It’s September 11 again. And, like every year since 2001, a cloud settles around our heads.
For our towns, even if you lost no-one from your direct circle, the tragedy was pervasive, palpable, life-changing. Yes, our world shut down for several days. There was no air traffic. We stayed in our homes glued to our televisions. We thought things would never go back to “normal.” Even when work resumed and airplanes flew again and trains ran, the view from our seats were forever altered as we edged toward Manhattan. A constant reminder of what was no longer there, what was lost.
Every friend and neighbor has a story. And our towns were touched very specifically, very painfully. There are those like Tom Kerns and Jeanmarie Hargrave who lost Jeanmarie’s brother T.J. Rosetta Jannotto Weiser, former co-owner of Village Wine Shop, escaped from Tower 1 but spent many years afterward helping families of her lost Port Authority co-workers find the support they needed.
I’ve spoken with Maplewood’s mayor, fire chief and police chief about their memories of the day, as residents climbed off the train, stunned and scared. Mayor DeLuca spent the afternoon and evening at the station, only leaving after the last train had arrived. Emergency personnel were there to offer assistance and wash the dust and ash from passengers.
The dust and the ash. I watched them rise through the air on September 11 and head out over the bay to the ocean from the parking lot of my office in Red Bank. It was a gut punch to know that the ash floating through that clear blue sky was the remnants of thousands of people, thrown off from what had become a funeral pyre in Lower Manhattan. I left at noon to drive home to Maplewood and that plume of ash was my only companion up the lonely highway — save for a few emergency vehicles.
I’ve been thinking a lot about dust and ash lately. A month ago, my family lost someone far too young, someone we love too much, someone we cannot do without.
A month out, I still feel a heaviness that cannot be shaken, as if I’m wading through a sea of sadness shoulder high. I marvel constantly that this person who was so brilliant, so alive, is physically no more. One day I had been sitting with him at his kitchen table talking about his children’s futures and a few days later he was gone. I had held his hand. I had looked into his eyes. Now those eyes are gone. That hand is gone. He is gone. Reduced to ashes.
I think about the Buddhist monks who came to Maplewood last month and spent long days at work through an entire week to create their impossibly elaborate and beautiful mandala — made of colored sand. At the end, they brushed it all away. Swept the grains into containers and bags to be poured into the river to scatter their healing powers throughout the world. The message was that life is impermanent, everything is impermanent, even this precious, painstakingly wrought mandala.
All of our loved ones who have been reduced to ash were more beautiful and more complex and most certainly more necessary than the greatest mandala. The analogy is imperfect. It is so hard to accept that our loved ones are impermanent, that they are gone. Even if you believe that the departed go on spiritually, the physical loss is overwhelming. But we shoulder it. And we hope those Buddhist monks were right: There is healing.
