IX XI MMI

On Tuesday, September 11, 2001, at an uncharacteristically early hour for me, I went to the Amtrak station in New Rochelle and got on a train headed for Washington D.C. where I expected to spend a couple of days taking in the sights. The train sat for a while in Penn Station and then headed south. As it passed the tip of Manhattan, I happened to look out the window, saw a dark ring of something around some upper floors of the World Trade Center, and said to the friend I was traveling with, "I think the World Trade Center is on fire." Things got greatly worse from there. We were all put off the train in Pennsylvania. My friend and I stayed overnight and came home again the next day, and passed the plume of smoke that marked where the towers had been.

On Thursday, when the passenger manifests were released and scrolled across the bottom of the TV screen, I learned that while I was watching news reports of the attacks I was also watching a woman I knew when I lived in Boston in the mid 1970s being incinerated in the first strike.

So now it's been ten years since all of that.

On the tenth anniversary of my brother's death,
I went to the place where he died, which was in the neighborhood where he lived, and sat there for a while, just feeling what I was feeling. And something shifted. This isn't closure.* These deaths-- these sudden, untimely, unfair deaths -- gore you and leave a wound that never heals. It hurts for the rest of your life. It hurts differently over time, but it always hurts. In situations such as these, there is no such thing as closure.

My brother's death was not an international tragedy. But my hope is that as the thousands of people who lost someone on that day remember, as inevitably they will remember, that they will,
as I did, find the hurt somewhat easier to bear. Even as it remains something that must be borne.

*per m-w .com: an often comforting or satisfying sense of finality ; also : something (as a satisfying ending) that provides such a sense