--- title: I Lost My Wife in the Paris Attacks. This Is What Came After description: After his wife, Helene, was killed in the Paris terrorist attacks, Antoine Leiris had care for his 17-month old son alone. canonical: https://time.com/4512363/paris-attacks-memoir/ author: Antoine Leiris article:opinion: true article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2016-10-25T14:12:34.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-08-04T07:55:06.583Z article:section: Ideas og:title: I Lost My Wife in the Paris Attacks. This Is What Came After. og:description: 'Since then, I have been lost' og:url: https://time.com/4512363/paris-attacks-memoir/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt1c78a6a2af2587f6/6988a8380b72e3abb06eb30e/9780735222113.jpg?branch=production&width=746&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 746 og:image:height: 420 og:image:alt: 9780735222113.jpg og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: I Lost My Wife in the Paris Attacks. This Is What Came After. twitter:description: 'Since then, I have been lost' twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt1c78a6a2af2587f6/6988a8380b72e3abb06eb30e/9780735222113.jpg?branch=production&width=746&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # I Lost My Wife in the Paris Attacks. This Is What Came After. > Sponsored content. Supplied in partnership with TIME. 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Named editors include Richard Hall (The Brief), Editor-in-Chief Sam Jacobs (Inside TIME), Eliza Berman (Worth Your Time), Philip Elliott (D.C. Brief), Justin Worland (Future Proof) and Harry Booth (In the Loop). Health Matters is written by TIME's health desk. #### How do I sign up for a TIME newsletter? Go to time.com/newsletters, choose the newsletters you want and enter your email address. There is no cost and no subscription requirement. ## Video: Survivors of Terrorist Attacks on How They Moved Forward [Watch (HLS stream): Survivors of Terrorist Attacks on How They Moved Forward](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/Z0gQrqpv.m3u8) (7:17)  _Published 2016-09-09. Four terrorist attack survivors recounted the horrors of such acts of violence in a series of emotional interviews. The survivors who spoke to TIME all agreed on the need to march on in the face of fear._ by [Antoine Leiris](https://time.com/author/antoine-leiris/) ## Antoine Leiris Oct 25, 2016 2:12 PM UTC  Penguin Press by [Antoine Leiris](https://time.com/author/antoine-leiris/) ## Antoine Leiris Oct 25, 2016 2:12 PM UTC _After his wife,_ _Hélène_ _, was killed in the Paris terrorist attacks of November 2015, Antoine Leiris found himself suddenly having to care for his 17-month old son alone. In his new memoir,_ [You Will Not Have My Hate](https://www.amazon.com/dp/0735222118/?tag=timecom-20)_, based on a viral Facebook_ [_post_](https://www.facebook.com/antoine.leiris/posts/10154457849999947) _he wrote after the attacks, he grapples with what his life will be like now that he must fill the roles of both parents, and yet somehow live for himself._ Nov. 22, 2015, 9 a.m. I have just dropped Melvil at daycare. He didn’t cry. I move slightly to the side so he won’t see me watching him, behind one of those windowpanes in the center’s glass facade. It is like a big bowl where we can see the fish swimming around. Sometimes we tap on the glass to get them to notice us. He is already playing with his musical book. It is a journey, in the space of a few pages, around the world of instruments. The bandoneon played by a llama, the balalaika by a bear. A fox in a Venetian gondola plays the mandolin. At the daycare center, everyone knows. When I arrive each morning, every person I see wears a mask. The carnival of the dead. Even if I tell them the fable of a man who will not lose control, I cannot persuade them to take off the masks. I know that, for them, I am no longer me: I am a ghost, the ghost of Hélène. Melvil is alive. Almost as soon as he gets there, the masks come off. He enters on tiptoe, says good-bye to me, smiles, and one burst of laughter is all it takes for the funeral faces to fall to the bottom of the toy chest. It is time for me to go home. I pick up the mail before walking upstairs. The mailbox is barely even open before a flock of envelopes escapes from it, paper in different shapes and sizes scattering on the floor around me. There are thick envelopes, containing very long letters, a whole life shared with me. There are kraft envelopes, filled with children’s drawings for Melvil. There are simple postcards. For a moment, at least, words have replaced the little box’s usual stack of bills. I open the first envelope. Read the postcard inside it as I climb the stairs. Kind words sent from the United States. At the door of the apartment, I pick up a note left by a neighbor: “If you need me to help with your son, don’t hesitate to ask. Your neighbor across the hall.” I put the letters on the living room table. The color of one of the envelopes catches my eye. An old-fashioned off-white. A missive from another age. The paper has a letterhead. The man’s name is Philippe. I imagine a gray-haired gentleman sitting at his writing desk. I slip inside his words. He is reacting to the [message](https://www.facebook.com/antoine.leiris/posts/10154457849999947) I posted on Facebook. His letter is beautiful. I feel snug, curled up in this envelope, where the sun shines. Then, at the bottom of the page, like a signature, these words: “You are the one who was hurt, and yet it is you who gives us courage.” Watching from a distance, you always have the impression that the person who survives a disaster is a hero. I know I am not. I was struck by the hand of fate, that’s all. It did not ask me what I thought first. It didn’t try to find out if I was ready. It came to take Hélène, and it forced me to wake up without her. Since then, I have been lost: I don’t know where I’m going, I don’t know how to get there. You can’t really count on me. I think about Philippe, the author of this letter. I think about all the others who have written to me. I want to tell them that I feel dwarfed by my own words. Even if I try to convince myself that they are mine, I don’t know if I will live up to them. From one day to the next, I might drown. And suddenly, I am afraid. Afraid that I won’t be able to meet people’s expectations. Will I no longer have the right to lack courage? The right to feel angry. The right to be overwhelmed. The right to be tired. The right to drink too much and start smoking again. The right to see another woman, or not to see other women. The right not to love again, ever. Not to rebuild my life and not to want a new life. The right not to feel like playing, going to the park, telling a story. The right to make mistakes. The right to make bad decisions. The right to not have time. The right not to be present. The right not to be funny. The right to be cynical. The right to have bad days. The right to wake up late. The right to be late picking Melvil up from the daycare center. The right to mess up the “homemade” meals I try to make. The right not to be in a good mood. The right not to reveal everything. The right not to talk about it anymore. The right to be ordinary. The right to be afraid. The right not to know. The right not to want. The right not to be capable. _From_ [YOU WILL NOT HAVE MY HATE](https://www.amazon.com/dp/0735222118/?tag=timecom-20) _by Antoine Leiris, published by Penguin Press,_ _an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © 2016 by Librarie Arthème Fayard and translation copyright © 2016 by Sam Taylor._ ## Transcript [ BLANK_AUDIO ] [ MUSIC ] You have to convey the truth, but there's always a viewpoint. So is the story you are telling, terror, terror, terror, it's awful, it's awful everybody's afraid, everybody run for your lives. Or is the message, how can we as a people come together to make our world safer? [ MUSIC ] This story There's a lot pieces to it. As of yet unconfirmed that a plane has hit the World Trade Center. And you can see that [ CROSSTALK ] It's got tons of smoke billowing out of the south tower. Unconfirmed reports this morning that a plane has crashed into one of the towers. Around 8: 40 and I ended up going down into the lobby. I know as soon as I got out of the elevator and started towards the door on the west side of the north tower when you heard a thud. I walked outside through the revolving door and I looked up above me and I see smoke billowing out at the top. The North tower. I turned around and thought I had no place to go. I couldn't outrun the debris that was coming down at me so I felt that the safest place for me to go would be to go back into the building, into the lobby. But I got as far as in the revolving door where all the oxygen, the temperature went up inside the door to like, an oven. Next thing I know I was lying out- In the middle of the driveway that leads up to that overpass, and I had been blown out of the building. [ SOUND ] [ BLANK_AUDIO ] Hundreds dead, the number could rise. Among the dead, six- [ CROSSTALK ] The Taj Mahal Hotel has played a big role in my life since I was a little girl. My parents got married at the Taj, I got married at the Taj and it has a you know, great personal significance to me. What we really heard was a very loud crash, I thought I tree had fallen and you could see the host just kind of, you know... Looking through the window. A minute later she said that nobody move, somebody's dead in the corridor. I've never heard a gun being fired and we then realized they were gunshots. Many, many gunshots. The staff knew all the back passageways and the terrorists didn't and they used that tactical advantage. To save us, to save their guests rather than to save themselves. Hundreds of us should have died, I mean we shouldn't be here. A peace rally has turned deadly in the Turkish capital Ankara after [ INAUDIBLE ]. This dangerously divided country is even more divided now. [ FOREIGN ] [ FOREIGN ] [ NOISE ] [ FOREIGN ] [ FOREIGN ] [ FOREIGN ] [ MUSIC ] Post traumatic stress is very strange. It makes a situation be right below the surface. [ FOREIGN ] [ FOREIGN ] The sounds of the second plane striking the building and the noise it made when it struck the building, it must have been a real whining High pitched sound that right to this day goes through me like a knife. [ MUSIC ] It's very traumatic, when somebody has died, and you have lived. And that survivor's guilt is real, and it's universal. It's something to process, but then it's something that will either make you, or break you. [ MUSIC ] It remains to me, as amazing of a place as it Always was. I really felt protected there. I felt that people saved me there. And not only the people having [ UNKNOWN ] to say, but the spirit of that place, those walls. It saved me, it saved my husband, it saved so many of us. [ FOREIGN ] [ foreign 00: 06 ] I remember the first time I came into the city, it was very difficult for me, I mean I, walking down the narrow streets, around Times Square and stuff like that and I spent most of my time looking up between the buildings. [ foreign ] [ FOREIGN ] [ MUSIC ] In every place in the world we've had all these attacks lately. And they've happened under the name of Islam or jihad or whatever it is. But you know what? Terrorists are not people with religion. Terrorism is too powerful of a It to ever go away. The challenge for people is to understand that fear of that tactic and not allow themselves to be swayed. What are ways to combat these things that are happening? [ FOREIGN ] [ FOREIGN ] What I have felt from my own personal experience with that, being a New Yorker and having lived through 9 / 11, is Said under extraordinary times ordinary people become extraordinary. [ MUSIC ] ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"OpinionNewsArticle","@id":"https://time.com/4512363/paris-attacks-memoir/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/4512363/paris-attacks-memoir/"},"headline":"I Lost My Wife in the Paris Attacks. 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