25 years on.

Here’s the thing about September 11th.

It’s not a single day of remembrance. It’s a season.

For those of us who lived in New York City and New Jersey, for those who lived in and near DC and Shanksville, for those whose loved ones were on the planes, “never forget” means something far larger than that one day.

I have clear memories of September 12, 2001. September 13, 14, 15. Today, September 18, too—every date after for a long time is linked inexorably to that blue-skied Tuesday. Not only for the collective movement through grief we were traveling, especially as New Yorkers, but for the compounding trauma of that time.

The days and weeks after September 11th continued continued to unfurl in a cruel bloom in those following days, weeks, and months, like a bruise. Every day bringing new shock, new pain, new loss. Every day a unique agony.

The jolt of seeing soldiers with automatic weapons at the subway turnstiles

The flyers, so many faces, on every non-moving structure below 14th Street

The Islamophobia and war mongering leaping out immediately in terrifying ways, causing more harm and fear

The blood banks, with long lines of donors and nowhere to donate the blood

The hope that more survivors would be found, spiked high at first, waning with dreadful certainty by the hour

The lower Manhattan residents displaced for months, homes filled with toxic smoke, dust, and debris

The stories. So many stories. Overheard on the streets, in delis, at work, on the trains and buses.

Standing in the NYU costume shop, checking on my former teacher, hearing her tell the story of her Park Slope neighborhood firehouse whose outgoing shift climbed onto the fire rig with the incoming shift. No way they were going to stand by while their brothers ran toward the smoke. The firehouse lost 12 men that day. Half the company.

A theater acquaintance saying soberly that he was considering enlisting right away, sending shocks through my system at the dramatic change of course. 

Michael Rolando Richards, the artist-in-residence on the 92nd floor, whose incredible works in bronze include a Tuskegee Airman posed as St. Sebastian, being martyred by airplanes colliding with his body instead of arrows. 

How do you make sense of details like this?
The answer: you don’t.

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“Never forget” is not one date. And our country remains in a state of constant forgetting, or selective forgetting, as instructed by its own President at the time. A week after September 11th was when George W. Bush told Americans to “get down to Disney World in Florida.” 

Go pour your money into the economy, nevermind your collective grief and confusion.

We didn’t know it until October 5, but the anthrax attacks began on September 18, 2001, ushering in a whole new level of fear in the region.

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Every year I get angrier at the ways that day’s losses have been used to fortify the racist, nationalist machinery of empire. Some of my rage surely betrays my privilege and ignorance of not knowing much about that machinery before that date.

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None of this is unique to me. None of this is mine alone. 

And none of this is to say that there is a singular way to experience a historic event that flung wide the doors for ongoing violence, genocide, and dehumanization. Everyone alive then, everyone now dealing intimately with the cruel ways this event changed things, has their own perspective.

I don’t share this for pity, for sympathy. I share it to remind us all to question the ways we’re asked to remember, to forget, to never forget. 

For me, Rebecca Solnit’s observations in “A Paradise Built in Hell” ring truest to my small experience. September 11th did not make me more afraid of my neighbors, either locally or globally. It instilled a deep and visceral faith in ordinary humans to behave in extraordinary ways in the hours and weeks after a crisis, with instincts toward care, aid, support, and love.

Don't worry

From Ikkyū:

don't worry please please how many times do I have to say it there's no way not to be who you are and where

From Crow With No Mouth: Ikkyu, Fifteenth Century Zen Master, translated by Stephen Berg.

History/Trapped

People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.

-James Baldwin

from "Stranger in the Village," Harper's Magazine, 1953

Words that elegantly speak what I was fumbling toward in my writing from last year.

The Eternal Now as it Fades into History

Getting older is strange. In 2011, I had a baby, my first baby, and those moments were seared into my memory as the Eternal Now. Those moments are still vibrant and alive for me, because they were brand new, fresh moments in a new lifetime for me—life as a mother. I was new and awake and changed in ways that were vulnerable and naked and alive.

To look up and see that those moments were a decade ago is very confusing, disorienting. The people who surrounded me in that moment are not all here anymore. Some gone through death, some gone through the natural ebb and flow of friendship. My body is different, my understanding of myself is unrecognizable in some ways.

When he emerged from my body, a whole new being, I was suddenly reborn, too; a brand new mother, a creature who had never existed before, not really. I wasn’t prepared for the way I would die on that operating table, and in the days and weeks to come. I would become a new thing, one that could not sleep until her child was in her arms. One who creates food to grow that child. One who reshapes everything about her body and mind, over and over, in the service of a safe and joyful rest for that child. A constant flow of becoming a better person, a less judgmental person, a gentler, more patient, more playful person.

I was a raw nerve, a rare fawn, stepping out into a new universe. Those moments still vibrate with energy—my atoms snapping open, a nuclear blast changing everything about everything.

So how is it possible that linear time places that awakening ten years ago? One hundred and twenty months. How is that child old enough to have nostalgia about video games we played when he was four? How can an Eternal Now be history, be a decade in the past?

I am bewildered.

I think about my neighbor, P., a lot. Her beautiful daughter, B., gone, lost to the COVID-19 pandemic. She gave birth to B. in 1966—only three years after this house was built. To me, a date clearly in the past, connected to historical events I didn’t witness. But I know that P. experiences that year as a forever Now in which the clothes aren’t dated, the music is currently everything is new.

Meanwhile, in a terrible trick of malicious public health and cruel luck, her 1966 baby is dead.

“I know everyone says I just need to accept that she’s dead, she’s gone, But…” P. said, standing in her house dress on the other side of the chain link fence that connects our back yards, her eyes lost, her brow furrowed.

“It’s going to take time,” I said. “You’ll probably pick up the phone to call or text her a hundred times a day.” She nodded.

When I was younger, I didn’t understand history to be something that accumulates inside of human bodies. I didn’t know it would build up inside of me. In many ways, that ignorance was probably nurtured in me because I’m white. At school, they taught us that history is made up of dates and events; meanwhile, I went to school with kids whose parents were born in the Jim Crow South, whose grandparents grew up under segregation, whose families left China because of the photos we were shown like it was ancient history. I sat in classrooms with classmates whose families were actively in the middle of history.

And mine was too, though the ways it was were made invisible by our whiteness, our ancestors’ choice to align with whiteness. Meanwhile, the electrified webbing of history was woven by all of us together in ways no child can truly understand.

My education failed me in that way—giving me the illusion that these events even happened the way they did—and that history teacher who tried to encourage critical thinking, who scrawled “History is Bunk” on his chalkboard on our first day, is now an active Trump supporter, according to his Facebook page.

Getting older is remarkably, painfully, bitterly strange.

Happy Mother's Day

Flowers are a traditional Mother’s Day gift, but today I’m thinking about how flowers and blossoms are really the outgrowth of the less showy work of mothering.

The flowers get the glory - whether a child, a creative project, a business, an organization - and of course we’re immensely proud of them.

But they wouldn’t exist without the lush foliage and invisible root systems of mothering. Through photosynthesis, we transform sunlight and wind and water into food for our families and communities. We hold fast to this earth with little fanfare so our blossoms can unfurl and thrive.

I celebrate you everyday, and especially today, in all those moments and choices that go without applause, without audience. I see you as you lean toward sunlight to nourish your own life and the lives around you.

Happy Mother’s Day to all of you who mother — everyone who nurtures young life in its many forms, including that which is delicate and new within you.

(Originally posted on Instagram)