Bearing Witness

Here's a post I wrote on 9/11/08. I can't believe ten years have passed:

On a crystal clear morning eight years ago today, my husband and I were sitting in our car at a beach in Greens Farms, Connecticut, watching the Twin Towers burn. We couldn’t see the flames, but from across Long Island Sound we could see plumes of smoke blackening the sky. Minutes earlier on television we'd watched in horror as the towers came down, the debris cascading through the canyons of lower Manhattan.

At one time my husband had an office at the World Trade Center, but I only knew one person who was there that day—a friend who was working at her desk on the 83rd floor when the second plane hit. She made it out. I didn't know a single soul who died.

Even so, I cried every day for months. The New York Times ran a regular feature titled "Portraits of Grief" to commemorate the victims of the attack. Perhaps I would have been less emotional had I not been a regular reader of the section. In all, 140 reporters spent more than a year writing brief portraits of more than 2,400 of that day’s roughly 2,800 victims, bearing witness to their lives.

The stories are heartstopping. Each one beckons us, the living, to be braver with our dreams.


I went back to that same Greens Farms beach this afternoon. A storm is blowing through. It's 63 degrees out, but feels 50. A very different day from that one eight years ago. A very different world.

The voices of the victims are no more than a whisper now, but from beyond the grave they still call out to us, urging us to remember.





Note: The photo at the top of this post was taken two days ago by Phyllis Groner for WestportNow.com at a 9/11 commemorative ceremony at Sherwood Island State Park in Westport, CT. The other photo was taken yesterday afternoon by Larry Untermeyer at Compo Beach, also in Westport. Both places are within a mile or so of the beach where I sat and watched the towers burn.