I wasn't there. I didn't know anyone personally affected. Nonetheless I felt traumatized. For months, years. Maybe I shouldn't have been. I can't imagine being there or losing someone precious in that fire and dust. But it was an earthquake of such magnitude that it sent shock waves to every corner. Creating fissures of fear and doubt. I felt off kilter. I saw a different look in our young daughters' eyes. And watched it color their world. Forever.
I remember thinking at the time we will go through the normal stages of grieving. The immediate reaction of coming together would subside as it does when someone suffers a tragic and unexpected loss. Neighbors, family, friends hold each other, then flock to your home and help you through it but then go back to their lives and you are left to sort out the pieces. At some point, you have to deal with it in your heart and reality. On your own terms. The past decade, marked by painful war, economic malaise and angry politics, has been a long road. Denial. Anger. Bargaining. Certainly some are stuck in one stage or another.
I believe, though, our collective souls are in a sort of depression stage. All this bickering. And cynicism. But. But. I see a deep well of resiliency. A glimmer that we will emerge from this shadow through grit and grace. In survivors directly affected by 9/11. In myself, my children now grown. Resiliency, a skill needed in times grown hard, unpredictable. Necessary for reweaving the nation's fabric and taking us to the next stage. Acceptance. When it will come God only knows. Or something like that. My faith is topsy-turvy; God is more mystery than certainty to me now. Here's hoping it's soon. Nothing will ever be the same, but I do want to see that brilliant blue sky again.
Update 09/09 8:38 AM, approaching the hour of the 2001 attacks--I just heard on NPR more reflections on 9/11. A poignant one about much-loved Father Mychal Judge, who personified the selflessness of first responders and the anguish of loss. I then remembered. Again. That sky. It's a piercing and common thread. As Brian Gallagher, New York Observer, writes---
No one remembers now, but there had been hurricane talk then too. A storm called Erin had been making its way up the Eastern Seaboard, causing fussy weather for the Mid-Atlantic states, until an incoming Canadian air mass nudged her out over the North Atlantic.And this from New York Magazine-- "Blue, what everyone would remember first"
National Weather Service meteorologist Gary Conte was working at the New York-area station that day. “I remember it being a very refreshing day,” he said, “with a nice, cool air mass coming in. And it was the first day that the air mass, this cool dry air mass, was moving southeast from Canada, so it felt even better…Without looking at the maps, I remember that much.”
It felt like the first day of fall, the kind of day for which the word “lovely” was made, the clear, autumnal sky at once flat and deep, stretched taut over the city.
At 7 am, the temperature was 67 degrees. At 8 am, it was 70. By 9 am, it had risen to 73. But by then, no one was thinking about the weather.
The visibility is listed at 10 miles, which means if you’d looked north, you could have seen the first plane skirting in low over the Hudson a little less than 30 seconds before it hit. But then who would think to look for that? Who could foresee such an intrusion, and on a day like that?
Much was made at the time of W.H. Auden’s poem “September 1, 1939,” but a reread shows it to contain very little analog, save the titular month. But one passage does pertain: “Into this neutral air/ Where blind skyscrapers use/ Their full height to proclaim/ The strength of Collective Man.”
The “neutral air” here gives pause, however. Such air can no longer be neutral, if you were here. Ever since, when we wake to a day like that, the crisp, clear sky is not without a hint of menace. The memory of that morning passes across the mind, and the idyll is twinged with anxiety.
The morning of September 11 was, as many would observe, strikingly clear, the sky so blue it made the subsequent events that much more jarring:
I suppose it is as life. Bright beauty, profound joy coexisting with the dark. The difficult. The painful. Coming to acceptance. Separating what makes us happy from what makes us weep. Somehow making peace with the contradiction. Then. Hope. Love. Trust again. Our human need for all those things will dictate the course, even if our politics stay calcified and our institutions wobble and weave. At some point we'll all want to live, simply live, live simply, under that brilliant blue sky again.“A bright morning sun lit a cloudless blue sky” (1); “a beautiful blue-sky day”(2); “the kind of bright blue sky that people who love New York love best in New York”(3); “what airline pilots call ‘severe clear’: seemingly infinite visibility”(4); “a crystal blue bowl of morning sky”(5); “it was not just blue, it was a light, crystalline blue, cheerful and invigorating”(6); “a late-summer sky so astoundingly blue it made the whole Northeast sparkle”(7); “almost alarmingly blue”(8); “9/11 weather”(9).
1. Don Brown, America Is Under Attack, September 11, 2001: The Day the Towers Fell.
2. John Avlon, Giuliani speechwriter, “The Resilient City,” an essay in Kenneth T. Jackson and David Dunbar’s Empire City anthology.
3. New York Times.
4. David Remnick, The New Yorker.
5. The Hartford Courant.
6. George McKenna, The Puritan Origins of American Patriotism.
7. Robert Mann and Miryam Ehrlich Williamson, Forensic Detective: How I Cracked the World’s Toughest Cases.
8. Wendy Doremus, widow of photojournalist Bill Biggart, who was killed covering the attack, Running Toward Danger: Stories Behind the Breaking News of 9/11, by Cathy Trost and Alicia C. Shepard;
9. Ed Park, novelist-essayist, New York Times, 2008.
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