The photo, taken by Fred Conrad, shows a shelf in the bedroom of Emily D’Ambrosi, a New Jersey teen whose father, Jack, died at the World Trade Center. Competing for limited space amid the annual totems of passage and achievement–SECOND PLACE, WOODCLIFF LAKE RUN, 1997, WOODCLIFF LAKE SOCCER ASSOCIATION 2000 JUNIOR DIVISION,–is a brown box marked DAD, MAY 25, 1956/SEPTEMBER 11, 2001.
Like the trophies, with their iconography of winged feet, soccer balls, bat-holding softball players, the urn is marked with its own icon: a fish on a line.
The picture is more than just sad–those are Emily’s father’s ashes in that box, after all–but it is a perfect encapsulation of what today’s memorial services at Ground Zero, the Pentagon and in Shanksville, Pennsylvania were really about. They were not about this magical notion of “closure,” not about tidying up the loose ends of mourning in time to meet some media-imposed 365-day deadline.
These ceremonies were about one thing: Finding out, after one year, where all of us have put the horrific events of September 11. Finding out the answer to the question: To wallow or not to wallow.
For the media, of course, the wallowing was initially ideal. For an entire year, images of loss, unreconstructed mourning, unrepentant grief filled our popular culture. Today, it seems the media wants to shift messages. On the “Today” show yesterday, for example, Katie Couric asked a widow how she would feel on September 11, expecting–almost demanding–some sort of perky paraphrase of that song from “Annie.”
Yes, the widow was sure that the sun would come out, she wasn’t ready to say that it would come out tomorrow. And isn’t that the point? Is there something about one year that demands that the book be closed? What of the people who don’t find that magical “closure” in the 365-time frame?
Indeed, another widow told “Today’s” Matt Lauer, “I get crazy” when friends tell her the time has come to “move on.” Later, James Kallstrom, who now runs New York State’s Office of Public Security after a long career in the FBI, told Lauer that he finds great comfort in the fact that “we’re better than [the terrorists] are.” But seconds later, even Kallstrom felt his feet shifting underneath him on the sliding tectonic plates that is life in post-September 11 New York, admitting that perhaps we are not better because, indeed, we were unable to prevent the dastardly acts of terror themselves.
Finally, all the talk gave way to the ceremony itself, which began with a moment of silence at 8:46 a.m.–the instant when the first hijacked 767 slammed into the North Tower. The ceremony, as devised by New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg, was designed to be short on oration and long on narration. Instead of asking our elected officials–our leaders, you might call them–to frame the events of one year ago or interpret their meaning for a nation still challenged, Bloomberg made the controversial decision to allow no speechifying, just rote recitation of American history’s greatest hits.
So after the moment of silence, New York Gov. George Pataki stepped to the podium and offered his interpretation of a sixth-grade civics student reading Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. You didn’t know who to feel bad for: the bland Pataki (who is no Lincoln), the muzzled Pataki speech writers (who were never given the chance to update Lincoln’s message for our times), or the victims’ families (who were forced to share their individual grief with soldiers in a very different war two centuries ago).
But then the city’s once and future hero, former mayor Rudy Giuliani, moved to the podium and began reading the list of the World Trade Center’s 2,801 dead–and the genius of Bloomberg’s vision began, ever so agonizingly, to reveal itself.
The list was still in the Bs when the enormity of the attack struck me again. After an agonizing half-hour–and still in the Ds!–the last line of poet laureate Billy Collins’s epic “The Names,” which he read at last week’s joint session of Congress, came to mind: “So many names, there is barely room on the walls of the heart.”
But sometime later–about an hour into it and still in the Ks–the gavel of each name became a cudgel, numbing my sensitivity and instilling the idea that perhaps “moving on” means that we must lose the sorrow of each individual tree in this forest of misery. Even my wife, who listened to the first 200 or 300 names with a rapt attention–as if allowing her attention to drift for one second would desecrate the entire memorial–found herself leafing through a nearby magazine rather than confront each individual’s pain.
And then sometime later–we had reached the letter S–my phone, which on any normal day is a basic lifeline to the outside world, began ringing again. This time, the ring urged me out of the past, with its slow-motion, endlessly replayed loop of pain, and back into the present, with its promise of renewal through a return to mundane normalcy.
And that is what ceremonies like this are supposed to do, I guess. Remember the dead, but respect the push-pull quality of mourning, the inexact science of “moving on.” Whether we get stuck there, however, is not entirely up to us as individuals, but all of us as a nation.
And there is still so much work to be done. The World Trade Center site, after all, is still a big empty hole in the ground, surrounded by smaller buildings that were designed to complement the now-absent Twin Towers. Currently, the city is paralyzed by debate over Ground Zero’s future, but the ice is beginning to melt, at least, on discussing the once-impossible notion of rebuilding something monumental.
My own New York Post has been open about it, but now, even the New York Times has begun a subtle campaign to remind people that a spiritual void can not be filled without also filling the physical one.
I saw that on Tuesday, when the normally-staid Times op-ed page ran photographs showing how prominently the image of the World Trade Center figured in pre-9-11 graphics–from the silhouette in a logo for a Mexican restaurant to the skyline cutout on an oversized key in a locksmith’s sign.
And on Sunday, the Times magazine ran a story about the building of the Twin Towers, an article that recalls the days when New York City built ambitious things, why those things became symbols, and why those symbols eventually became targets.
It’s what Kallstrom–and Lincoln before him–was saying. We are better than those terrorists because we are going to do more than just plant 16 acres of grass at Ground Zero. We are going to dream again.
I wasn’t sure of that before yesterday, but hearing The List made me certain. The final act came when New Jersey Gov. Jim McGreevey closed the ceremony by reading a portion of the Declaration of Independence. Not only was I struck by the utter inappropriateness to this reading–indeed, were the men who destroyed those buildings “created equal” to us? Are there any “truths” that are “self-evident” anymore?–but McGreevey’s reading again validated Bloomberg’s vision of a speech-free ceremony.
Nothing, not the Declaration of Independence, not the Gettysburg Address, not the reassuring voice of Rudy Giuliani, not even the walls of Billy Collins’s heart, can compete with The List.
