A Walk Around the Void of 9/11
Walk
onto the plaza in Lower Manhattan and you hear the memorial before you
see it — a whooshing through the oak trees. You soon realize it’s not
the wind, but water. At the footprint of each tower, north and south, a
vast square emptiness is bound by four walls of falling water, the pool
below pouring into a smaller central void that flows out of sight. The
memorial is black upon black, but the water casts reflections. Sunlight
and mist make fragmentary rainbows that flicker as clouds go by.
Tourists
are milling about and buying souvenirs, guides are explaining,
construction workers on the perimeter are relaxing. Though it is a
murder scene, the memorial is not a morbid place. The trees soften it,
as does the presence of children who have no memory of that morning, 15
years ago on Sunday.
There
is an underground museum nearby, if you want to immerse yourself in
that day. But the event is hard to grasp in full if you never saw the
towers intact, if you never gazed straight up between the two pinstriped
columns and got dizzy at the scale. And if you were not downtown that
day, and did not have to flee uptown or across a bridge, did not have
your memory seared by the smoke, the dust, the smell, the
incomprehension.
The
memorial has the power to gently push you back — not to horror, but
maybe to tears. This is the effect of seeing the thousands of names,
incised in bronze rows, five deep, encircling the fountains. Each row is
like a lei of five strands, lives linked by work or some other related
or random circumstance, and one awful fate.
Walk slowly, and let your eyes absorb the loss. Jeremy “Caz” Carrington, of Cantor Fitzgerald. Deepa Pakkala, Marsh & McLennan. Uhuru Houston,
Port Authority police. Maybe technology someday will allow us to hover
over a name and hear a story, summon a life, see the braid of loved ones
formed over a lifetime and then, suddenly, snapped. Who were these
dead, and where might life have taken them? William Mahoney, Fire Department Rescue 4. Michael Quilty, Ladder 11. Heather Malia Ho, pastry chef at Windows on the World.
Many
of them had no idea what was happening, and none knew what the attacks
would lead to. The years of unending warfare, the disasters overseas,
the new way of living: see something, say something, fear everything.
The
memorial, blessedly, does not summon any wretched aftermath. It
summons, instead, dignity and honor — of the victims who called home,
leaving messages of love, of the first responders who rushed toward the
smoke and flames. There was great bravery that day, and exemplary
leadership in the days and months after. Rudy Giuliani, creating calm
and unity; George Bush, honoring the workers and the fallen amid the
wreckage.
Fifteen
years on, the evil of 9/11 may still reverberate, but the goodness
remains a thing to marvel at. And the 9/11 memorial — subdued, profound —
is almost miraculous, given its tortured birth by committee. Years ago
two mayors, Michael Bloomberg and Mr. Giuliani, were in a group
discussing what the memorial should be. Mr. Giuliani wanted something big on that “sacred ground.” Mr. Bloomberg argued for a school,
not a monument. “I always thought the best memorial for anybody is to
build a better world in their memory,” he said. “I’m a believer in the
future, not the past. I can’t do anything about the past.”
He
was right about what we can’t do. But many of us can do this on a
bright September day: Take the subway to Lower Manhattan. Walk a block
or two, find the way through a construction zone and down a chain-link
corridor. Take the time to walk around each void, watching the names
flow by. There are too many to linger over, but read those you can and
reflect on the whole. Take several turns, pondering, as a pilgrim might
do, the enormity of the loss, the passage of years. And what we, the
living, can do to build a better world, worthy of their sacrifice.
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