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As it has every year since 2001, this day on the calendar conjures up a jangle of emotions and reflections. I remember so vividly the despair and helplessness I felt, being a New Yorker, watching the events unfold with disbelief, sitting in my Upper West Side apartment that night, five miles from the World Trade Center site, crying and shaking, unable to make sense of what had happened.
The first anniversary of the attacks was easily the hardest. Wall-to-wall coverage in the NYC and national media, everyone still so very raw and shocked and sad. The entire island of Manhattan seemed to be covered in a fog that first year, denser in certain areas and among certain groups of people. You could see it in people's faces and sense it almost instinctively when a stranger on the subway or the sidewalk was telling you with their eyes, "I know."
On the first anniversary of the attacks, the NY Times published a section featuring the names and photos of everyone who died. When you hear a death toll expressed as a number (in this case, 2,752), it's an abstract, intangible thing, hard to visualize in terms of real quantity.
I tried to avoid the news all day, but when I arrived at Jason's apartment that night, I saw he had taped each page of the NY Times spread along the wall in his hallway. Photo after photo after photo after photo. It was so utterly devastating to see all those faces--real people, in the flesh, not just a number in a news article. I stared at that wall for a long time, unable to tear myself away. I marveled at the magnitude. I mourned all those people I'd never met and the impact their deaths had on me, my friends, my family, my city.
I felt similarly the first time I visited the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, D.C. All those names etched in stone. You walk along that wall and the names just keep coming, thousands upon thousands. It is a simple, yet extremely powerful represenation. Similar, too, and with a great deal of personal meaning for me: the schoolchildren who collected 11 million paperclips to represent and honor the total lives lost during the Holocaust.
In successive years, the anniversary of 9/11 has gotten easier, but no less powerful. When I moved from NYC in 2004, I experienced the anniversary for the first time without people around me who'd been there. I cried in private that lonely year, but also in public, during a screening of "Fahrenheit 911." I was 3,000 miles from my city, watching the movie in a packed northern California cinema, not expecting imagery from that day to appear on the screen and make me explode in tears. The screen faded to black. The theatre fell silent; mine were the only sobs.
Poor souls jumped from the World Trade Center towers. That was, and still is, the part of that day's events that is most difficult for me to accept. I have tried putting myself in their shoes countless times, tried to imagine what they felt--the confusion, the terror, the helplessness--and I know I can never even begin to comprehend what they felt. I am nauseous just writing about it now. It's still so shocking, after all these years. Will it ever cease to be so?
Even now, whenever I find myself in lower Manhattan, my heart aches. When I go home to Brooklyn or cross the river into New Jersey and look back at the skyline, I feel lost and brokenhearted taking in its altered appearance. Something will always be missing from the view.
My heart is heavy today, though, like millions of Americans, I'm moving through my typical workday routine, drinking my coffee, reading my email, wishing co-workers a good morning and a good weekend. Lots of people saying "Never forget" today. As if we need to be told.
Posted by ayelet at September 11, 2009 12:32 PM