Dear Mimi,
It's been a harrowing week that brought me to call my parents this past Sunday, a gesture that I think may have shocked my mom. I was walking around today at lunch, realizing that I still haven't come to terms with what happened in New York last week.
I'm still grappling with it; and even more of a revelation was that I was trying to come to terms with something and grappling with it. We are not just by-standers, witnesses to a historical event. This is an event that is affecting all Americans deeply; we can't just watch and then go on with our daily lives; we're trying, as a nation and as individuals, to absorb and understand what happened and all the ramifications of what happened.
As images continue to pour out of New York, they are getting etched in our collective memories and are demanding some kind of explanation or resolution that we may never be satisfied with. We did not just passively watch, given in horror, the images of the planes hitting the towers and of the Twin Towers collapsing, but we watch the images and replay the images and something in us, whether we are aware of it or not, I think, is trying to actively find some resolution.
The latest image that stuck in my mind is from a bystander with a video camera as the first tower came down. She was reluctantly pulled into a cafe as someone, maybe the owner of the cafe, forced her in and wouldn't let her out and blocked the door as she continued to shoot out the store window. As the debris rushed past the store, she finally obeyed the shouts to stay away from the window and as she continued to shoot, you can see how the dust and debris completely shrouds the daylight and it looks like they are in the cafe at night.
It's hard to come to terms with the reality that these things happened. That there were moments in the lives of the innocent people on board the planes when they realized that this was no ordinary hijacking that they had heard about in the news, happening to other people. Perhaps there were moments at the end of their lives when they realized they were on someone else's suicide mission, and this was the end of their lives. There would be no landing and negotiation of demands, no storming by commandoes to save them, no protracted ordeal. It's hard because their tragedy affects us so deeply, and we'll never know what they experienced.
But we do have go on, and ruminations do need to be kept in the background to whatever extent possible as they tend to be more philosophical than practical, even giving blood is difficult at this point. The foreground of our lives need to continue.
