approach those windows.
There was the debriefing with the em-
ployee group that worked in a building
overlooking the WTC site. The view from
their building, every day, was of dozens
of workers in suits, gloves, and masks,
cleaning away rubble and looking for
remains. They talked of walking 250
blocks that day to escape, a journey of
eight hours. They talked about their fear
of the asbestos in the air after the at-
tacks, and their hypersensitivity now to
smells, sounds and sensations.
Susan spent two weeks in NYC, doing
the best she could to bring a measure
of peace to lives that had been so ter-
ribly disrupted. Her father had been a
firefighter in Iowa for 40 years, and she
felt a special commitment to honor his
memory by her service. She kept a de-
tailed journal while in NYC to preserve
the memories.
ENDURANCE THROUGH DESIGN
When she came home, however, she felt
a need to capture the reactions, both her
own and those of other Americans, in a
more enduring way. Her media of choice
was quilting. Susan, a Sun City resident
since fall 2012, had learned traditional
quilting from her family―mother, grand-
mother and great-grandmother―but, in
1980, she moved from traditional quilt
patterns to smaller “art quilts” that
A
Quilter’s
Tribute
By Sandy Nielsen
Susan Hoppenworth, a resident quilt artist, whose many quilts capture and express
emotions, beauty and nature.
PHOTOS BY MAGGI JONES
