It’s that time of year again, when journalists and writers of all stripes feel the need to look back on September 11, 2001, and ask what it all means now. So, I may be guilty of cliché, but I think schmaltz can be avoided.
People of my generation used to think that our “Where were you when JFK was shot?” would be the Challenger disaster. Well, now we all have our own “Where were you on September 11?” stories.
For most of us, those stories are nothing but trivial reminiscences.
For some, though, that particular day in history isn’t the day the towers fell, it’s the day their father didn’t come home — or their brother, or their sister, or their fiancé, or their husband, or their aunt. They went missing. Hope burned. Hope faded. And then it was time to mourn and pick up the pieces.
While September 11 recedes into distant memory for those of us who watched it on TV — memorialized and paid homage to once a year, though infiltrating every single day of our lives in myriad ways — for the families and friends of the victims, it is still an open wound.
Last night, I met a friend I haven’t seen for a while, who is in town for the memorial services, at a bar in the East Village. He lost his brother on September 11. Really, we didn’t talk about it that much. I never met his brother. But sitting at the bar, over various types of alcohol, it was there. It was there when the TV over the bar, tuned to CNN, started playing footage from the attacks — footage of people falling from the towers. And it was there when it was time to go home and get a good night’s sleep, all the better for him to make it through another year’s memorial services.
Most of us only have to go to one funeral.
Anyway, my only real point is that as another September 11 passes, the events of that day will be used for the usual political purposes: to justify the war or to oppose the war, to promote one rebuilding scheme or to promote another.
Some of the families have been used as political pawns, and, to be frank, some have relished it as a chance to push various agendas — or, more understandably, to find meaning and purpose in the loss of their loved ones.
But for most of those whose families were ripped apart on that day, this is just the fourth September 11 that their loved ones didn’t come home — and it will be the fourth Thanksgiving, the fourth Christmas, the fourth Chanukah, the fourth New Year’s Eve.
And it will be every day for the rest of their lives.
hello ryan, your old colleague rod here from your previous employer. Excellent post. My own bit of recollection: a few days ago I was cleaning out my old source files–kept on excel–from when I worked at Institutional Investor mag, a trade pub covering The Street.
I covered bonds for them.
I cleared out the Sandler O’neill, fiduciary trust, cantor fitz and keefe bruyette woods files–hundreds of names, some i talked to regularly but never met, some via email, others i met a few times but that was it. reporters have weird relationships–much is exchanged in such short amounts of times.
I wonder why I kept those people on the source list.
anyhow, maybe its all over for me now–a reporter who deletes names from his files will never talk to those people again.
Rod, you will talk to them again, in your dreams. And this is not a bad thing. You honor their memory in that way, as you do here, by remembering them, until its time to let them go. That you do is the proof of your essential human-ness and goodness.
We all do.
-Skeej