The death of bin Laden and 9/11 talk this week makes me so aware of what all of us have inside us. We want revenge, we want justice, we want forgiveness, we want to move on. I went from shame to guilt to triumph to sadness and back again many times. When 9/11 happened, two of my kids lived in New York, plus my daughter's new husband and his family, plus my sister-in-law. I had the frantic phone calls and emails trying to locate them. The additional horror that my eighteen year old daughter was at college in Pennsylvania near that crash. And my older two children's half brother was flying in the air from Ireland for our older son's wedding in ten days. His plane was turned around when he was over the Atlantic, and they only knew why when they landed in Dublin. The wedding was not canceled, and everyone was teary eyed not just with joy, but with the stunned realization that our world had changed.
Perhaps there is closure somewhere down the line, but I personally cannot see how. Some events change you and you are altered forever. Certainly my kids' lives are different and will always be so. My parents' lives were changed by World War II, and much of it was not spoken of. Most of us don't speak of 9/11 any more. But my instinct tells me that it must be revisited by each of us periodically, not to work a wound, but to acknowledge that we cannot and do not know what is in store for us, what the future may bring. I heard a man say on NPR that he so grateful the last words he said to his two sons were that he loved them. He lost them both at ground zero. He says he has no regrets. I want to keep that voice in my heart, and live by it.
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