I spent the past weekend in New York, gallivanting around with a good friend and enjoying what the city has to offer. I love being in that city--the energy, the masses of people, the lights, the smells, the claustrophobia-inducing quality of a series of 50 story buildings. I have been to the city recently but had not taken the time to go the 9/11 memorial.
We had some time to kill on Saturday morning so we went by. I don't know what I was expecting, and I think to some degree it was helpful to come at it with no expectations. It was perfect, I thought. Just the right combination of sober and sombre without descending to the macabre or the kitchsy. For those of you who have not been, the main feature is two square monuments, erected over the site of the original towers with cascading waterfalls leading down to concentrically smaller terraces. Around the outside of each monument is a granite slab with the names of the deceased in each tower inscribed in the rock. Visitors are encouraged to run their hands along the etchings and trace the names of the dead. It was an entirely sobering experiencing.
One of the main things that struck me as I was there was the ethnicities of so many of the names: Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Italian, Greek, Arabic. The international nature of both that city and this particular tragedy was well-conveyed with no overt mention required.
The names are sobering, too, in their very quantity. As you walk the circumference the plenitude can be overwhelming. And then both my friend and I were stopped in our tracks. Next to just shy of a dozen names in the dual monuments are the names of a woman followed by "and her unborn child." Tears instantly came to both of our eyes. My friend is a new father; I have two children and a pregnant wife. It was not hard to imagine the depth of despair at that phone call or that realization that your loss is twofold. Though in another sense I can hardly imagine it at all.
I told my students at the beginning of the week about this anecdote. I told the story well with the appropriate pauses at the appropriate junctures. And it was a fresh punch in the gut at each telling.
And I think I know why. It's this and it's simple, really: we all know and recognize that it is not simply the death of one person being remembered in that cut stone but the death of two. We know in that moment, whether the mother was on her last day of work before maternity leave--like one of the mothers--or she and her husband had discovered the pregnancy only that morning--as was the case with another--that what was forming in each woman's body was not a simple cluster of cells with the potential of life but a person in the making. We know that whatever the death toll of the adult bodies in the towers on that sacred day that the names of a dozen more are rightfully added.
Too often right to life issues can become abstracted from what is actually being discussed. This simple monument broke through the pretensions. Those four simple words--and her unborn child--contain a world of meaning. A world of meaning that many of us in our perverse and broken culture are willfully denying. Those plain words, etched in stone, cry out the truth.
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