Ground Zero, November, 2011

Our local independent bookstore features literary quotations written high on its walls.  My favorite is from Logan Pearsall Smith, an early twentieth century writer: “People say life’s the thing, but I prefer reading.”  I wouldn’t go that far, but I think life is often enhanced by reading while living.  When I travel, for example, I seek out both fiction and non-fiction about my destination before and during the trip.

Two weeks ago, I experienced an almost perfect symbiosis of life and reading.  Visiting New York for a board meeting of Facing History and Ourselves, which was to begin with a visit to Ground Zero, I took along a novel that enriched an already profound experience.

Because of Facing History’s reputation and its many supporters, we were given exceptional access to the site, including a talk by the director of the National September 11^th Museum, and a tour of the memorial with him as our guide.  Next we were privileged to participate in a small group conversation with architect Michael Arad, the designer of the “Reflecting Absence” pools that occupy the site of each tower.

Every part of this event was simultaneously painful, and, in a sense, uplifting. Museum director Lee Ielpi, a retired New York fireman whose firefighter son died on 9/11, introduced us to the mementoes people retrieved from the site and donated to the museum.  One in particular struck me: an investment manager who had located the small set of bilingual dictionaries he had used for his work, and who said he donated them as a reminder of the need for all peoples to understand each other.  Among the quotations painted on the museum’s pillars and walls, I read with a shudder both of shock and of admiration for their power, these words of the poet Hettie Jones: “We are breathing the dead, taking them into our lungs as living we had taken into our arms.”

Mr. Ielpi spoke to us of his son, their last phone call as the young man headed out with his rescue crew, and the three months before his body was discovered.  Throughout the tour he focused not on esthetics and numbers, but on the human beings who perished – and who he always described as “murdered.”  He consistently referred to them as souls, and told us of the 19,000 yet unidentified body parts and the more than 1000 victims as yet unaccounted for.  He told us the remains will be stored below the memorial, and re-examined as DNA research advances, and most movingly, of the special rights families of the missing will have to visit the vaults to be near whatever may remain of their loved ones.

Leaving the museum, we went to a nearby location, where Michael Arad spoke about his design and answered questions.  Arad, who was 34 when he began working on the project, barely looks that age today.  He spoke about the concept for the design, and the many ways he worked on it before ever entering the competition.  (Just before he received the commission, he had been working for New York City designing police stations.)

Above all, Arad’s sensitivity to the meaning of the memorial came through.  The most contentious part of the project had been the inscribing of names.  Some had assumed simple alphabetical order, others had urged that rescuers be separated from other victims, still others that their ages, affiliations, or other information be included.  Arad firmly believed that a name alone should represent each person, and that aside from noting the tower, plane, or other location where people died, and placing police and firefighters in their own groups, there should be only one ordering principle: families should be allowed to request proximity of their loved one to others important to them.  Despite opposition from many who thought the task too complicated, and with Mayor Bloomberg’s support, he persevered, and with enormous care and patience, 1200 specific requests were accommodated.  Some of these were remarkable: partners who had not shared the same last name, best friends, but also some that required ingenuity, such as the young woman who wanted her father, killed on one of the planes, to be near her friend, killed in the towers, or two brothers, one a firefighter, the other a policeman.  In these cases, one of the two is listed as the last person in their section, tower, plane, or rescue group, and the other as the first person in theirs.  That such care was given, even though perhaps only one living person will know, demonstrated a depth of commitment from the living to the dead that was, as I said earlier, inspiring and uplifting, even in the face of grief.

Next blog: the truth of fiction