Ten Years After 9/11 – Words and Remembrance

The 10^th anniversary of the attacks on 9/11 is well behind us now and I was not planning to write a post about it. I stayed away from much of the media coverage, as I did ten years ago. The farewell voicemails from husbands, wives, mothers and fathers, and the footage of people jumping from the towers was a heartbreak I could not relive. But then I finally picked up the September 12 issue of The New Yorker that was lying on my desk for a week+ and dedicated a good portion to remembrances.

On September 11, I was working at a venture capital firm. My brother was a social worker with an office next door to the World Trade Center. After a few hours of deep breathing to stave off the looming panic that terrible morning, we finally broke through the cell phone tower log jam and let our breath out as we learned that he had seen the first plane hit, and immediately turned around and started walking. He ended up walking all the way back to Brooklyn.

Later that week my husband and I drove up Route 93 North to New Hampshire to get away from the terrible news replays, and we got caught up in periodic traffic jams as the cars slowed to take in the large gatherings of people sitting candlelight vigils on top of the overpass bridges. I remember sitting on Lake Sunapee and wistfully thinking back on our wedding in 2000 and its all-consuming flurry of silly details like seating charts and favors. The luxurious privilege of everyday nuisances in a time of naïve security.

Ten years later, I still mark that date as the beginning of the end of a collective optimism for inevitably happy outcomes. The 9/11 anniversary reminds me about the importance of presence in the happiness of right now as I work hard to silence the nagging list of worries and what ifs that swirl in my entrepreneur/mother’s mind. And history has not been kind to our fragile recovery, hurling Katrina, the Great Recession and high-profile shootings onto the worry pile.

At InkHouse, we are some of the lucky ones ten years after 9/11. We started InkHouse in 2007 in the brief lull between 9/11 and the Great Recession, and I am grateful for that fortuitous timing. We saw a ray of opportunity and dove into that ocean without focusing too sharply on the signs of trouble bubbling at the edges. And perhaps these hard times have been a boon to our cautious approach – forcing us into the scrappiness and innovation that has become a requisite for success during these uncertain times.

The beautiful words from the contributors to The New Yorker’s The Talk of The Town section articulate the power of the words we use every day to try and push out new points of view through old and new channels. I thought you might enjoy these as much as I did:

• “We do not necessarily need anniversaries when there are things we cannot forget." – Dessert by Colum McCann
• “The world is resilient, and, no matter what interruptions occur, people so badly want to return to their lives and get on with them. A veneer of civilization descends quickly, like shining rain. Dust is settled.” – Wizards by Lorrie Moore
• “Words are capable of making experience more vivid, and also of organizing it. They can scare us, and they can comfort us. What makes writing so thrilling is what makes childhood so difficult.” – Speechless by Jonathan Safran Foer
• “When words should have been most impossible to find, there were words of grace, and dignity, and consolation. Words of fear, and words of love. There’s nothing to learn from this except everything.” – Speechless by Jonathan Safran Foer
• “Though I occasionally suffer from a fear of flying, during the past 10 years getting on an airplane has become for me an act of remembrance. Each necessary surrender to every new, sometimes frustrating security measure is an acknowledgement that I, too, am attempting to glide on wind currents on borrowed wings while also hoping—praying—to land safely on the ground.” – Flight by Edwige Danticat