BLOG: We All Watched

The most startling headline of the last few days, centered upon our bottomless losses on 9/11, was reported to me tonight:  CLOSURE AT LAST!

My experience, along with that of many eye witnesses and commentators and many in between--, is that 9/11 is NEVER closed.

Television's Chuck Scarborough compared the destruction of the World Trade Center to 11/23/63, the still unbelievagle slaughter of our President, John F. Kennedy--, "when our world changed forever, never to be remedied." 

"Closure" - what an insult to those who died;to their families, friends and colleagues. 

What an insult to the readers of that newspaper.

When the planes hit the two towers ten years ago, I could NOT watch.  Everyone at work clustered in cubicles, --staring, gaping, weeping.

I knew, if I allowed those ceaselessly repeated images into my retina, they would never leave either brain or heart.

What I did not know, until I ritually watched for three days this weekend, is that I'm seared anyway.

I never saw nor heard, for example, bodies passing windows and flames, bodies thudding onto the streets, so that firemen were ordered not to go outside because of THAT danger.

I never saw the tumultuous pyroclastic flow of ash, as towers turned to cinder and powder. 

I had no idea that boiling remnants of towers followed fleeing people down Manhattan canyons.

I never saw either plane hit, and wonder even now who was photographing and WHY when the first connected with its human-filled target.

After this weekend, there is one image, however, that never leaves me. 

Three stark metal skeletons of buildings that used to be.  The center one is straight.  The others are slanted away, as though in horror.

It's every Renaissance painting of Golgotha. 

In my ears, almost echoes, "This day, thou shalt be with me in Paradise."

Paradise, indeed, for all who perished.

Quite the opposite forever for all of us who watched, then and now. 

All of us who can never forget.

Yet must forgive.