But in many ways America has been scarred forever by this event. Many others have been scarred as well.
Once the towers collapsed, the world ended for nearly 3,000 people. We were unable to save anyone. One of my own worst personal scars is the picture in my mind of a group of dead firefighters who were found huddled together under a stairwell in one of the collapsed towers. They had gone there probably to wait it out, thinking that was the most likely place for a pocket of air, the most structurally sound area to survive the impact of a collapse. Right on both counts, but the air only lasts for so long, and the structure can only hold up under certain conditions. A firefighter lives with the knowledge that it can happen to anyone, anytime on the job. Smoke and flames can take out even the toughest guys.
But memories never fade.
I still have the skirt and vest that I wore that day – I have never been able to throw them out; it seemed disrespectful. I did wash them. I also have the bright yellow hard hat that I wore; it hangs on the wall in my home, though my kids might not remember where it came from. They were pretty small when the black bits of paper floated down from the skies over Brooklyn. I don’t have my white Reeboks, which trod over chunks of concrete, bits of twisted metal and mounds of ashes whose source I’d rather not think about. The rabbis knew all about those ashes: they decreed those Reeboks had to be buried in a proper Jewish grave together with other holy items no longer used, thus honoring the remains of those with whom they had inadvertently come into contact.
There were too many victims whose bodies simply vanished in the massive fireball created by the impact of the airliner when it hit the tower. There were too many others whose sole remains were bits of bone painstakingly removed from the site by ZAKA and other faithful rescue workers, thousands of fragments for coroners to match up with DNA materials provided by frantic family members.
Respect for the dead comes in many forms. But would I call the site of Ground Zero a ‘sacred’ place, as so many in the media have? I don’t know. Is the site of any deadly attack a “sacred” place? I hope not. If that is the case, most of Gaza and Lebanon can now be considered sacred ground.