This week I've been taking in the NY Times coverage of the opening of the 9/11 Memorial - a controversial project about a horrible event. Even those of us who just watched the attacks on television, or who only know-someone-who-knew-someone who was killed, have been deeply affected.
The Times coverage naturally includes many points of view: victims' families, survivors, those who lived and worked in the city - or at the Pentagon, or on those airplanes - on that nightmare day, members of the general public, those who designed, built, and contributed to the memorial.
Today is Saturday, May 17, 2014, and there is an article on the front page of the Times that goes right to the heart of our topic I'm approaching: different survivors and their various attitudes toward the 9/11 Memorial. It is very much worth a look: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/17/nyregion/9-11-museum-not-a-must-see-site-for-all-new-yorkers.html
When we are talking about recovery from a trauma or a tragedy, it's important not to get bogged down in the "content" of the events. Your beliefs about the 9/11 events may be wide-ranging, from the personal to the political to the historical. Religion may be part of your opinions. But here we are focusing on the process of recovery from a tragedy, one that affected so many of us in so many ways.
What I mean by getting bogged down in "content" is this: imagine your car was broken into and your laptop stolen - with all your work, all your favorite photos, all the things. It's easy enough to focus on what a dope you were to leave it in your car in the first place; or how unsafe your neighborhood has become; or how local police are incredibly unhelpful with such burglaries.
All of that noise shifts the focus away from the core issue: you have suffered an irreparable loss, and naturally you are going to have very strong feelings about that. It doesn't help you one bit for the people around you to argue about the circumstances.
That is a small example, the kind of loss that can happen to any one of us.
The scale of other losses, other tragedies, may be vast compared to a car break-in. But it is just as useless to argue about the circumstances of 9/11, the politics, the war, the controversies surrounding the memorial. Those arguments are for another time and another place.
The Times article highlights the individual nature of the transition from victim to survivor. Each person interviewed possesses their own experiences about that terrible event, their own feelings about it, their own attitudes toward the 9/11 Memorial.
The challenge of a 9/11 Memorial has been from the very beginning to take into account the experiences of thousands of people - from the relatives of a toddler on an airplane to the spouses, parents, and children of the 2,996 people who died that morning. How do you commemorate a tragedy that was at once intensely personal and enormously, globally public?
Here's a thought from someone who experienced 9/11 from 1800 miles away: as I was reading about the Memorial opening this week, I was put off by the "theme park" designation. Not only did it seem unthinkable to me that there would be mementoes sold like little replicas of the Statue of Liberty; I was mildly insulted by survivors' apparent belief that someone like myself would visit the site to gawk.
Don't they know how moved I would be? Don't they understand that the events of 9/11 affected me deeply as well? How dare they think I would stand there with a bag of kettle corn and my bottle of water, peering with morbid curiosity into the display cases, wondering if that thing right there is a little piece of bone?
This is a perfect example of me inserting myself into the center of survivors' experience. While I would like to believe my visit to the 9/11 Memorial would be seen as a gesture of care, respect, and shared loss, I don't get to tell the survivors closest to the tragedy how to feel about my being there. I'd like survivors to see my presence as support, but perhaps they wouldn't see it that way at all.
And maybe that's one of the difficult things about the 9/11 Memorial: it invites us to insert ourselves into the center of survivors' experiences, when really their transition from victim to survivor belongs to them alone.
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