Twenty-two years ago tonight, I laid out my wide-leg checked pants from Banana Republic. They were my nicest pants, purchased for my first job at the Associated Press. I had just graduated from journalism school months earlier.
Next to the pants, I placed a white collared button-down blouse and a black V-neck sweater from H&M to wear around my shoulders. I spit-polished my Doc Martens and added my Italian silver hoop earrings to the adornments. In my most adult look, I would make my way to midtown Manhattan for my 10 a.m. real estate closing.
After that signing, on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, I would have the keys to 698 square feet of New York City pre-war history to call my own.
But, since you already know the real story of Sept. 11, first came a different history.
Funny how history has a way of repeating itself. Tomorrow, just another September day in 2023, should everything go right, I’ll sign the closing documents on the sale of my Mission condo in San Francisco. Inshallah. This is the end of a frustrating two-year ordeal due to the Pandemic and the vagaries of San Francisco real estate.
Between these bookends of national tragedy — 9/11 on one side and the Pandemic on the other — is my novel of place and grace.
I think of my peers as we were in 2001: fresh-faced grads tackling New York City with our Y2K tailwind. Yet alongside, there was an accumulation of the sadness of 20-something deaths. The grief has come, decades later, now that I have learned how to feel.
The friend who died on 9/11, on-site for a meeting at Windows of the World as a bright new professional; then in 2002, another who threw her 85-pound body in front of the D train in the early morning because nothing could heal her deep addiction and pain; in 2007 another one left the earth with a needle in her arm, blue-lipped in her mother’s powder room.
And I think of myself and my peers as we are in 2023: Trying to avert death with our Omega-3s, holding on to memories of a misspent youth, feeling all the headwinds of this century, now 23% complete, that’s now going seriously sideways.
I am always grateful for the touchstone of 9/11 each year. It’s a way into all the griefs, large and small, that build all year. It’s an easy release valve, and under the cover of a capital T tragedy, I am allowed to also tend to all the little “t” ones. I get the morning to cry, to feel sad, to let all stripes of feelings roam out on the savannah. And then by evening, there is slow re-composure.
Cliche, yes, but life is precious. That’s the part we agreed to never forget.
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multas per gentes er multa per aequora vectus
advenio has miseras, frater, ad inferias,
ut te postremo donarem munere mortis
et mutam nequiquam alloquerer cinerem.
quandoquidem fortuna mihi tete abstulit ipsum.
heu miser indigne frater adempte mihi
nunc tamen interea haec, prisco quao more parentum
tradita sunt tristi munere ad inferias,
accipe fraterno multun manantia fletu
atque in perpetuum, frater, ave atque vale.
-Catullus
carried through many people and many waters
i have come, o brother, to these wretched funeral rites,
so that at last i can give you this final gift in death
and address your silent ashes in vain
since fortune carried you away
my dear brother so cruelly snatched from me
here, now, take these gifts,
handed down by the customs of our ancestors
brought to these sad funeral rites
take them, dripping and flowing with fraternal tears
and forever, my dear brother, hello and farewell.
Beautiful!
Thank you for sharing these stories and memories ❤️