PhotoDude.com

Sat. Sep 10, 2005

Four Years On

One year on, I told you, “You shouldn’t be here today.” Two Years On I wrote A Day of Remembrance and Mad At The Messenger. Then there was Three Years On, and The Children of 9-11.

Now it’s four years. And I don’t know what to tell you.

Not too long ago, Tony Blair said “September 11 for me was a wake up call. Do you know what I think the problem is? That a lot of the world woke up for a short time and then turned over and went back to sleep again.”

That resonated with me when he said it in late July. Long before Katrina. Long before I wrote about how we pulled together for a brief shining moment back then, but four years later, you’re on your own.

So, here on my own, I can’t help thinking about the numbers. And trying to personalize each one. Because the numbers are people. 2,986 of them.

When someone dies, we give their memory a day. We dress up, go to the visitation and the funeral, and remember them. If you were to remember just one of those 2,986 victims a day, it would take over 8 years and 2 months. So you’d be about half way there. And around the beginning of next February, you’d have covered the approximately 1,600 victims who’d had at least some portion of their remains found and identified. But you’d still have nearly 1,400 whose loved ones were left with nothing but their memory. No grave to visit on a day like today. Not even a small urn of their ashes.

There are, at a minimum, 2,986 important stories from that day. Each one of them about a life now gone. We can never know them all. But I can tell you one: ‘I’m OK, I’m with the firemen’: In Memory of Bill Biggart.