United We Remember

This past Sunday was the annual New York City Marathon. As helicopters flew overhead and police barricaded street corners, painful reminders of a city under siege, runners clad in starred and striped shorts and T-shirts turned 26 miles of raw endurance into a communal exercise of grief. Firefighters ran for lost brothers, husbands for lost wives, friends for lost friends. The marathon’s motto, “United We Run,” captured the spirit of the event. Never, perhaps, has the image of 30,000—Canadians, Ethiopians, and New Yorkers among them—running in one swift motion, under the invisible shadow of two great landmarks, been so strikingly poignant.

A photograph of the runners gathering on the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge at the start of the event showed many gazing to the left, as if to reconstruct the changed landscape for themselves. Squinting, firefighter Tim McCauley observed, “It is heartbreaking not to see those towers.” McCauley wore the badge numbers of fellow firefighters on his headband. Others carried pictures, and still others wore T-shirts bearing the names of victims. Yet it was the runners without pictures, T-shirts and badges, those who were simply running for themselves, who intrigued me most. As they looked towards the gulf of empty space in the skyline, their faces were marked with a similar expression of sorrow. For those without the grief of losing loved ones, what is it that we mourn?

I wondered about this as I took my bike out Sunday morning to do a familiar loop around my neighborhood (I live a half mile away from World Trade Center). Squeezing between police cars and roadblocks, I soon turned around, mostly because the smell––an acrid, chemical smell-had settled permanently in the air. Making a slow turn onto my street, I looked up, and for the first time in the fifteen years that I have been looking up, the view had irrevocably, permanently changed. My eye struggled to fill in the blank behind the yellow church and the Customs House, mostly because my vision of the towers had already begun to fade. Partly because they were so familiar that I never really knew exactly what they looked like, and partly because you do not bother to make a memory of what you never thought you would have to remember. The towers had loomed protectively over hide-and-go-seek games, my first bike ride, the time Adele Kudish tripped over me running through the spray of an open fire hydrant at my 10th birthday party. On late nights, as I walked home from the subway station, I would always look up at the lights scattered through the towers and muse over who was staying late to work, and why, and what people were celebrating up in Windows on the World, which cast an unbroken strip of light from the 107th floor.

The strange thing about living in a city where you can ride a crowded train and smell someone’s breakfast without knowing their name is that you begin to befriend the physical landscape around you. Larger-than-life structures become identifiable things, old friends to greet on visits home, urban landmarks as well as private milestones. The anonymity of people makes the familiarity of buildings more deeply felt: in a city of strangers, they are a set of steady and common companions.

It is difficult to explain the sadness I feel. The best way to put it, I think, is to say that I grieve for lost buildings. Something I have grown up with is no longer there. With the loss of the towers, I have begun to realize how much their presence had anchored me to my idea of home. Biking around my neighborhood on Sunday, I felt a vague sense of homesickness, the kind of feeling you have when you lose someone very close to you, or when your life changes drastically, without your ever having meant it to.

The media, in an attempt to find the words that adequately describe Sept. 11, calls it a threat to democracy, an American tragedy, a historical rupture. Perhaps. In an equally important sense, the loss of the towers is also a profoundly private loss, not only for those who lost family and friends, but also for those who cherished some idea of what these buildings meant to them. For most of us, I think, do not think of the towers as symbols of American success, rather in terms of the Sbarro’s that we ate at during a recent visit, or the concerts that we saw on the plaza, as the setting of individual memories. And I think it was not in shock or in anger that so many turned their heads downtown on marathon Sunday, but in remembrance. In grieving for lost buildings, we grieve for ourselves.

Sue Meng ’03 is a history and literature concentrator in Adams House. Her column appears on alternate Thursdays.