At the 1964 Democratic National Convention, Robert Kennedy—finding kinship with a doomed heroine of fiction—referenced the loss of his brother, President John F. Kennedy, by quoting Shakespeare’s Juliet:
When he shall die, take him and cut him out in little stars and he will make the face of heaven so fine that all the world will be in love with night and pay no worship to the garish sun.
During the wake and funeral of my own beloved brother, that imagery kept bubbling up through my awareness, and it comforted me. I thought the lines struck a keen balance, expressing love, transcendence, and a kind of optimism in the assurances of a twinkling eternity. Because we know we will never be in love with night, Juliet’s fancy brings a great depth of human feeling right up to the precipice of sentimental overreach, but—pretty consolations aside—do not send it over the ledge, and into a crashing descent of self-indulgence wallowing.
As I watched the 9/11 Memorial Service at Ground Zero, I couldn't help wondering—a decade after that unprecedented attack—are we holding too closely to our grief, allowing ourselves to entertain it beyond a point that is healthy—and in danger of falling in love with the dark?
This is asked with all due respect. I have no wish to in any way trivialize the pain and loss so many people live with each day; the scope and scale of the 9/11 attacks were something wholly new in our experience, and the hours-long naming of the murdered is a dramatic illustration of just how many people we lost on that day. If the emotions ran high in noting the passage of a decade’s worth of grief, perhaps that is because, before this past Sunday, so many of these families had no grave to visit beyond this new garden at Ground Zero, which is very much a kind of cemetery.
But I understood why some were expressing weariness with the yearly Cathartic Rite. If writer Michelle Goldberg was crass about it, tweeting, “Am I the only one who is completely dreading the coming orgy of 9/11 commemoration”, Lewis McCrary managed tact and thoughtfulness even as he plumbed the same line, writing, “. . . the past ten years have shown that in commemorating those lost on 9/11, we seek a kind of permanent order–but perhaps not one that is healthy . . . History is itself evidence of the fleeting nature of individual memory, even if acknowledging that we will one day forget is painful.”
My thoughts have lately been running in a similar vein. People must grieve and mourn, and there is no timetable to which anyone should be held as they process their personal loss, yet I am becoming uncomfortable with the public conformity of our mourning; if someone observes the day with a reconciled sigh instead of a sob, it does not mean they are cold or unfeeling, or that they have forgotten a thing. It may mean, simply, that they are spent, and at a loss to add anything more. A reluctance to emote does not mean that the terrorists have won.
In Shanksville, Pennsylvania and in New York City, two new memorials were unveiled, and all of the dignitaries involved, Presidents Obama, Bush and Clinton, Vice-President Biden and Former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, participated with great dignity. In New York they even managed to add a bit of scripture and prayer, which were effective amid the poignant moments of silence.
But had the ceremony progressed from its opening, to include a few remarks from first responder representatives, and perhaps a bit of music, and then an official proclamation of the opening of the memorial garden, with an invitation to the families to linger there for as long as they wished, it might have been a more powerful, and perhaps healthier remembrance than the six hours that followed, which were moving until (as family members began to top each other in declarations of love and remembrance) they became numbing; until (when it appeared a women meant to name all 11 of her grandchildren and tell her dearly departed what each had been up to since last they’d chatted) it seemed like we were barreling toward self-indulgent grief porn, from which we should avert our eyes.
When JFK was assassinated, and Martin Luther King, and Bobby Kennedy, too, we had our ceremonies; we mourned and—aided in great part by the example of their widows—we managed our grief of many decades; we did not allow it to manage us. We were sad, but we did not despise the day and fall in love with night. We were stricken, but not immobilized by those events—paralyzed politically, spiritually, economically and energetically—as we seem to have been since 9/11.
Perhaps the prolonged process of designing and building the Memorials in Shanksville and at Ground Zero has added to our atrophy; our fellow citizens were incinerated, disintegrated—hidden in the shadows, though we called for them, and called. But we need no longer send their names out toward the unanswering sky. As with the Vietnam Memorial in Washington D.C., there is a place, now, where we can find them, and connect; where we can trace their names, make a rubbing, leave a kiss and a flower. Then, stuck too long in one day, we can call olly-olly-oxen-free to the night and finally step from mere shadow into light—where elusive closure may be found.
Elizabeth Scalia is the Managing Editor of the Catholic Portal at Patheos and blogs as The Anchoress. Her previous articles for "On the Square" can be found here.
RESOURCES
RFK at Convention
my brother’s wake/funeral
Obama, Bush, Giuliani at Memorial
Michelle Goldberg
Lewis McCrary
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Comments:
9/11 however was unique in that it signaled the arrival of a completely different kind of risk, one which the antiquated rules of aviation security had never anticipated, and which, to most sane people, was totally unimaginable. In a real sense it also heralded the beginning of a new world order, much as the post WWII era and the Cold War did.
Most importantly, (prior to Hurricane Katrina in 2005), it served as perhaps the clearest illustration of the folly of relying on big government in the face of unimaginable tragedy. At the end of that day, it was not the responses of the three-letter-acronym federal agencies that stood out, but those of the private citizens on Flight 93, who banded together to foil the fourth attack, as well as municipal police officers, local firefighters and even individuals on the street who, remaining uncowed by senseless tragedy, reached out to lend a helping hand to their fellow citizens, for some at the cost of their own lives.
Charity, as they say, begins at home. But gradually this wise old saying is becoming more and more antiquated as entire generations have been taught to look for charity from the government. This "big daddy" philosophy informed the creation of the social welfare system in European nations, which as is now clear, is not sustainable over the long term. Hence the declines in both the virility and the populations of those countries. If the government can give, then it can also take away. In fact the government has to take away from someone else, before it can give to you.
If the memorials serve as a continual reminder that there are still plenty of "unknown unknowns" out there, which terrorists are willing to exploit and which we need to be vigilant against at all times, then fine. Eternal vigilance, as they say, is the price of liberty. But if the memorials degenerate into something else - self-pity, self-indulgence, or even 9/10 complacency, then it is time to reconsider what exactly it is that we are willing to do in order to ensure that we no longer become sitting ducks in a war in where the enemy is often found within our own ranks.
Elizabeth, I could not agree with you more.
This is not going to happen.
After Pearl Harbor, we didn't talk about "Healing", or memorials; we talked about going to war.
We aren't allowed to do that, in this politically correct era---so tears, hugs, grief-porn, flowers and teddy bears are all we're allowed. We aren't allowed to get angry---at least not at the ones who actually perpetrated the attack. Yes, some of the grief theatrics are overdone, but it's also the only way of expressing what actually hapened to us that day. You really can't heal if you can't admit that something's wrong.
The 10th anniversary of 9/11 was also commemorated by something else---a threatened Al Queda bomb attack, on Manhattan. It's not over yet, by a long shot. So, if we're not really going to look at what's happening, then, yeah, tears, grief and all the rest of it will be what we get. Because it's not going away.
(And, of course, some would just like what happened to be forgotten altogether, because it doesn't fit their narrative.)
Heck, we can't even re-build the Twin Towers.
As I recall, there were some people who did celebrate 9/'11, dancing and passing out candy. They were not Americans.
If 9/11 does go down the memory hole---as some would like---then, trust me, future September 11's will be celebrated with all the tackiness, and feverish frenzy, of modern-day Halloween.
By the way---blogger Sultan Knish has a good article up at his website today, "The Wages of Terror" sultanknish.blogspot.com, well worth a look.
I was imagining a fountain with water shooting skyward and all those thousands of droplets reflecting the sun or lights at night. Too, mundane, I guess.
I found it refreshing to watch football games start with honor guards and solemnities instead of bouncing cheerleaders and obnoxious fans. Focusing on 'first things' instead of frivolity for a change. With so much real porn in our society, it is an insult to the grieving to use a term like grief-porn in this context.
Elizabeth, I am a big fan of your work, but I think there comes a time when critics of culture in the media lose their perspective because they make their living finding faults. Don't let your eye become jaundiced.
Narrator Rod Serling answered the question: it memorialized a time when men shoveled their humanity and their conscience into a mass grave. If that reminder is ever torn down, we might forget the inhumanity and madness they inflicted on their fellow man. And in forgetting, we become the grave diggers.
I think those rescue and recovery workers who worked that pile for months on end with very little time off need that memorial, too. I talked to many of them in the days after, and they were deeply effected. They were finding parts of people for a very long time, and they absolutely hated coming to work. But they knew they had to. For them, to see the memorial - even 10 years later - helps them to heal as well.
I took a call and left NY 7 months after that. I haven't been back since, but hope to visit the site when the crowds die down. And I think I will appreciate it, too.
For the families who lost one or more members, these anniversaries will always be raw or sore spots in their memories. For others, they will fade in the same way that "Remember the Maine" or "Remember Pearl Harbor" have.
In our national group consciousness, there is a tendency to seek closure on matters such as this. I don't mean to trivialize the losses for survivors of murdered victims, or those suffering permanent disabilities from the 9-11-01 events; but as years pass, fewer people will recall this date in depth, either to celebrate or to "wallow".
TeaPot562
Three and a half years after Pearl Harbor, we had put a military force on the field, on the sea, of far greater magnitude than any other had been done in history by any country. We had wrecked Japan from end to end, leaving scarcely two bricks piled one on top of the other, and had devastated them so badly had we merely waited 6 months before allowing them to surrender, that country would have been starved into non-existence.
Our country felt we had corrected the situation. Our monument to the dead of 7 December, 1941 was the wreckage of Japan. We felt we had recompense. But, for a variety of reasons, this never happened after 9/11. It still hasn't happened. Odds are it will never happen.
I think we will be grieving for a long time yet. I know I will.
Regards
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111903596904576518572360386658.html
May God have mercy on all those who suffer.
"Let Love clasp Grief lest both be drown'd,
Let darkness keep her raven gloss:
Ah, sweeter to be drunk with loss,
To dance with death, to beat the ground,
Than that the victor Hours should scorn
The long result of love, and boast,
`Behold the man that loved and lost,
But all he was is overworn.'"
