The Day Itself

It is now September 11. The day itself. Ten years ago by this time in the morning, the attacks had already happened. We were struggling through chaos and confusion down there, both internal and external.

Late last night, I experienced a sudden, fleeting, desperate need to cancel this whole thing and have nothing to do with the anniversary today. I wondered what I was doing here and what I expected to happen. And why, in heaven’s name, I’d come.

The answer is, I expect very little to happen. I made the decision not to go down at the actual time I did in 2001, but to get a little more sleep and go later. I wasn’t at the site when the planes hit and didn’t want to be there to mark the time the buildings fell now. With no disrespect meant to any of our fellow-mourners, those particular remembrances are a little lurid and depressing, and when I went down for the first anniversary to hear the bells toll and the names read, all I felt was a sense of heaviness and frustration that there wasn’t any catharsis or help in it.

This trip is not about re-living. It’s about remembering. And, even more than that, it’s about what’s there now. September 11, 2001, itself, is un-recapturable. The state of mind, the lost-ness, the drama are over. I’m going to see what’s been built, to commemorate the new thing that’s been created, and plant it in my mind to replace the gaping hole that was there.

The thing about deaths — even deaths as horrible and obscene as those of bin Laden’s victims in the World Trade Center — is that they don’t get lessened by time, but they do get established. Those deaths happened. They are part of folklore and story and memory and legend now. The world would be a better place if they hadn’t, and if all those people had been allowed to live peacefully, to work through their day on 9/11 and come home afterward. But since that didn’t happen, perhaps ten years later, we’re here to finally say goodbye.

Stay tuned. We’ll see what happens.