I am leaving the house open tonight and tomorrow. But you may not be able to find me. I will be in a quiet place. You can attach a word if you like to what I will be doing -- thinking, reflecting, commemorating, remembering -- you fill in the blank.
I don't have a word to describe it. I don't know how it will feel. I don't know how it is supposed to feel.
I have seen, we all have seen, those towers collapsing a dozen or a hundred times. I have seen, we all have seen, the widows and the widowers. And the children, so many who seem to have been born after that day, so many who never will know what they lost.
I have seen, we all have seen, the faces and the names of those who carried out or celebrated these events, and struggled to comprehend what drives them. The words our leaders use -- evil, faceless, cowards -- they all apply but seem too weak to describe this viral strain of humanity.
In the end, in a year or ten years or a lifetime, I suspect we will never make complete sense of that day. Sense cannot be made of the senseless. For me, it cannot be wrapped up in a half hour or an hour or a day. Peter Jennings and Ted Koppel, talented and articulate as they are, cannot sort this out for me. There is no mail slot for it in my mind.
I don't know, exactly, what I will be doing tomorrow. I will get up, talk to my wife and children, go to work, probably do many of the things I do every day. My thoughts will be with those things, and they will be elsewhere.
I don't want to discourage anybody from posting their thoughts here tonight or tomorrow. Please do, if you wish. Please do whatever helps you make sense of, and peace with, the events of last year.
There are many sites which chronicle the lives of those whose lives ended last year at this time. Here is one, where you can find out a little bit about each of the victims, about what their lives meant to those around them:
cnn.com
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We learn when we are too young to understand that we all must go sometime. We don't get told in advance when and how. We don't get told why. It's not part of the deal to be told those things.
We don't know if tomorrow or next month or next year will bring more attacks. We don't know if someday, perhaps soon, our names will be on a CNN site, where others can write about us and how we impacted their lives. How we live, how we will be remembered by those we have an impact on, how we improve their lives and live our own lives. What would they write? What would you want them to be able to write?
Maybe those are among the things worth thinking about as tomorrow, the first of many anniversaries of that day, slips by.
See you Thursday. |
