graceland's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Two Years Later I feel like I should do better than the entry that I posted earlier. As someone directly affected by the attacks, the last two years have been hard. It's been harder than coping with other deaths in that it's not as cut and dry. Everywhere, there are reminders of how these people died and that's the new reality. It's something we will cope with for the rest of our lives. Whereas, when a person dies prematurely of cancer and when you see a fundraiser for that particular kind of cancer, you feel a twinge of grief, in this case, you have a constant reminder of how they died via footage of their deaths that is shown over and over to the world. The day of their deaths is discused pointedly on almost every news program every day. My mailbox is filled with spam advertising "September 11th Tribute posters," you don't get that for people who've died in accidents or murders. You walk down the streets of New York and see vendors selling t-shirts and postcards and posters of the place where these people died. We watched them die. All of us watched these people die and that's something that won't be forgotten. I watched it on TV and I watched it in real life from blocks away and there was nothing I could do for any of them. I stood there helplessly as people leaped and other burned and then I ran for my own life. My roommate sat at her desk and watched people leap to their deaths from thousands of feet up in the air. Not just one jumper. She sat her desk, in her office on a Tuesday morning and watched 10's of people essentially commit suicide, although, is it really suicide when you would have died either way? I don't know, but she was close enough to see their faces as they dropped through the air. My life changed in subtle and big ways. There are the friends who died. And there are the other things. There are the people who no longer speak with us because they have yet to come to terms with their grief and use anger to blame others who have. There are those who are angry at the widows/widowers who have started dating. There's the fact that I don't take the subway anymore. Or that when I sit in a taxi in traffic, I wonder if there's a bomb planted on the truck or the bus next to me. When I clean my windows at work I wonder if a plane will come crashing through them one day. Whenever I hear a plane above me I look upward to make sure it's staying in the air. And of course, the fact that we still have no bodies. Nothing to bury. For all of that, there is a normal life that I lead just like everyone else. I remember those who died and speak outloud sharing memories and laughs about them. Just like any other death.
Some people think the anniversary memorials are overkill. The irony. I think it's not enough. It will never be enough. Those people just shouldn't have died. It's not Pearl Harbor, they weren't military personnel and weren't a nation at war. This was a terrorism attack and that means it could happen again. It could happen to any one of us. And I don't think that means that we should live our lives in fear, but it does mean that I think a lot of people should be more emotional and feel more connected to what happened than do. And that's how I feel about it two years later.
1:45 a.m. - 2003-09-12 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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