I remember that day in Winnipeg as well. I was working at Misericordia Care Center at the time. I was a few minutes late for work, so I heard the headlines on the CBC news right at 8:00…just as I was turning off Stafford onto Academy. A plane had crashed into the World Trade Center. I’m not sure if the newscaster said it, or if somehow in my mind, I just assumed that it must be a small private plan where the pilot had become disoriented in the “Big Apple” and panicked. I parked the car and went to the cafeteria for breakfast, and my co-worker said a plane had just hit the second tower…I responded, “Yes, I heard that on the news.” And Maureen said, “No, you don’t understand. Another plane, a second one, hit the other building.” It suddenly became apparent this was no accident. I came back from breakfast, and went onto the unit…and the television was playing in the corner. A plane had crashed into the Pentagon. I went off to do something with a resident, and when I came back something else had happened…I tore myself away from the television to go do my job for a few minutes…everytime I returned throughout the morning, it seemed, another tragedy occurred…another plane crashed, a building collapsed. It got so that I didn’t want to leave the television, because to leave and come back meant something yet again completely horrible would have happened. It seemed odd to be prescribing wheelchairs, working on ambulation with a resident, and figuring out safe swallowing for another, when I didn’t know, when the world didn’t know, what was going to be crashed next, when or if it would stop, and what our world would look like by the end of the day. There was a sense that the world would change…and would never be the same. I stopped feeling safe, and suddenly it seemed we were all a whole lot more vulnerable than any of us had realized.
I’ve previously blogged about visiting the World Trade Center site. The part of the trip that I find myself going back to again and again in my experience is when I spent an hour in St. Paul’s chapel. With a haunting requiem being sung in the center area, I looked at the displays describing the incredible healing work that was provided to rescue workers who were immersed in unspeakable horrors…a little corner of “real” that was warm and human and compassionate, in stark contrast to the very “real” devastation where that they spent their day. Now, the situation is very different. I took this picture from an observation area at the site in March of this year:
Just around the corner from the observation deck, there is a memorial dedicated to the employees of American Express who were killed. It is a pool where the 11 victims’ names are enscribed along with adjectives describing their character as decided by their families. What’s moving is that silently and quietly, drops of water fall into the stillness of the water in the pool, with gentle ripples. The drips represent the tears that are and will be shed over their loss and the loss of others.
There are no signs asking for quiet, or for people to speak in hushed tones that I remember.
It wasn’t necessary.
I was travelling with a group of rambunctious teenagers, and instinctively they moved slowly in silence around the memorial. In the middle of downtown Manhatten, there was this quiet chapel like environment honoring those that have fallen.
As the water rippled with the tears of the display, my own eyes were filled with tears of my own…for those that had lost their lives, for the many family members and friends whose lives had enormous holes that would now be filled with grief, for the way we all have been affected by this grief and by others, for how the deep sadness of being permanently separated from a loved one changed so many lives that day.