The unthinkable, revisited
by Stephanie Piper
I was going to be so much better. I was going to live absolutely in the moment, and call everyone I love every day to tell them how dear they are to me. I was never again going to slam out of the house, leaving a trail of angry words in my wake. I was never going to have another trivial thought.
When two of our sons, a future daughter-in-law, my sister, my brother, and a host of cousins survived September 11 in Manhattan, I figured the time had come to take a hard look at my priorities. Out with self-pity. Out with chronic discontent. In with gratitude and compassion and patience.
A year ago at this time, like most Americans, I alternated between sobbing in front of the television set and vowing to change my life forever.
A year ago, we bought up all the American flags at Home Depot and pinned patriotic ribbons to our lapels. We sent candy bars and bottled water to Manhattan and hugged firemen on the street. This is what Americans do, bless our hearts. We pull out all the stops.
And then, inevitably, the urgency fades. For those of us who survived the day without searing personal loss, the emotional volume grows fainter, dialed down with every passing month. We fold away the flags and put CNN on mute. We return to the unpaid bill and the leaking faucet.
Well, some of us do. For others, the volume remains deafening. I think about a boy in a New Jersey suburb, a classmate of my nephew. The boy's father didn't come home last September 11. He didn't make it off the 90th floor of the South Tower, and now my nephew wonders if this kid will make it out of high school. In the months following his father's death, the boy spiraled downward with such blinding speed that his mother had to sign him into a drug rehab boot camp. The family lies in scattered shards. For every story of soaring courage called forth by grief, there is a story like this. Some get to move ahead. Some have to linger.
We will be in New York on September 11, preparing for our son's wedding. Three days after the anniversary of last year's disaster, he and his bride, another survivor, will recite their vows in a Brooklyn church. Confetti will replace the drifting ash that floated through the air a year ago, and when the bells ring, they will mark a happy beginning, not an end.
We will drive past firehouses draped in bunting and banked with flowers and candles to honor the fallen. We will raise a glass to them, and to their memory. And then, in a flower-filled, candle-lit hall, we will raise a glass to the future.
We were going to be better, and maybe, in our own clumsy, halting way, we are. We're still here, walking in the world, sorting through the beauty and the mystery and the pain. We don't go on as if nothing happened. We just go on.
September 12, 2002 * Vol. 12, No. 37
© 2002 Metro Pulse
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