A Remembrance of One Man

It’s been almost a decade now. Nine years since that gorgeous Tuesday morning that turned into one of the ugliest days of our lifetime. Nine years of war. Nine years of fear. Nine years of hate. Nine years of blame. Nine awful years in American history.

It’s easy to talk about the events of September 11, 2001 on a grand scale. We hear it all the time. But, like it or not, for me it’s always been about the small details: the weather, the faces on the subway, the sound of broken window glass under my feet on Fulton St., the pungent smell, the mutterings of strangers, the sound of the earth rumbling before the towers collapsed. There are so many more I couldn’t possibly list them all here.

PTSD brought those details back to life for me on a regular basis for years after September 11th. Writing was my best therapy. So once again, I’ll take you on a flashback with me to those eery, uncomfortable days in the Fall of 2001 in New York, when I wrote this in the middle of the night.

I’m afraid to go to sleep. I don’t even like to lie in my bed with my head on the pillow because I know they are coming — the nightmares. The scenes, the sounds, the horror, the fear — they all come back in the nightmares. Last night was one of the worst.

The Jumpers. The Runners. The Rescue Workers. It’s so easy to classify the participants by these simple titles. Titles that easily designate hundreds and thousands. The vast numbers make it easy to ignore the individuals. Not that we don’t all mourn, but how do you single out one stranger among thousands? In my case, you see just one Jumper. One man plunging to his death. Witness the last 3o seconds of one man’s life. Witness the fear that enveloped his body. That one man’s death would have been unfortunate enough, but he was one of so many more. And I have witnessed that death not just once, but over and over in my mind.

I see it when I blink. I see it when I sleep. Last night in my nightmares, I saw it through his eyes. The windows passing upward, the tremendous wind catching my body like a sail, the complete and utter helplessness. The point far beyond return when hysteria seemed inevitable and senseless at the same time. But I didn’t see the ground. I couldn’t look, just as I couldn’t that day. The final five seconds were just too cruel to bear with its all too certain ending.

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