The Sunday Stories

[[Ed. Note: Part One of The Staircase was published back in January. If you have not read it here it is. The Staircase, is a first draft—part journal, part narrative experiment—written over time and published in parts on my Substack. I say “parts” and not chapters because The Staircase is not a finished story. It just might become a record of becoming one. But it also may never be finished.

None of these stories have been previously published. They all existed on my computer in parts, fragments, and ideas for decades. I’m dusting them off now and writing them to try to make sense of my life. The stories will move across time chronologically, and by experience. Some rooted in grief and memories, others may explore fun relationships, career changes. Like writing a memoir while still living inside one, I might evan take an unexpected turn toward reality television. (If I get that far). I’m taking it bird-by-bird.

Part One began in 1999, in the aftermath of the funerals of my husband Anthony, and my friends and cousins Carolyn Bessette and John Kennedy. Part Two is the beginning of an attempt to live inside grief: to navigate loss, survivor’s guilt, shifting identities, and the long, uneven process of rebuilding a life after a catastrophic tragedy.

Ultimately, this is an attempt to create narrative out of what often felt fragmented — to make sense of somethings that a close friend once described as “a life in extremes.”]]

“In the winter of 2001, ABC News along with Jerry Bruckheimer green-lit a series titled “Profiles from the Frontlines,” a documentary series that chronicled the post-Sept. 11 military activities in Afghanistan. I immediately volunteered for the two month assignment. There was no place in the world I’d rather be than the other side of Hell.”

– Carole Radziwill

Kabul / New York City / 2002

There is a zoo in Kabul, Afghanistan.

I know how that sounds. But there it is — in the middle of a city still smelling of war, with unexploded ordnance scattered inside its walls and bombed-out buildings ringing its perimeter, there is a zoo. The Kabul Zoo. And on a Sunday afternoon in the spring of 2002, I went to it with a Polaroid camera.

Most of the animals had not survived the war. Marjan the lion had been mortally wounded after a General, in retaliation for Marjan mauling his brother, threw a grenade into his cage. Donatella the bear had been repeatedly slashed by Taliban soldiers. His nose had fallen off. The other residents — the ones who had not been eaten, or killed, or simply frightened to death by years of bombardment — were gone. Only the birds remained, unscathed in their cages, as if they had simply decided not to notice any of it.

And yet…