Every year I think I'm finally over it. But every year, when September 11 rolls around, I cry like a baby. I'm just not quite over it yet.
This year, at church, an image of the burning buildings was shown as part of a slide show commemorating the anniversary. The tears began to flow before I even knew what hit me. The photo of the buildings triggered a memory of a time a few weeks after the attacks when Wes and I were taking a ferry across the Hudson into Manhattan. He was going in to work; I had a business meeting to attend. The ferry route around Lower Manhattan gave us a close-up view of the site, which was still smoldering.
What was so telling about this persepctive was not what was there, but what was missing. The towers that had been a fixture in our lives were gone. The place where I had taken my nephews when they visited me -- riding in the elevator all the way to the top so they could see the view from the observation deck. The place where the PATH train left me off when I came over from New Jersey each week. The place that defined the landscape of a city where I did business, made friends and went to the theater. In a matter of minutes, as I watched on the TV, the towers had fallen and were forever gone. All that was left was a gaping, festering wound in the earth.
September 11 left a gash not only at the sites where the planes crashed, but also in my heart. It is taking some time to heal. I grieve for the man who sold apples on the World Trade Center plaza, for he lost his livelihood. I grieve for the fathers and mothers who lost their sons and daughters -- and their hopes for a family's bright future in the process. I grieve for the children of the commuters whose cars were still in the parking lot when the sun rose on September 12th; their parents never returned to tuck them into bed.
I am no stranger to grief; I've had my share of trauma in life - and perhaps a bit more than my share. (I'm the only white woman I know who has lost two significant relationships to murder.) I know all too well the emotional impact that violence leaves behind. For years I kept these stories hidden in the hope that I would not be defined by them. All in vain. We cannot help but be defined by what happens to us -- the good, the bad and the ugly. Our experiences shape our psychology.
What I am finally learning is that by more deeply accepting the truamatic events of our lives, we can play a role in how a specific experience defines us. In the clutches of the survival insticts of our reptile brains, despair and revenge are understandable and inevitable - the human version of the fight, flight or freeze reaction. But we have a capacity to create a more interesting and life-affirming story when we choose to activate it. We have the power to take the destructive energy of violence and re-imagine it into a force for love and goodness. Is this not the essence of faith?
