The Grief That Won’t Go Away

The pipers played, the politicians stood (silently, for a change), the buglers sounded taps and the steel beam and the empty stretcher were removed from what has become known as ground zero.

Firefighters and police officers--the tough guys--cried last September; they cried again Thursday morning, as many of us did on both days and many other days in between. And as we may continue to for a good balance of our lives as we try to digest and understand and come to terms with what this new void, this abyss, in our hearts is all about.

Yet some people already are talking about “closure,” as if the trucking of a 58-ton steel beam from a bulldozed ground zero would heal our hearts.

But this isn’t the kind of pain that can be contained by ceremonies and rituals. Life isn’t that orderly. Or tidy. Clearing the site (and soon, it appears, building something on it: a memorial? an office building? another skyscraper?) will not fill up the emptiness left by the attacks of last September and the incineration of so many good people and the shattering of our security and our comforts. These losses cannot, will not, should not be brushed away that easily and that swiftly.

Suffering does not follow a neat timetable; there is no term limit on grief. It cannot be placed on a shelf or packed away in a drawer or sent out into the vestibule where we can visit it at our convenience. Over time it might lessen, but it will not be forgotten or dismissed.

People might shift from living within their sadness to living with it, but that will not necessarily brighten the shadow that has darkened the life of everyone acquainted with what happened on that day in September.

William Butler Yeats wrote that actors in a tragedy “do not break up their lines to weep.” He was right, in his own narrow way. But we have not been living a play since Sept. 11, however much we may wish we had been. By now, pain has seeped into so many corners of so many lives that it is hard to escape. An eventual “resolution” may assure police officers and firefighters and soldiers and bureaucrats that they’ve done their job and done it well. But such an official manner of dealing with the aftermath of the terrorist attacks will not end the sorrow, and we should not pretend that it will.

Words have failed us since September, and words will continue to fail us, as have--and will--rites and rituals and memorials. Each of us is left with filling the silence and the void as best we can, and for that there are really no answers and no rituals and no rites.

So we remain with the silence and the sorrows and the void, which have enveloped us for much too long now. And to which we had better become accustomed.