Ten Years

Today is September 11, 2011.

For years after the attacks, I couldn't handle watching coverage. Today, I was assigned to cover memorials on the BU campus. There's a strange thing that happens when I cover emotional events with my caerma. There's something that separates me from what's happening. The memorials at BU were not very emotional. Many of the people there were students who, on average, were about ten when the towers fell. Not old enough to really get it completely.  Part way through the first observance, I saw two students leave the plaza and as they did so, I heard one say quietly to the other "It's so hot!" 
Try standing trapped in a burning building, kid.

After filing my images, some of students crying after their presentations (which left me a bit torn; being a child at the time, do you really know what you're crying about? Or is it simply a great excuse to be dramatic and cry?), I left Boston and headed to Lowes to buy something for my house. I felt strange. Doing something so normal. NPR was covering the anniversary, playing audio of flight attendants calling to report that terrorists were on their plane, slitting throats and using mace. Another man who works on the top floor of one of the towers, at the rstaurant, spoke of his friend who died because he took his shift at the restaurant. I wondered about this man. When you have an experience like that, and I remember there were many - the man who wasn't in the tower because he was late getting his daughter to daycare for example - do you live every day with guilt if you don't do something major with every minute? Can you have a day of doing nothing and not feel guilty at the end of it?  I don't know. I feel guilty for lazy days and I have never experienced such a trauma.

Now I am home and on the TV there is no shortage of coverage and story-telling. I am not emotional about tributes, the monuments, the dedications, but rather, the stories from that day ten years ago and the weeks and months that followed. A story about the responders who survived and how they suffer from endless medical issues as a result of breathing in all that dust and ash and asbestos. The PTSD they suffer from hearing and seeing the bodies fall from the buildings. The medical examiner with her lip quivering while she tells the story of a fire captain talking into the on-site morgue with his hands full of bones, and saying "this is my son".

And now, with that, it catches up with me and I remember.