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The Truth About Moving On

by Stephanie Piper

Every day, I vow I'm not going to read it anymore. And every day, I leaf through the paper until I find it. The section is called Portraits of Grief. It contains brief sketches of the victims of September 11.

Every day, The New York Times runs a dozen or so of these, with pictures. For the first few weeks, I closed my office door when I read them. I couldn't get through without sound, without an audible no, no, no.

Now I read them mostly in silence. Sometimes an involuntary gasp escapes me, a shudder that seems to begin at the soles of my feet. It's nearly four months since the attacks, and we've had Thanksgiving, and Christmas, and New Year's Eve, and New Year's Day. New York city has a new mayor. It's a new year in an almost-new century. The accepted wisdom is that it's time to move on.

We are schooled to avoid suffering at any cost. We learn early that death is an abomination, to be spoken of in whispers. We learn to avoid those who mourn, to pay the condolence call quickly, send the flowers fast, write the note now. We praise those who put death behind them and get on with their lives. We are not comfortable with anyone who lingers over sadness. Life belongs to the living, we say briskly.

But the portraits aren't finished. There are hundreds left to be written. There are stories waiting to be told, and until they are all told, and read, and remembered, it is folly to move anywhere.

It is folly to move anywhere until we have met them, the window washers and carpet installers and bond traders and bankers. A fireman dad who used to rollerblade along a coastal highway, pushing his twins in a stroller. A commuter mother whose best moment of the day was washing the dinner dishes with her teen-age son. As he delivered her eulogy, a sparrow flew into the church, perched on the lectern, cocked its head, listened. I'm not a religious person, the boy said. But I think my mother just arrived.

Here are high rollers from posh suburbs and blue collar workers from remote corners of the five boroughs. Here are prep cooks holding down two jobs to bring their children over from Nicaragua, or Sarajevo, or Seoul. Here's a man walking his young wife through melanoma, celebrating each small improvement, ordering her to live. She did. He did not. Here, too, are the passengers of three early morning flights who yawned and sipped coffee and chatted with their seatmates until someone stood up shouting, and the world unraveled.

Human beings are made of stories, wrote the poet Muriel Rukeyser. We are not made of atoms. Lives went up in smoke in the bright September air, but not the stories. We cannot move on without honoring them, without looking clear-eyed at the tiniest detail: a sparrow on a lectern, a set of rollerblades. We cannot move on unless we take them with us. We cannot be human and leave them behind.