You know what today is.
You may be young enough not to remember it. Or you may, like me, have been a child on the cusp of adolescence, too young to hear or understand certain details but no less horrified. This is the one good thing about traumatic brain injury: my memories of the day of and the weeks following are hazier. But they're still there.
It doesn't matter where I was. What matters is the feeling. All of us, adults or children, were glued to the television. We sifted through photo, video, audio to make sense of our collective shock. I don't know that any of us still fully understand. I don't think we can understand. Grief and fear of that magnitude cannot be broken down into manageable chunks of data. There will always be rough edges and shards.
After my own brush with death, I found myself obsessing over what happened on that day in 2001. What was going through the survivors' minds? Were their memories as fragmented as my own? Did they feel like me, like their souls had fled although their bodies had survived? So I read. I studied. I filled in every gap in my knowledge of the event and learned horrible things along the way.
The human capacity for suffering is astounding. We can inflict such evils on one another. We can survive nearly as much. We are as resilient as we are damaged, a patchwork of strength and frailty. And we fill in the gaps in one another's armor.
Tonight I will do as I have done for the last decade and a half. I will pray for the dead and cry for the living, and then I will push the images from my head as I try to sleep. Our national wound is healed, but scars still ache. Sometimes we have to stop and rub at them for a while to still the pain.
