EKO
Artist and bookmaker
The morning the towers came down my friend came over so we could walk to school together. My mom had the local news on, the chitchat morning show. We stood there glued to the screen, two third graders ready for school: watching it happen and understanding none of it.
I asked my dad if we should stay home.
He was adjusting his tie. He grabbed his briefcase and said no. You are going to school, because they want to disrupt your life. But you’re gonna live it.
We went to school, and we just watched TV in class all day. They cancelled PE. A room full of kids looping the worst footage of the century for hours. I’m sure my teacher thought she was doing the right thing. At some point kids laughed, because kids do, and I snapped at a girl in my class. She apologized.
I had no words for what was in my chest. I only knew that something holy had been violated and laughing anywhere near it felt wrong.
That is how it started for me. Twenty-five years of the same images returning every September. Public grief taking on its ritual form. And somewhere along the way you can start to feel that questioning anything done afterward is a failure of the dead.
There is one line on the table. The dead do not require us to approve everything done in their names. They require us to remember what they did.
So remember. Welles Remy Crowther, 24, an equities trader at Sandler O’Neill and Partners on the 104th floor of the South Tower. A volunteer firefighter since he was 16 in Upper Nyack. When the towers stood burning he pulled the red bandana his father gave him, carried since boyhood, over his mouth and nose against the smoke, and he went to work. The 78th floor. The one stairwell that still ran. He found the wounded. He put a woman on his back and carried her down. Then he went back up.
His remains were found in March 2002. Survivors spent months describing a man in a red bandana until a photograph gave him his name. His parents later found more bandanas folded in his bureau, and one of them rests in the museum now.
Rick Rescorla, 62, head of security for Morgan Stanley in the South Tower. A veteran of Vietnam. When the first plane hit the North Tower, the Port Authority came over the loudspeaker and told everyone to stay at their desks.
He ignored it.
He picked up his bullhorn and ordered all 2,700 of his people out. In the stairwell he kept them calm by singing, old Cornish mining songs, the voice that had carried men through Vietnam. Halfway down he called his wife. Stop crying, he told her. I have to get these people out safely. If something should happen to me, I want you to know I have never been happier. You made my life. When nearly all of them were out, he went back up.
He was last seen on the 10th floor, heading upward, before the tower fell. Thirteen Morgan Stanley people died that day, and he was one of them – 2,700 lived.
For 25 years the country has asked why. I know that from the inside out. I went down the rabbit holes as a child, as a teen, as an adult. Some of that work is worthwhile. And at some point I had to get on with mine.
Others never got the choice. Some lost family, friends, coworkers, and the wound never closed. We watched the city, and then our country, turn into somewhere we no longer recognize, and the grief keeps compounding.
Nobody gets over that. We carry it.
What are you going to do now, 25 years after the fact?
Some of the guilty are already dead. Others appear to walk free. But even perfect justice restores nothing. Vengeance belongs to the Father.
So how do we live?
Some want a villain with a flag, or a villain with horns. Both are a way of asking the small question so we never have to face the big one.
My dad answered it that morning without knowing he was answering anything. A man just adjusting his tie while the world came down on TV.
An attorney who took his work seriously and took on clients who could not always pay him, because it was the right thing to do.
He didn’t give me a speech. He just said, you’re going to school. Because they want to disrupt your life, but you’re gonna live it.
You go to school. I go to work.
I know what my father knew that morning. Something to do. A way to live. And I know what Welles Crowther knew, and what Rick Rescorla knew. The direction is up.
So today, remember what they did, and then go live your life.
The person in front of you is the stairwell you have. The dead do not require us to approve, and they do not require us to solve. They require us to keep going.
This morning I took my kids for donuts. They are just learning to dress themselves and tie their own shoes. They noticed more American flags out than usual and asked why. I told them what today was.
They had only one question. Will it happen again?
I said pray to God it does not.
They asked why it matters so much to me. I said I was only a few years older than you when it happened. It’s imprinted on who I am. What does imprinted mean, they asked. A deep memory, carved into your soul.
My parents explained JFK’s assassination to me with kid gloves, and I swore my kids would get it straight. And still I sat at that table this morning and chose calm, clean words, the way my father must have chosen his that morning while he adjusted his tie.
He didn’t hand me an explanation either. He handed me a sentence and a way to live. I do not have more than that for them yet. Maybe no father does.
Will something like that happen again to us? Pray to God it does not.
P.S. The full record and the chronology live in the book. The book is free.
This article was originally published by EKO Loves You.
