PhotoDude.com

Thu. Sep 11, 2003

Two Years On

Two Years On – (this is the text of the special home page from 9/11/03, archived here) A year ago on this day, I wrote “You shouldn’t be here today. I didn’t lose a loved one on September 11, 2001. None of my relatives gave their life in military service to their country in Afghanistan. I was just another shell shocked American watching from a safe distance wrapped in the comfort and safety of their home.”

“But today, there is nothing I can say that is relevant, except, you shouldn’t be here right now. Go pray, meditate, take a thoughtful walk, or partake of the far more pertinent memorials offered today in various places, in various ways.”

“You shouldn’t be here.”

The same is true today, perhaps with a twist. I have no fingers to point, no political point to be made. You can surely partake of that in various other places today. And you can find it here … on any other day.

But today, I’m going to spend some time with an item I’ve been saving a while. For Christmas, my wife gave me a book I very much wanted, “Here Is New York: A Democracy of Photographs.” When I opened it Christmas morning, I leafed through a few pages, but a voice in my head said “save it.” I haven’t touched it since, but I will spend today going through the nearly 1,000 images, thinking about the thousands of innocent lives taken on that day. Human lives of all varieties, all religions, all ethnicities, all sexual, social and political classes.

I’ll think about the widespread good those lives could have generated in the past 730 days. If they’d been allowed to simply continue living them. I’ll think about the fact that nearly half the victim’s families have not even one shred of identified remains of their loved one. I’ll think about the widowed spouses, and the gaping hole left in their lives by having the love of their life ripped from it so suddenly and violently.

Perhaps most of all, I’ll think about the children who lost a parent that day. Of all the horrid after effects of that day, I think that one haunts me most. Some were in their mother’s womb, and will never know their father. Many were too young to grasp what happened, but maybe now, two years on, they do. All of them will grow to maturity with an ever developing perception of that loss.

By comparison, what happened to me on that day was of no note at all. But I’ve written about it, for the reason so many others have … to document where we were and what happened to us on that fateful Tuesday. Just another Voice. But I’d much rather you read the story of what happened to another photographer on that day: “ ‘I’m OK, I’m with the firemen’: A Tribute to Bill Biggart.”

It is the best tribute I can offer to any one of the thousands lost on that day. And that is all today should be about.