Images trapped in an ashy grave

For me it was a shoe- a brown woman’s flat with creases across the toe. On a pile of twisted steel and ash, surrounded by computer paper and smoke blowing in the breeze, it lay cast aside and missing its mate. The shoe was real-- the rest: too horrific for comprehension.

I’d never been to New York, and I’d never met her people. Her subways and fancy buildings were the things of movies. But the shoe I knew the shoe and the back of the firefighter’s helmets.

How many times had I searched the backs of helmets, looking for the familiar name “Sitter-- Co. 33,” my husband’s name? That day he was off fighting another fire. I knew he wasn’t there, but I still searched. It’s instinctive to read the helmets. There goes somebody’s son, somebody else’s husband and father into the tower. Good they’ll save those people. These men and women know no fear. I was so proud of them that day. These were the heroes who would make it all better.

What happened seemed incomprehensible.

The building fell. It wasn’t supposed to fall. In even the most terrifying nightmares there is still hope, but for the building to fall? Buildings don't fall and crush people. They don't. It couldn't be. The firefighters-- they were there. They were inside. The people-- all those people.

A scream-- what more could I do? I was just a helpless observer 3,00 miles away. It was helpless to tell them not to go, to stay out of the still standing, faltering tower. I knew no crumbling tower would deter them. They’d keep going because that is what they do-- their brothers and sisters were inside. It was personal.

Heroes possess this drive that makes them keep fighting. They store up their grief in little boxes and keep going-- how do they do it? What tears they couldn’t cry that day-- no time for tears or even a scream.

And I thought of all the grief-- so small compared to this-- that my own husband held deep within himself, managing to go on-- a 2-year-old who drowned in a septic tank, the truck full of teenagers whose truck flipped, mangled bodies for him to see, the couple who crashed on Humboldt Road. He was the first at scene that day, and he was so young -- 23? I think. The woman was begging him to help her husband, but he could do nothing. Grey matter was all over. The man was crushed, and my husband tried. He put on a show, but he knew he could do nothing, but for her he tried. He came home quiet. He does this once in a while. Never sharing what horrors he’d seen-- what people he couldn’t help.

And so I knew the firefighters would continue to run toward the burning crumbled building-- a desperate run toward what they knew would be their death. I knew they’d flood to the other one still standing but faltering. I knew because deep in their hearts there is so much hope, so much fight. They can save the day, right? They don’t crumble with the ashes. They don’t fall beside a discarded shoe of some unknown woman.

But they did.

And when they did, I imagined so many women searching the backs of the helmets-- only these woman weren’t hoping for a roadside wave or a glimpse of their loved one on TV. They were hoping for signs of life.

This was the day my children started sleeping with me-- though I really didn’t sleep for weeks because every time I closed my eyes I saw the shoe-- a woman’s shoe, comfortable and alone. I couldn’t see the towers or the helmets anymore. Those images were too painful. My mind couldn’t comprehend the Pentagon-- our nations first line of defense, the place that keeps us safe-- with a big hole burning. A field in Pennsylvania -- much too painful.

I could block all that out, but not the shoe. The shoe was personal, mundane and out of place in this surreal nightmare of planes flying into buildings, towers crumbling and twisted steel burning.

And so I slept with my Maggie-- though I didn’t really sleep. I tried not to shut my eyes because the shoe made it all real.




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