I scarcely hear a siren, see the flashing lights, before I'm praying, my voice a stage whisper, sudden and foreign in my ears -- Who else hears me? It doesn't matter; I don't realize I'm speaking out loud until I hear it myself, and another's presence makes no difference.
After August 28, 1998, with the loss of our grand-daughter during the night, I learned what those emblems, the siren and the lights, mean: life, and death. And as I murmur prayers for whomever is dying, whomever lies dead, he who helplessly stands by, she who is physically unscathed but who will never be the same -- for just one uncontrolled, hysterical nanosecond, I am them all.
When the World Trade Center towers went down, our youngest son called to tell us to turn on the TV, told us brusquely, huskily, of an unprecedented attack, a turning point in all the world, in our homeland. The enormity of it shocked, and to some degree, deadened. I was still grieving the loss of a baby, as real that day as the day she was born, and now...
The New York skyline. The -- whole --- thing? Imploding? And another plane? Another tower? The Pentagon? Pennsylvania? People running, screaming, wailing, jumping... some escaping, one, two, a group... and my safe family, watching by satellite those with their lives on hold, expecting casualties that would not, could not come.
How does one KNOW at what cost those towers went down?
New York became immediately a symbol of innocent loss, and at the same time, one of tremendous solidarity. Mere days later, set up with my little church group outside a supermarket, the pastor and others shared their vision of a mission to Africa. I folded red, white, and blue ribbons, stitched beads and sequin-stars upon them, attached safety pins, tossed them into a basket to take for free.
And people thrust their money at me.
I didn't ask for it, didn't want it, didn't know what to do with it. But it kept coming. Soon my church family took down their poster boards, and simply stood and watched God gather money for those who lost all, later making calls, finding what to do with the money we were not asking for.
I think... I believe, yes, that those who cried as they emptied their pockets, their wallets, their purses, did not see towers crash. Like me, they were watching soul after soul lifted unexpectedly into eternity. Not secretaries, managers, vice presidents, clerks, firefighters -- but one soul. And a second soul. And then a third soul. A mother... a father... a new bride... an only son... a grampa... almost endlessly, one after the other.
And so I think of them on this day, amidst waving flags and black arm bands, and the rhetoric of peace, and the rhetoric of war, and the opportunity of a lifetime to buy a Liberian coin with the twin towers imprinted upon it.
I honor one soul. At a time.
'Birth of an Angel' cb