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ursamajor22 years, and it will always feel a little unreal.
Here in the Bay Area, unless you're a politician with a national profile, or somebody with strong ties to NYC or DC, it's just another day. I've been home for four years now, but having spent nearly two dozen years before that in the Northeast, with that formative event shaping so much of what came after? Makes me feel out of step with everyone around me today, disjointed. And I don't mean in a "patriotic" flag-waving kind of way; it's the collective trauma and grief from that day spread unevenly across the country. My east coast expat expectations running up against time and distance, the sudden political swell of the flags on this date awkwardly angering me as always but there's a part of me for which it still feels like recognition when the rest of the country has moved on to the point of forgetting?
I don't jolt awake at 5:46 am Pacific anymore, three time zones west of where I spent my 20s and 30s. And even so, 8:46 am Eastern usually meant I was on the T or at my desk, at least if it was a weekday, taking a moment, seeing others sharing that ambient awareness and pausing, too. I would jolt awake if it were a weekend with a sense of having failed, somehow, illogical and ridiculous as that is.
The last couple of years, when I've had words for these pandemic-era reflections on 9/11, they've been more quietly despairing than they have been in awhile. I don't know how much of that is the unevenness of grief despite distance in space and time, versus what we're now calling the polycrisis; last year, I described it elsewhere as "because we've had so many more awful things since [then] piling on at an exponentially accelerated pace." The year before, "it feels like we should have been able to do more and better since then."
A friend of mine described the things that have happened to us since then on the anniversary as a kind of "layering;" there've been good and bad things, but most of them on a personal level rather than a societal one. That the grief has remained the same, but life has gone on; trees shedding their leaves, burying the grief in these other larger layers of living, but then suddenly the wind shifts, and the grief is exposed all over again, no matter how long it's been.
In Boston, there was always this emotional undercurrent on the anniversary - half the planes left from our airport; everybody knew at least somebody who was there, and most of us knew many people directly affected, close friends and family. For someone living in the heart of Red Sox Nation - literally, I was living four blocks from Fenway Park at the time - I knew an awful lot of transplanted Yankees fans (and one contradictory die-hard Mets fan), most of whom came up to Boston for college and then never left; many of whom were there on the day. (I even dated one of said Yankees fans for awhile; I like to joke that when we broke up, that was what reversed the curse a month later, you're welcome.) But it also meant the survivors' guilt was real, was always closer; that the sensitivity around it was that much sharper than for others whose ties to the events were more attenuated.
It was an impossibly beautiful late-summer morning, then, clear blue skies. The day before, she talked about seeing a rainbow from her office on the 99th floor of the towers, right after a short but powerful burst of rain.
Today, there was this.
And now, my fellow soprano has been gone longer than she was here, silenced prematurely a lifetime ago; even her faded unofficial memorial sticker in the Union Square subway station now removed. Singing along tonight with Water Night, one of the last songs we sang together; with the Faure Requiem which I sang that fall with hundreds of others to honor all the dead. Dies illa, dies irae calamitatis et miseriae, dies magna et amara valde ... dum veneris judicare saeculum per ignem.
Here in the Bay Area, unless you're a politician with a national profile, or somebody with strong ties to NYC or DC, it's just another day. I've been home for four years now, but having spent nearly two dozen years before that in the Northeast, with that formative event shaping so much of what came after? Makes me feel out of step with everyone around me today, disjointed. And I don't mean in a "patriotic" flag-waving kind of way; it's the collective trauma and grief from that day spread unevenly across the country. My east coast expat expectations running up against time and distance, the sudden political swell of the flags on this date awkwardly angering me as always but there's a part of me for which it still feels like recognition when the rest of the country has moved on to the point of forgetting?
I don't jolt awake at 5:46 am Pacific anymore, three time zones west of where I spent my 20s and 30s. And even so, 8:46 am Eastern usually meant I was on the T or at my desk, at least if it was a weekday, taking a moment, seeing others sharing that ambient awareness and pausing, too. I would jolt awake if it were a weekend with a sense of having failed, somehow, illogical and ridiculous as that is.
The last couple of years, when I've had words for these pandemic-era reflections on 9/11, they've been more quietly despairing than they have been in awhile. I don't know how much of that is the unevenness of grief despite distance in space and time, versus what we're now calling the polycrisis; last year, I described it elsewhere as "because we've had so many more awful things since [then] piling on at an exponentially accelerated pace." The year before, "it feels like we should have been able to do more and better since then."
A friend of mine described the things that have happened to us since then on the anniversary as a kind of "layering;" there've been good and bad things, but most of them on a personal level rather than a societal one. That the grief has remained the same, but life has gone on; trees shedding their leaves, burying the grief in these other larger layers of living, but then suddenly the wind shifts, and the grief is exposed all over again, no matter how long it's been.
In Boston, there was always this emotional undercurrent on the anniversary - half the planes left from our airport; everybody knew at least somebody who was there, and most of us knew many people directly affected, close friends and family. For someone living in the heart of Red Sox Nation - literally, I was living four blocks from Fenway Park at the time - I knew an awful lot of transplanted Yankees fans (and one contradictory die-hard Mets fan), most of whom came up to Boston for college and then never left; many of whom were there on the day. (I even dated one of said Yankees fans for awhile; I like to joke that when we broke up, that was what reversed the curse a month later, you're welcome.) But it also meant the survivors' guilt was real, was always closer; that the sensitivity around it was that much sharper than for others whose ties to the events were more attenuated.
It was an impossibly beautiful late-summer morning, then, clear blue skies. The day before, she talked about seeing a rainbow from her office on the 99th floor of the towers, right after a short but powerful burst of rain.
Today, there was this.
And now, my fellow soprano has been gone longer than she was here, silenced prematurely a lifetime ago; even her faded unofficial memorial sticker in the Union Square subway station now removed. Singing along tonight with Water Night, one of the last songs we sang together; with the Faure Requiem which I sang that fall with hundreds of others to honor all the dead. Dies illa, dies irae calamitatis et miseriae, dies magna et amara valde ... dum veneris judicare saeculum per ignem.
no subject
Date: 2023-09-12 14:51 (UTC)For a long time I ruthlessly avoided any anniversary or memorial talk because it was all jingoistic patriotic war on terror nonsense. And so many more people die in so many catastrophic or worse, everyday ways, and we don't care because there's no narrative. FFS, for a long time we were losing a 9/11 of Americans to Covid every week and we've yet to have a national day of mourning for those million plus people.
And then yesterday I saw someone mention something about the helpless tv watching and panic on the day and... look, I know that a lot of people in New York, and to a lesser extent Boston and DC, absolutely have undiagnosed PTSD about it, right? Psychologists used to do studies on it, even. But I was unprepared for the flashback in what I am pretty sure is the classic sense. And it wasn't to the times when I had a legit reason to fear, earlier in the day. The "I am here in my office in the same complex as Draper" or "my co-worker & friend's parents are on a Delta flight from Boston to LA that took off this morning and he can't reach them" or "my roommates are on a plane to Boston right now" fears. It was just that feeling of getting home after being on the absolutely silent roads, watching the news showing people leaping to their deaths on endless loop for hours on end. All the physiological panic reactions, just waiting for 22 years.
God. I know the news producers were also in shock but I would love them to be held accountable for that 24 hours of coverage, and what it did to us.
I wish we could react to other tragedies with even 1% of the national trauma at unnecessary death that we felt here. Maybe if we felt that urgency and horror about /me waves hands at everything we would act. Though I suppose most of our post-9/11 actions were counterproductive, so.
no subject
Date: 2023-09-12 18:02 (UTC)I worked in Kenmore and lived in the Fenway then; I remember walking home from work through nearly silent streets, running into tourists by Fenway Park expecting to go in for a tour and wondering why everything was so quiet, and having to tell them "go back to your hotel, everything is shutting down, planes have crashed into the WTC and the Pentagon." And I'm sure they thought I was a nutty conspiracy theorist. And I still went into the 7-11 and bought a stupid amount of ice cream and microwave meals, just before they shut down and went home too. I still can't look at those microwave chili bean cans.
And everything about how we've "handled" COVID systemically just makes me feel like we *are* being judged by fire. (Literally, thanks, climate-change-induced wildfires, speaking of the acceleration of other systemic failures.) That all these extra deaths should have been our reckoning and we fix it, and we haven't, 3.5 years on.