The final death toll wasn’t even known yet. We were there because America had been widowed, orphaned, plunged into unimaginable grief on a single morning that had started out so blue and clean and full of promise. The president had declared a day of prayer and remembrance. We were Americans who had come together inside a church–to pray, to weep, to grieve, to ask God why … because we didn’t know what else to do. And because coming together might help our hearts survive.
Some weeks before that, on Aug. 18, I had looked down from the windows of a plane as we flew over California’s Central Valley. The earth below looked like folds of brown suede and the distant hills were swathed in blue mist. It was an early, soft hour of morning.
“I can’t believe we’re making this trip,” my mother said to me. We were flying to Sacramento to bury my sister, Maureen. Children aren’t supposed to die before their parents. And even though Maureen who died Aug. 8 of melanoma at age 60, was not technically a child, to her mother, Jane Wyman, she will always be. To my mother, also–she became her stepmother when Maureen was 11. Children dying before parents always seems surprising. Life’s circle is never cleanly drawn; it’s messy, tangled, broken up with question marks. We stumble over the questions; we dress in black and walk slowly down aisles, trying to make sense of a mystery that hovers just out of reach.
At the end of the day, when the plane carried us back over the same land–by then turning lavender with the approach of evening–I knew something important had taken shape in me during that long, tearful day. I had a stronger appreciation for the necessity of memorials and funerals. I realized that goodbye doesn’t really settle in, take hold, until a ceremony gives it permission. The word is there, and the awareness of loss. But not the reality.
In the weeks that followed the Sept. 11 attacks, there have been so many memorials, so much grief, and so many questions that can never be answered. Even the wisest among us have little response to the simple question, “Why?”
I am part of a generation that shunned certain timeworn rituals–marriage ceremonies, traditional memorials. Naively, with the wide–eyed certainty of youth, we believed we didn’t need such things. I don’t think anyone actually said we were too hip for rituals, but we thought it, believed it.
Now the generation that thought it would never age has grown old enough to know we don’t have a lock on our feelings. We can’t decide ahead of time how we will react to loss, and grief, and the wrench of sorrow. Life always surprises us.
On Sept. 14, I sat beside my mother in the same pew my family always sat in when we attended the Bel Air Presbyterian Church. I sat in the spot my father used to occupy on the aisle, because he gets claustrophobic. My eyes met the eyes of those around me; we mirrored back to each other the grief and confusion that had brought us there. I don’t know now how I ever believed that hearts could mend without some kind of service, or memorial, or gathering. How could I ever have been so young to believe that sustenance and succor could be found alone?
And there was this, also: the singing of “America the Beautiful,” echoing inside the church, which made my heart feel as if it would crack open and my eyes blur with tears. I used to see my father get misty-eyed at the National Anthem or at other patriotic songs. But I, as a resolute member of the Vietnam generation, who had cut her teeth on antiwar sentiments, never turned sentimental at patriotic songs or at the sight of the American flag. Still, that day, I saw the flag in the corner as I had never seen it before–through my father’s eyes, through the scrim of tears and a deep love for this country. How far we have all come, I thought that night, as I struggled past my tears to join the other voices.
And how sad some of the journey has been. All across the country in the days since Sept. 11, hands have reached for other hands and voices have lifted in song. In candlelight vigils, tiny flames have fought back against the darkness.
I now know this: we come together in services and ceremonies because we need each other, especially when our souls feel horribly wounded.
Once I was young and thought time could speed by without me; I didn’t feel the need to commemorate its passages, its hairpin turns. Now that I’m older, I know how important it is to mark certain pages in life’s book. Whatever form ceremonies and services may take, they help us endure; they help us keep our footing as the ground shifts beneath us. They let us remember how strong we can be even when we feel like our hearts are splintering.
