September 11, my birthday, was once the most beautiful day of the year.
Growing up as the fifth of five children, I loved that it was the one day I ruled the house, when I could write the dinner menu and dictate rules for the last of the summer’s nighttime games in the yard.
Since then, wherever I’ve lived, it’s been a glorious day on the cusp of autumn. It might be the first cool day, whispering, “Change is coming.” Sometimes it was the sweetest, final burst of golden summer, with the sky so blue it has no name.
I saw that sky seven years ago as a surreal backdrop to the horror that unfolded on our TV screens. I saw it as the planes arrived at their final, awful impacts, at right angles to the towers. I saw it as the dust cleared above the heads of firefighters combing the rubbled streets of Manhattan. And I grieved as I knew that color, that place, that day — all of us — would never be the same.
In the following months, as individuals and as a nation we were plunged into a dark fog of despair that I thought could never end. Was there ever a Sept. 10, when we simply lived our lives, blissfully ignorant of the hatred eating away the hearts of men?
But slowly, finally, as the depression came to lift, sharp glimmers of light broke through the nightmare. Like the first day I again noticed a hummingbird at my feeder. Had they been gone, or had I just failed to notice them? Or the time I saw one stranger embrace another who’d broken into sobs on the street. You remember: Think back to hearing the bittersweet tales of men and women reaching out, through kindness and a new kind of raw love, to others in pain.
Later that fall, my daughter’s friends came to our house for a sleepover. Their happy, breathless, fourth-graders’ conversation turned to birthdays: When was Maggie’s? When was Hannah’s? Oh, please, God, don’t let them ask me. But the question came. And with my two-word answer a shadow fell, and they asked each other, “Where were you when it happened?”
I don’t want to be the person who brings back those memories. And I’m not alone. There are countless numbers of us. We know our loss is trivial, compared to those who’ve lost parents, spouses, children, co-workers. I’m not asking for sympathy; those thousands deserve it many times over.
Relatives and friends have suggested I change the date of my birth. But a birthday, a historical event, is not something you can just change. Sept. 11 is the date Nikita Khruschev died. Years before that it was the date I was born. And it’s the date a handful of men consumed by hatred lost their humanity. A date that changed the way Americans look at the world. A date, a series of events, that none of us can change.
Nobel laureate Miguel Angel Asturias wrote in “El Senor Presidente”: “The weight of the dead makes the earth turn by night, and by day it is the weight of the living when there are more dead than living there will be eternal night, night without end, for the living will not be heavy enough to bring the dawn.”
I believe we caught a glimpse of that eternal night on 9/11. I felt the Earth stop. And I think it is the kindness and the humanity we as survivors found in our hearts that brought back the light to get the Earth turning again. And I believe embracing life, continuing to find the good in others and in ourselves, is the only way we will fight off the night without end.
This Sept. 11, I will light a candle. I will comfort someone without expecting comfort in return. I will try to understand someone who is different from me. I will smile and forgive the yahoo who cuts me off on the highway. And I will try to restrain my own yahoo-ness. I will turn off the damned TV. I will not let them win, because I believe, with all my heart, that only the weight of the living can bring the dawn.
Debra Crawford was a 2003 Colorado Voices panelist. She is currently in educational communications and writing a book about living in Asia. This is based on a column that ran in The (Carbondale) Valley Journal in September 2002.
