I was utterly determined not to blog about the 9/11 anniversary, especially since I’ve been so long absent from my own blog that returning to talk of other people’s pain seemed…. Well. It seemed unseemly. And so I will talk instead of how deeply touched I am by the National September 11 Memorial that was unveiled today at the site of the World Trade Towers.
Click the photo to see the entire slideshow.
The thing about these photos that makes me weep is not the images of the families, although they are powerful and evocative. No, it’s the captions and what they taught me about the design of the memorial. It’s so thoughtful. It’s all about human things. The sound of ever-flowing water is designed to be a comfort to visitors. The names of the dead are arranged in affinity groups — co-workers, friends, remembered together. The pools are deep and wide, like life. There is room for everyone.
I don’t particularly want a grave. I don’t need there to be a place where the last of me lies, where people can visit. But when Nicola and I go to the park, we sit on a bench that someone paid for in memory of a loved one. We look out at the water and the sky, and we talk about life. That bench gives us comfort, and perspective, and a place to acknowledge the beauty of the world. And around the bench, life goes on.
Here’s to life.
Nicola took this photo from the bench.
Thank you. (RIP Kelly Ann Booms, Sept. 11, 2001 – passenger on flight 11.)
Tag-jumping on J’s comment that hasn’t posted yet — I’m not sure if our grief counts on this, as it’s the grief of lost opportunity rather than the grief of losing a close friend. Kelly Ann and we share great-grandparents, but we never met her because her family branch moved to Ohio. She was by all accounts an incredible person – very giving and very strong-willed, which is how you spell “Booms”. We probably never would have met her in the course of our life, but to know that we, by another’s action, are permanently prevented from ever meeting her . . . I’m at a loss as how to describe the feeling.
I am forcibly reminded of an annonymous quote that I can’t get out of my mind: “In wars of ideology, it’s people that get killed.”
And when those 400 oak trees grow into their own magnificence, they will transform the entire neighborhood with bird song, shade, glorious fall color and acorns on the sidewalks. They will encourage people to linger in a neighborhood that was an altar to work. Eight thousand people now live where once there were only a thousand–or in NYC terms, empty.
Yesterday I woke to the sound of sirens in my flood-ravaged upstate town. My chest was tight all day: 9/11 stirs complicated feelings for me, as likely to make me scream as weep. This anniversary, invested with more cultural potency than the others, coming so close to the Days of Awe, the reckoning of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, in the midst of another disaster… well. I could not find my voice.
New York is my city. Its mark will live forever in my voice, my eyes, and my stride. Faded, sure, because I have now lived away far longer than I did there, and never knew it as an adult, having left at seventeen. Current residents don’t call me a New Yorker, not even my friends. They would bristle that I dare call it my city.
That memorial is spot-on because it created a space that balances stillness with life. As I looked at the ads in the Sunday Times, I was struck by how many companies used the image of the twin beams of light that now symbolize the towers, another image of hope. For me, the New Yorker captured it best, with their first cover of the ghostly dark towers, and their latest, with the reflection of the towers in the river.
We are marked. We are changed.
We brim with life–if we choose. May you know and spread joy in the New Year.
@J/S. Zack — Grief is grief. No one gets to say whose grief is valid and whose isn’t, certainly not me. I am sorry for your loss.
I think my hinkiness around this topic is based on how many people I’ve met in life who have to make some else’s tragedy all about themselves. OMG, I used to take a yoga class with the sister of someone whose husband was killed on 9-11! As I say, I don’t get to be the arbiter of someone else’s grief, but I do not want to ever be that person, you know?
There are so many kinds of grief. Community grief is different from the grief of personal loss. Existential grief is different from the grief that upends an individual’s daily life — takes her home or her family or her job or her marriage or her physical safety or some aspect of her health.
@Barbara, nice to see you.
@Jill, it’s an interesting thing to identify oneself with a place and yet not be able to “claim” it anymore in the way you’re describing. I have those places too.