Thursday, 9/11/03 - 17:12
[Note: If you're looking for information about those who jumped from the World Trace Center on 9/11, there's an excellent Esquire article on the subject: "The Falling Man" by Tom Junod, in the Sep 01 '03 issue of Esquire. You can find it by following the link to Moll Peartree's journal below, at least until Esquire takes the article down. The rest of this journal entry is a response to that article.]
[According to USA Today at least 200 people died by jumping out of the World Trade Center, but knowledge of how they died has been publicly suppressed. If you found this diary entry by searching for information on 9/11 jumpers, could you leave a note here or send me a quick e-mail? I'm interested in finding out who else remembers the jumpers and why. My e-mail address is 80b AT cabeen.org ]
Ted sat me down and told me to read the whole of the beautiful article that Moll Peartree linked to today, and so I did. But the thing it brings home most is how much I still just don't get the reactions to 9/11. (cf prior entries, Abe Simpson shouted "Death!", More about reactions to the WTC, and an account of how we found out). I'm not sure exactly what makes the decision to jump so unspeakable. Is it the strength of suicide taboos in American culture? Is it shuddering away from the idea that anyone could be faced with more suffering than they're willing to bear? Or is the horror not so much in the decision that prefigured the jump as in the jump itself, the fact that you can actually see people about to die in these pictures?
I remember seeing footage of the people jumping off the World Trade Center and being horror-struck by the choice they had to make, the immediacy of it, people having to make that choice while I was sitting there on my ass and figuratively picking my nose. But I also felt immediately that they were courageous and they'd done the right thing, that this way to die is right and beautiful. If death is coming I want to be given the choice to meet it, to collect myself one last time and appreciate the last of life -- but quickly, not to linger -- a last triumph of selfdom, a last apprehension of beauty and tragedy. When I have heart-pounding nightmares and someone's chasing me, I know the best solution is to turn around, spread my arms wide like a man on a cross, and let myself die. Of course it's probably overly idealistic to think that the jumpers got much of a chance for any of this, and it makes the decision all the more horrible that many of them didn't think of their decision in the same terms I do, but better than burning to death.
I wonder whether it would've occurred to me to try to write a last message to Ted and our families in white out on the soles of my shoes, or on my body or somewhere else. I wonder if it would've worked. I wonder if anyone did try it.
Of course the scale and American-ness of 9/11 punched through the toughness that inures us from death most of the time. I remember in the month or two after 9/11 that everyday news like bombs in Israel actually affected me, that when we listened to NPR in the morning in bed, I'd sometimes feel like crying. 3000 lives is more people than I can imagine easily and it's a drop in the bucket.
At the bottom of it, I don't think it's right that 9/11 is more horrible or tragic than death overseas or than the people dying around you silently right now. 9/11 was not a particularly terrible way to die. The dead of 9/11 died in a highly iconic building. Died in a mass disaster which elicited public sympathy, memory, and dollars. Died, at least in some cases, after being given the choice of a quick, relatively painless death and the sensation of falling. The failure of witness is not in ignoring some facet of 9/11; it's the failure to appreciate all the mundane accidents and tragedies and cancers that sit beside us every day.
The only time I do anything like praying is when I'm stuck in traffic behind a crash or I hear it on the radio that traffic's backed up on the 405 after a million car pile-up that's slowing things down for commuters and that, to hear the talk, you'd think no people were involved in -- certainly not people like you and me. So as emphatically as I can, I think, "Be alright." I don't think it actually does anything, but it makes me feel better. At least it stops me from thinking about the crashes as an inconvenience.
It occurs to me that my father too died by jumping. In years gone by he'd already had too much radiation to get more for the lung cancer that killed him -- he'd already had too much radiation -- and he didn't want any long surgeries or whatnot that would probably fail and leave him to die of cancer somewhere else, like the brain. So he went slowly falling through pain more viscous than air, but still -- I hope -- better than the alternative. I don't know if he ever regretted his decision, but I imagine that in any situation like that there'll always be at least a few minutes of wrenching regret.
All in all I fear suffering much more than death. I can appreciate intellectually that if you believed your father would roast in the eternal fires of hell for choosing a sure quick death, you'd be disturbed. All the same, that belief is pretty much unshakably comical. Sorry.
Long live Diaryland!
The five most recent entries:
More Naval Gazing - Saturday, 8/13/05
Anniversary Diving - Friday, 8/12/05
Academic Tip of the Week - Tuesday, May. 17, 2005
How to tell a Midwesterner - Sunday, 4/24/05
Academic Feelings - Thursday, 4/21/05
Ted's most recent entry:
Monday, May 12