Thats when the dream came back to me whole.
A week before, I had dreamed I was standing in a tall building, floor-to-ceiling glass all around me. A small plane flew past close enough that I could see the pilot as clear as day — his face almost like a caricature, the kind an artist draws in a few quick lines, and on it nothing but worry, like a man who had no control over what was happening. I had let the dream go at the time. I wasnt going to be standing in any tall building any time soon, so what was it to me. Watching that second plane hit, it all came rushing back, and it has never fully left. Close my eyes today and I can still see that face.
I did not know yet that my husbands middle son was working in Manhattan that very morning. That worry landed on top of the shock before I even had words for either one.
Then the third plane hit the Pentagon, and I knew — we all knew — this was no accident. I remember flipping through every station we got, frantic, because whatever channel I had on would not show it, would not confirm what had just happened. I needed somebody to just say it plainly. One reporter finally did, simply because he happened to be standing in the right place when it happened, with no way left to describe it except straight out.
I still do not know what to make of that dream, and I am not putting it here to explain anything or point at anyone. I have no proof of what it meant. I only know it came a week early, and I have never lost a single detail of that face since. Some of you reading this will know exactly what to do with that. Some of you wont. Thats alright. Im not asking you to carry it. Only to know that I have, and still do.
Not Since Pearl Harbor
What I remember just as clearly as the dream is what came after. Not the towers falling. The country falling back together.
For a little while — weeks, maybe longer — nobody cared who you had voted for or what you believed the day before. Flags went up on porches that had never flown one. Strangers helped strangers who would have been strangers forever, any other week. People stood in line for hours just to give blood to people they would never meet. It is the only time in my own life I have seen this country come together like that. The only other time I have ever heard it spoken of the same way is Pearl Harbor, my mothers generation, World War II — the whole country stopping being divided long enough to grieve as one thing and then get back up as one thing.
I have not seen us that close since. Twenty-five years now. I hope I live to see it again, and I pray it does not take what it took the first time to get us there.
...to console those who mourn in Zion, to give them beauty for ashes, the oil of joy for mourning, the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness...
From the ashes, we chose to become something. That part I never want us to forget either.
The Forgive-and-Remember Working
You have heard the old saying, forgive and forget. I do not believe that one all the way. Twenty-five years on, a lot of us are still healing, and forgiving is a real thing worth doing — for your own heart, if nothing else. But forgetting is a different matter. Here we forgive if we are able, and never forget, so that if it ever tries to come again, we are not caught standing the way we were caught that morning. I will be honest with you — I see the makings of it stirring again in this generation, and that is exactly why the remembering matters as much as the forgiving does.
This working is not aimed at any one soul or any one nation. It is for carrying the weight of that day without letting the bitterness sit and rot in you, while keeping the memory itself bright enough to still serve as a warning.
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I
Three Candles
Light a red candle for the valor and the cost, a white candle for peace and healing, and a blue candle for the vigilance that keeps a thing from happening twice. Set them in a row and let them burn together — none of the three stands in for the others.
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II
Name What You Carry
On a small piece of paper, write down the bitterness or grief you are still holding from that day, or from anything since that has grown out of it. You do not have to name every wrong. Name enough that your hand feels it.
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III
Speak It, Then Release the Weight, Not the Memory
Hold the paper between your hands and speak the words below. Then fold the paper and either burn it in the white candles flame if you are ready to let the bitterness go, or fold it small and keep it if you are not there yet. Either way is honest.
I release the weight I carry, not the truth of what was lost.
Forgive the hand, forget it never, lest it come again at such a cost.
1, 2, 3, by the power of the trinity, so it is spoken, so it shall be. -
IV
Keep a Token
Set aside something small — a coin, a candle stub, a note with just the date on it — somewhere you will see it now and again. Not to reopen the wound, but to keep your eyes open. Remembering is its own kind of watching.
Tell ye your children of it, and let your children tell their children, and their children another generation.
Grandma never let a hard thing get buried so deep the next generation forgot it could happen. I do not intend to either.
Forget it, never.
A country healed once by standing together —
let that be the thing we remember hardest of all.
Captain John Ogonowski — American Airlines Flight 11
Captain Victor Saracini — United Airlines Flight 175
Captain Charles Burlingame — American Airlines Flight 77
Captain Jason Dahl — United Airlines Flight 93
and their first officers and crews, who never had the chance to be called heroes by name
It was not only who was on those four planes. It was everyone in those buildings who never came home, and the more than four hundred firefighters and officers who ran toward it instead of away. Nearly three thousand souls were lost that single morning, and the number has never stopped growing since, as more of our first responders succumb to what that day left in their lungs and their blood. We hold all of them here, named and unnamed alike.