Even a year later, as with most immediately recognizable flashes of history, words are unable to capture anything but the physical magnitude of the events of Sept. 11, 2001.
We can say what happened, but the emotions jarred into use that day are too extreme for description. Can anyone measure what that morning drew from a country? More so, how can anyone measure the extent to which a generation was rocked at its collective foundation? The answers are, no and you can't, in that order. How do we measure the importance of an occurrence? It can't be done.
So what can we know about how this feels to us right now?
It was big enough to burn images onto the brain. We've all experienced it; a revelation that freezes even the most mundane details of its realization into the memory.
My grandfather died of diabetes and cancer Sept. 7, 2001. No one knew what an epically star-crossed few days those would be. My family thought the only thing we would have to deal with was the loss of our family icon.
On that mockingly sunny Tuesday morning, I lay in bed, still gripped by the apprehension that comes between a loved one's death and funeral. I called my mother to ask the time of the only wake I was sure would occur that day.
\Go turn on the TV,"" I can still hear her say, right down to her tone of voice and speed of delivery. We all know exactly what was on. There is no point in explaining the feeling. Besides that excuse, it can't be done.
Sentences and tenses feel tiny and useless against what was on that morning's news. It was a paradox.
The soft glow of the TV showed images too intense to process, among sputtering voices less worthy than silence. Only verbs and nouns fit, like depressing headlines. Airplanes. World Trade Center, Pentagon Hit. Thousands killed.
Riding to the wake on Interstate 90, I heard both melodramatic news reports and feeble musical odes that meant nothing to me. They only amplified the picture in my head of a plane hitting a building over and over again.
It was an obliteration of all but plain political reason, and not myself a political columnist, I'll spare you elaboration.
At the church with my similarly dumbfounded relatives, the conversation focused not on our missing patriarch, but on events that were even more surreal amidst our own loss. It was hard to sort out then, but now, a year later, it makes sense.
At the funeral the next day, we talked and laughed about my Grandpa and the things we learned from him. That was the handle that was there all along while we talked of other things the day before. It isn't about the loss, but about the emotional sense to be made of it.
My grandpa's death made perfect sense. He was old. He died from natural causes.
It has been a year now, and our emotions are still too mangled for more than partial expression. But each day we get closer, and we can take comfort in that.
If we seek to solve this problem, and keep other planes from flying into other buildings, we need to make sense of why this loss has been so hard to understand. Once we do that, maybe we can start to see this mournfully, but still comfortably. I still can't and I've got a feeling no one else can either.
It's like a loss, suspended indefinitely between the wake and the funeral. There it is. That's how it feels.
dlhinkel@students.wisc.edu.
