Grief and Grace @ Ground Zero: 9/11 @ 20

This past weekend was the 20th anniversary of the September 11 attacks -- the most tragic event in this city's history, a most solemn event. Grief, sadness, despair, anger -- the whole gamut of negative emotions -- New York City has experienced all of them, at every moment, since that day, and will forever. The sadness is as much a part of the city as its concrete, steel, and waterways.

And yet ...

For me, personally, as someone who saw the Twin Towers collapse from a window in the Flatiron Building ... for someone who felt the anger, the rage, the despair, the confusion on that day and those afterwards ... for me ... to paraphrase Evelyn Waugh, "something quite remote from anything" that the terrorists and the first-responders or anyone else ever intended came out of this tragedy that, collectively, we all suffered from, something that could never have been imagined at the time: a certain kind of grace, a strange, paradoxical enlivening of the spirit. It obviously didn't happen on 9/11 but a few short years aftewards.

Around 2 AM on January 1st, 2003, about 15 months after the tragedy, I found myself in Lower Manhattan on my way home from a New Year's Eve party. I walked by Ground Zero. This area, this sacred ground, which had become the center of the world for the last year plus change, was totally deserted, no one else there but me. The whole of Lower Manhattan was almost pitch black except for some low-lit street lamps and the floodlights around Ground Zero. I looked through a small window in the fencing and walls around Ground Zerp and saw the huge empty pit. My mind, obviously, leapt to the memory of 9/11/01, of the lives lost, of the chaos that had descended onto our world. But I also felt a certain kind of peace, a certain calm, a certain honor at being alone in the prescence of these departed lives, their spirits soaring about me. I knew, somehow, that they were okay. 

This might sound irrational but it's true. 

About a year-and-a-half later, I took my late aunt down to Ground Zero. Up until that time, we had never been close simply because I didn't know her very well and she lived out of town. But she really wanted to see Ground Zero so I took her. On the subway ride down, she told me all about her life, a fascinating story. And then, at Ground Zero, we walked around while she peppered me with questions about the speed of the recovery and everything that we going on down there -- and I answered her as best I could. Soon she burst into tears and I comforted her. After that, we became very close until her passing several years later. 

So, in a strange way, 9/11 and its legacy -- as awful and tragic as it's been -- provided me with as much grace as grief. And perhaps that's a perverse way to feel -- but it's the truth, a strange facet of what it means to be human.