Tangible Evidence of Our Broken Hearts

We have passed another anniversary of the Twin Towers being brought down by terrorists, as well as an airplane of our citizens and a horrible crash into the Pentagon.  All of us who lived through it were affected by it.  You could not see the video without feeling sick all over.  I was in my living room and my son called.  He said to turn on the tv.  When the second airplane hit, he said, “They will come down, now. No building can take that.”  I said, “Surely not!” But they did indeed fall.  

I went to New York.  I saw the hole in the ground that left a hole in our hearts.  I saw the seven buildings around the towers, fire damaged, windows missing.  In the church next door, window blinds caught in the branches of a tree moved in the breeze.  You could see all the way into the subway below where the buildings had once been.  Pictures of dead and missing were pinned to a fence nearby.  The fireman on the scene thanked all of us who came.  There were no words of comfort to give, but the silence of all who were there spoke volumes.

My son is a firefighter.  I took an expensive Manhattan taxi to Macy’s and bought him an FDNY t-shirt and mailed it off.  He had stood on the circle in the middle of Indianapolis to honor the fallen, now he would have the shirt.  Other firefighters could not get over him in the t-shirt.  It was tangible, touchable, wearable evidence of our broken hearts.  I saw a painting where a ghost firefighter is handing a victim of the towers’ collapse up to God.  It was too sad to own. 

Now, all these years later, it is time to move on.  And that does not take one iota of tragedy and pain away from that place and that time. I promised myself that I would remember the victims of that day when I looked at the sky.  And I do.  If you were there, that won’t be hard for you to take in.  If you were not there, nothing we say or show you can compare.

There are people who are still identifying victims of that day.  They tell the families when they find the proof through DNA.  Some families hold a remembrance and bury the remains. Others do not want to deal with anything connected to that day.  They had no choice but to go on.  They fought their way out, made life work, and they just cannot go back. We have to respect that.  There is a place for remains that are not taken by family. 

For most of us, it is simply time to remember that day as history.  It’s not a choice.  We did not choose who passed away that day.  We seldom have a choice in where evil wanders.  But like wars before then and since then, eventually the dead belong to God and life must be lived. Do not apologize if the sadness fades.  Do not wonder that it is now indelible to our history but not to our workday. 

My father was a soldier in World War II.  Remembering any part of it meant he didn’t sleep for days.  Until revisionist history, he wouldn’t talk about it.  He did talk about it when others who were not there said it did not happen.  But it cost him a great deal of peace.  A man in his town found out that Daddy was in the same unit as a friend of his.  Their soldier did not return.  He asked Daddy to sit and talk with them.  Daddy refused.  It was more than he could manage.  His heart was damaged; he was old and tired.  He had spent his life trying to leave the sadness.  But the sister came, anyway.  She drove several hundred miles to ask about her brother’s death.  Daddy met with her.  He told her how her brother died.  He assured her it was instant and the pain was for those who saw it happen and those who were left.  She said she just had to know.  They were people united in a pain most of us do not know. 

Most of us do not know the pain of September 11, 2001.  Not even those of us who were there that awful day know what the families know.  If those friends and relatives can go on, so can we.  There is no opportunity for going back in time.  Time drags us forward.  It says, “Come on!  Tomorrow is coming!  I will not leave you here! Up!  Off of your knees! See the sun come up!?!  See the new day!” And no amount of protest will be heard.  Time does not believe in survivor’s guilt.  It believes only in those who see tomorrow.  And it bids them do something good, something kind, something to mark the day it is giving them. Accept the new day.  Go on.  Lay your wreath, learn your lessons, and honor your dead by living.  It is what they would have done had the situations been reversed.