FSS Newsletter :: September 2002

FSS Spotlight :: Remembering September 11th One Year Later

by Sam Harper

I was driving my 13 year-old son to school. It was overcast. I was wearing blue jeans. His shoes were untied. My knee was sore from hiking the day before. The car smelled faintly of spearmint gum. At 7:45am, Pacific Standard Time, I turned on the radio. I have no memory of the rest of our drive, until we arrived at school. My son was crying. I snapped off the radio, hugged him and said, “We’re going to be okay.” I wasn’t sure that was true.

Pieces of memories crowd the tragic days in my life. When John F. Kennedy was shot, I was in a second grade classroom. My teacher made the announcement. She had dark tearstains on her brown shirt. It was cloudy for the rest of the day. Physical education was cancelled. My father didn’t drink that night.

When a “Special Report” interrupted the game show I was watching to announce that Martin Luther King, Jr. had been shot, I was eating a TV dinner. The pork was mealy. It was raining. There was tin foil on the antennae. I was losing at “Monopoly” when I heard that my grandfather had died. I was playing with the top hat. The rug was orange.

Our lives are punctuated by tragedy, each event challenging our faith, our identity, and our relationship to reality. When a loved one is taken prematurely by cancer, or never emerges from a foggy stretch of Interstate, or is forced to choose between burning to death or jumping into space 107 floors above New York City, the assumptions that define our daily lives
come into question. Suddenly, even the words we use for comfort--“We’re going to be okay.” “I’ll see you later.” “Everything’s going to be alright.”—seem unreliable.

So, an accounting takes place. I remember the things I can count on, the things I know are real--My son’s untied shoes, the smell of the car. I suppose, these details provide a framework for the emotion that accompanied my horror, something to believe in, a place to start again, a foundation for rebuilding.

I returned to my daily tasks on September 11th, doing the dishes, taking out the garbage, reading to the children, hoping they’d provide some relief from sadness. Routine heals, I thought. But this tragedy was unlike any other. A woman who was aboard Flight 11 lived across the street from my son’s best friend. A man to whom we sold a sailboat over the summer was killed in the south tower. There were husbands left without wives, children
left without fathers, cities left without fireman and policemen, the unsung heroes of our daily lives were dead, wounded or at risk. It shook me deeply. I looked at their faces in the newspapers for an explanation. Why were they taken? Where did they go? Who would be next?

There is no rational explanation for a tragedy on this scale. There is only the kind of helplessness that causes great pieces of self-definition to fall away. Things that we thought were true, things that we thought important were gone by mid-day. Baseball, movies, restaurant food, that little extra roll of fat that we’ve been trying to get rid of it, none of it mattered. “Family”, “priorities” “caring for one another”, “love”, and “perspective” were the words I heard most among my fellow bereaved. Like the rescue workers, we were all digging for evidence that things were going to be all right.

In that search for meaning, an entire nation has gathered together as family, one people, nakedly heart broken, expressing love, grief, concern for the wounded, for the dead, and for each other. Ground Zero is us. We aren’t just standing in the ruins, we are the ruins. We are
a living memory of that day. All we have left is each other, and the last reliable word—Love.

And that’s all we need to rebuild.