Today is Friday, September 13th, but I am not
going to write about black cats crossing my path or walking under a ladder
being bad luck or all of the theatre superstitions I TOTALLY follow. Today, I
want to write about something that everyone was writing about 2 days ago,
September 11th. This is not going to be a minute by minute reminiscence
of what I went through that day 18 years ago. This will be more about the
feeling I had then and still. On the eleventh I was scrolling through Facebook,
I usually do that once a day now, far less than I used to, but I came across a
post of an article on my feed. I follow the comedian Elayne Boosler, and she
had posted a beautiful article that ran in Esquire magazine called The Falling Man. If you are old enough
to actually remember details about that day in the late summer of 2001, you know
exactly what this article was about. If you are not, you are lucky. A tiny bit
of backstory about me and that day. I have a very photographic memory, not the
kind that is instant recall of books I’ve read or papers I’ve seen. My eyes are
not cameras, but life event emotions and feelings, I can play them back in my
head just like they are a movie, and certain memories are not the kind you want
to see over and over again. Unfortunately, once I’ve seen it, I can’t shake it.
9/11 was filled with those pictures. For that reason, I did not watch the news
for several days after it happened. It was easy immediately after because I was
working at an elementary school, and we were told not to discuss it with the
children. No TV’s were on. The days that followed were harder for this TVholic,
but I purposely kept the set off. One of the first images I did see, and I
think it was in print was a photo of 2 people falling past one of the Towers.
They had jumped out of the windows of the Skyscraper. I was overcome with
sadness, and a sick feeling welled up inside of me. The desperation, the fear,
the absolute horror these people must have felt to leap out of a window 100’s
of floors above the ground. Let me pause here and say, I have never had
suicidal thoughts. I don’t know what that’s like, but I know that they exist,
and are very hard to fight. However, if I had been on the floor with those
people that day, I may have made the same choice. And here’s the thing, I do
not believe they were committing suicide but instead choosing how they would
die that day. They knew that death was inevitable. They knew they were not
getting out of this situation alive. They chose “Escape” that day, escape from
choking smoke and intense heat, and literally burning alive, and damn anyone
who judges them for the choices they made. Yet we have shunned those images and
put them away quietly. Whenever someone does speak of them, people freak out.
How awful that someone took pictures of that! How disrespectful! How demeaning!
The Esquire article was a beautiful tribute to these people. Why have they been
left out of “NEVER FORGET?” If anything, I think those images paint a very
clear picture of the fear of that day and exactly what was happening. Terrorists
decided to execute hundreds of people that day. The people who jumped that day
simply wanted the dignity to die in their own way. They were not going to let
someone else decide how they would die. People jumped from the Hindenburg, and
they were the ones who survived. I am sure they did not know as they jumped
from the massive, ball of flame that they would land alive. No one judges them.
The heroic people of Flight 93 chose to wreck their plane into a field knowing
they would die, but they would thwart evil by doing it. They are revered and remembered
as well they should be! Some place the number at 200 people who jumped or fell
from the Towers that day. 200 people that we don’t want to remember. These are
the images that show us how horrible it was in a mental capacity, and that
makes us uncomfortable. We wonder if we might have made that choice, and that scares
us. Faced with burning alive, I am not ashamed to say, I would have, as I read
in the beautiful article in Esquire, “jumped into the arms of God” with full
faith that he would catch me and take me home. God bless all of the “Falling” Angels.
I remember you, and grieve for you and mourn the loss of your soul in this
world.
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