Son of Timatollah

Knock knock.
Who's there?
9/11.
9/11 who?
9/11 you said you'd never forget!

We're going today to a memorial service for my recently-departed friend Jim Swift. Jim called me on Memorial Day weekend to tell me they'd found two tumors in his liver, but that the doctor thought they would be able to excise them cleanly, and then his liver would grow back. A few weeks later, at the time of meeting with the doctor who'd do the surgery (if I'm recalling this correctly), Jim found out that there was a tumor at the back of his skull, too, so got a different doctor, and started a different set of treatments for that, first, since it had been pressing on nerves and causing headaches, speech issues, etc.

I thought the treatments were progressing, because he was able to play his guitar again, the thing beyond the people he loved that he cared about most, and he was planning on having a big party with all his friends. I was out of town in mid July when I got the word that he had passed away, and I still don't know details. I just know he's gone.

I'm glad to go to this memorial service today.

I have no intention of going to another one nine years from now.

I thought the world of Jim, and I know I'll remember him fondly now and then, but I wouldn't advise, even for his family and closer friends, keeping his memory alive beyond a quiet awareness of his having been with us, of what that meant to us.

So many of those lost on 11 September 2001 had no connection to the reasons we were attacked. Some—the firefighters and police in New York, military rescue personnel at the Pentagon, and those who bravely brought down United flight 93—died in valor, saving others' lives by rescue and by fighting back. Remembering them all is not without value.

But jacking that remembrance up, putting it on a pedestal, shining lights on it, standing back and looking at it, and bringing back the feelings of those times is not wise. It is not a sensible remembrance. It is pandering to our basest hair-pulling, garment-rending, flesh-tearing sensibilities.

Once, perhaps, yes; but not on an annual basis in perpetuity.

We don't need to treat 9/11 like the families who put "In loving memory..." stickers on their car, keeping the pain and the loss in attention rather than honoring the departed by using this short time on Earth productively. But we've lost a broad cultural sense of how to mourn, how to give families space to mourn for a year, how to welcome them back from that mourning in a gradual way. We're struggling in an age lacking consistent rituals in a multicultural society to honor birth and death and lifelong commitments.

It is time to move our thoughts about 9/11 to a better place every September. We will note the date, but there will come a day when we don't, and shouldn't, fly the flag at half staff. When we don't let demagogues speechify and dominate the airwaves with loony ideas. When we don't act the wounded victim time and time again.

It would be easier to let go had Bin Laden et al. been captured. That bungling can't be undone: only new operations challenging and attacking Al Queda can accomplish now what was not finished then.

How many times did your mother tell you, "Don't pick it until it bleeds"? We seem to have become a nation, like the drivers of the cars with the "In memory of..." stickers, picking constantly at the memory. Until it bleeds.

Do we really honor the departed by making a fetish of our loss?

Let's make next year, the tenth anniversary, the last year for five years that we make such a to-do about that horrible day in 2001. Let's honor the dead of that day, and of all days, by living our lives fully, not by a recurring focus on our loss.

Labels: 9/11, loss, mouring, patriotism