New York was the highlight of my 10 day trip to the Eastern Seaboard in 2011.
9/11 and Ground Zero were never very far from discussion it seemed as we chatted with tour guides and local New Yorkers.
It takes very little to get a New Yorker to talk about where they were on that day, how far they had to walk to get to safety, and how worried they were about friends who worked in the World Trade Center. Our tour guide from Kansas was scheduled to stay at the Trade Center Marriott hotel on September 15th…she is aware of how close she came to being in the middle of a tragedy.
We had lunch at this fabulous diner joint just across the street from the rebuilding site…it’s a bustling place now, but there were years where the owner struggled to keep it afloat as the Ground Zero stopped being a place of commerce for a long time.
The experience of 9/11 seemed close at all times in the city of New York.
I remember that day in Winnipeg as well. Like so many, I remember exactly where I was, what I was doing, and how it felt.
I was working at Misericordia Care Center at the time. I was a few minutes late for work, so I heard the headlines on the CBC news right at 8:00. I distinctly remember I was just turning off Stafford onto Academy. A plane had crashed into the World Trade Center. I’m not sure if the newscaster said it, or if somehow in my mind, I just assumed that it must be a small private plan where the pilot had become disoriented in the “Big Apple” and panicked.
I parked the car and went to the cafeteria for breakfast, and my co-worker said a plane had just hit the second tower…I responded, “Yes, I heard that on the news.” And Maureen said, “No, you don’t understand. Another plane, a second one, hit the other building.”
It suddenly became apparent this was no accident. I came back from breakfast, and went onto the unit. The television was playing in the corner of the room. Now a plane had crashed into the Pentagon. I went off to do something with a resident, and when I came back–another tragedy.
I tore myself away from the television to go do my job for a few minutes…every time I returned throughout the morning, it seemed, another tragedy occurred…another plane crashed, a building collapsed.
It got so that I didn’t want to leave the television, because to leave and come back meant something yet again completely horrible would have happened.
It seemed odd to be prescribing wheelchairs, working on ambulation with a resident, and figuring out safe swallowing for another, when I didn’t know, when the world didn’t know, what was going to be crashed next, when or if it would stop, and what our world would look like by the end of the day.
There was a sense that the world would change…and would never be the same. I stopped feeling safe, and suddenly it seemed we were all a whole lot more vulnerable than any of us had realized.
I’ve previously blogged about visiting the World Trade Center site. The part of the trip that I find myself going back to again and again in my experience is the hour I spent in St. Paul’s chapel. With a haunting requiem being sung in the center area, I looked at the displays describing the incredible healing work that was provided to rescue workers who were immersed in unspeakable horrors…a little corner of “real” that was warm and human and compassionate, in stark contrast to the very “real” devastation where that they spent their day.
Now, the situation is very different. I took this picture from an observation area at the site in March of 2011:
Just around the corner from the observation deck, there is a memorial dedicated to the employees of American Express who were killed. It is a pool where the 11 victims’ names are enscribed along with adjectives describing their character as decided by their families. What’s moving is that silently and quietly, drops of water fall into the stillness of the water in the pool, with gentle ripples. The drips represent the tears that are and will be shed over their loss and the loss of others.
The ripples are compelling, as they spread out, and even overlap.
The tears matter…they affect so much. Loss has ripple effects that extend far beyond the obvious.
Additional Note Added 2018: Lester Levine, who wrote 9/11 Memorial Visions: Innovative Concepts from the 2003 World Trade Center Site Memorial Competition, found this photo on this blog and asked for the original that I took. He included it in a magazine article and in his book:
There are no signs asking for quiet.
There is no visible request for people to speak in hushed tones that I remember.
It wasn’t necessary.
I was travelling with a group of rambunctious teenagers, and instinctively they moved slowly in silence around the memorial. In the middle of downtown Manhatten, there was this quiet chapel like environment honouring those that have fallen.
As the water rippled with the tears of the display, my own eyes were filled with tears of my own…for:
- those that had lost their lives,
- the many family members and friends whose lives had enormous holes that would now be filled with grief,
- the way we all have been affected by this grief and by others,
- how the deep sadness of being permanently separated from a loved one changed so many lives that day.
The losses of 9/11 affect so many of us, because collectively they allow us to remember the effects of the losses of all of our lives.
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