A Late-in-the-Day Word about 9/11

Smoke rises from a building and we think of them. It can be any building, anywhere. A plane rises from the ground and we think of them, and pray they did not see death rushing toward them.It is so hard NOT to imagine their final moments, our minds somehow veer away from them, so heart-breaking are they to contemplate. Instead I find that my mind has hovered around another event these last few days, one that took place nearly 100 years ago, also in lower Manhattan:A fire broke out on one of the top floors of the Triangle Shirt Factory on March 25, 1911. The workers trapped there, with flames raging behind them and firefighters’ ladders far too short to reach them, leaped to the sidewalks below and met death there.There's a poem called “Shirt,” written by Robert Pinsky, that touches in part on this tragedy. He speaks of a witness in the building across the street, who watched a doomed young man help first one girl and then another step up to the windowsill, “as if he were helping them up to enter a streetcar, and not eternity.“ Before jumping himself, he held these two girls out, away from the wall, then let them drop. “A third, before he dropped her, put her arms around his neck and kissed him.”Then he held her into space, and dropped her too.Some say the only way out is through; that if we are to find ease on the other side of sorrow, it will only be by allowing ourselves to feel that sorrow wholly.In studying this other tragedy, I have been able to get at the pain I feel over its modern counterpart.Those families must have felt things very much like the families of the September victims. The next morning’s New York Times said “grief-stricken crowds gathered at the site of the factory, crying the names of their loved ones.”I looked up these names: Julia and Lizzy and Abraham, some of them were, Anna and Rosie and Jacob.Not a week after the attacks, I attended one of the strange memorial observances so common that autumn. Like most of the others, it was a wake without a casket, a funeral without an interment. At the Mass’s end, the priest bent into a microphone. “Take some flowers,” he told us all - because there was no grave on which to lay them.There will never be graves for many who met death that day. Met it at the Pentagon or in the Towers. Met it in the soft soil of Pennsylvania, where thousands of our Civil War dead met death too.I think of Walt Whitman, who during that war came to the Capitol in Washington expressly to nurse and comfort the sick and dying soldiers filling its halls. In “Leaves of Grass,” he spoke of the “beautiful uncut hair of graves.” Whitman could see beauty anywhere. And he knew how to befriend death, as we all must learn to do, early or late.I think of the weather we had that week, the way each day dawned so clear and brimmed with a crisp pale-amber light.There is that light to think of now.And there is that image, given us by our own modern poet.I refer to the kiss, and then the letting go.All the ones we have ever lost: they kiss us now. They ask us to let them go.

Take a Sad Song

This past weekend I had business at the airport, but having arrived there, I found myself reluctant to enter the terminal.Instead, I lingered in the parking lot, watching the planes lift and soar, or else glide and settle like great graceful birds that seemed to tuck their wings on landing.I thought of the lives lost on planes over the last decades: in the accidental crash of ValuJet’s Flight 592 and TWA’s Flight 800 and through terrorist acts, including Pan Am’s Flight 103 over Lockerbie and the four flights lost on September 11th: American Airline’s Flight 11, United’s Flight 175, American’s Flight 77 and United’s Flight 93.It was as if I were afraid of all I might feel on entering the terminal.But once inside that cool bubble of space, a comforting calm prevailed.A kind of official host patrolled the long line of travelers, searching for the tardy few who would miss their flights if not found and brought forward.A man on his phone made calls, dialing and barking his name, proposing figures, proposing dates.Poker-faced, a toddler in a nearby stroller eyed him skeptically.I saw that I would have a wait, and I'd eaten no breakfast, so I stepped from the line to find a sandwich.In a jauntily-lit fake-saloon of a joint, I sat down and looked around at the stained-glass lamps and the polished bar. The place had an old-time feel to it, and so did the music being piped in. It was the song  “Hey Jude” by the Beatles.“And anytime you feel the pain, Hey Jude, refrain, don’t carry the world upon your shoulder,” is how the words go. "For well you know that it’s a fool who plays it cool by making his world a little colder...”Thirty minutes later, in line once again, I inched my way toward the counter.Just as I began my transaction, a baggage handler stepped between us.“I need a word with my friend here,” he said, indicating the ticket agent. They solemnly shook hands.“Hank, I want you to give me your phone number,” he said to the agent.Careful as a schoolboy, Hank wrote it on a slip of paper and handed it over.“I’ll be calling you,” said the baggage handler pleasantly, slipping the paper into his breast pocket.There was no way to know, but it felt as if Hank needed help, which his friend was offering.So friendship still works, I thought from my dark frame of mind.And then I saw that much still works in this world. Every day millions of us get up and go about the business of living, thinking from time to time of our dear ones at home perhaps, or that lovely last hour of summer light as seen from a west-facing window.Every day hundreds of thousands of us go aloft, trusting our lives to hold up beneath us.It sears us to think of those for whom things went another way. In our minds we still hold the sight of their datebooks and backpacks salvaged from some wreckage. The sight of their innocent shoes.We tell ourselves they don’t need shoes where they are now, or backpacks or datebooks either, and many of us believe that this is so. The assurance of things hoped for. The conviction of things unseen.Leaving the airport that day, I thought again of that old song by Lennon and McCartney, and of the kindness one man showed to another, and suddenly I could once again look at those airplanes as the great graceful birds I have always imagined them to be.