A deeper ache...
THIS SECOND anniversary is at once easier and harder than the first. The emotions are less raw now, for the anguish, shock, and grief of Sept. 11, 2001 are tamped-down constants incorporated into the American psyche -- and millions of individual hearts. Perhaps that is why the recently released Port Authority of New York transcripts of emergency calls and radio transmissions from that day are so hard to read -- they rip off the scar tissue and take us back to the heat and horror of Ground Zero.
Two years ago it was almost impossible not to connect with the last words from cellphones that allowed us to touch something human in the hideously inhuman.
But today the voices of the lost float like ghosts out of a caged nightmare, making a person feel almost voyeuristic eavesdropping on the cries for help and assurances of rescue workers. The people in those transcripts are living in an unthinkable present while we look back from a merely unsettling future.
Two years ago the tears flowed in an instant during news reports or when the sun simply lit a flag. One year ago the nation seemed to stand en masse going back to the core of that pain.
This year the ache is so deep in the bones that a person might think he or she has gone numb. And while diminished media hype is welcome, there may be a sense that something is missing with fewer, quieter, and less elaborate commemorations around the country and not as many flags flapping from homes and cars.
Are we healing? Are we tired? Are we still good and scared? As usual, there are no definitive answers because just about everything connected with 9/11 remains a question mark.
Not even the dead are a certainty, for many families of the nearly 2,800 people who died at the World Trade Center still await positive identification of loved ones -- forensic experts have matched DNA of a little over half the recovered remains.
There is no consensus on what a fitting New York memorial might be and no rush by families to file for money from the federal victims' compensation fund -- perhaps both those acts signify the closing of a door that many people can't yet shut.
There is no consensus on exactly what the attacks of 2001 meant. Were they acts of war or monstrous crimes? And if Osama bin Laden is still alive, where should he stand trial if caught?
Has America gone too far in answering those blows, triggering more terrorism overseas and warping constitutional liberties at home? Or is that a fair price for US security?
Not knowing where we are headed makes looking back two years all the more unnerving. We hold tight to the living now, hope we have honored the dead, and light a candle for ourselves and the world.
