Emotional Scars

The Emotional Scars of September 11

Walking past the courthouses and city hall toward Ground Zero, you enter an uncanny world that is both completely familiar and totally strange. Though street signs and landmarks remain unchanged, axes of orientation no longer line up as they once did. It is not just the reduction of people and traffic; something else, something palpable yet far more difficult to articulate is loose on the streets.

I visited the site with my friend, Aaron, who had been in the World Financial Center at the time of the attack. He was not injured but while escaping had images seared in his mind that will change him forever. He felt it was important for him to return to the scene of terror and knew he should not go alone the first time.

As we turned the corner on Broadway at St. Paul's Chapel, we caught our first glimpse of the American Express Building. We both froze instantly. Standing but a stone's throw away, the floors where Aaron had been working looked like they had suffered repeated mortar attacks. Between us and the WFC, the twin towers once stood. Now their absence had become an overwhelming presence.

A few blocks farther on, there was an opening through which we could see the true scope of the devastation. With dusk falling, bright lights illuminated a scene that was both profoundly unsettling and disturbingly sublime-like an otherworldly sculpture by some unknown artist. A s...

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...he past decade render us vulnerable. Our strength has become our weakness. The eruption of the aweful power to which we have been exposed forces us to face an unavoidable question: Can we now humbly accept our vulnerability by opening ourselves to help from others-both within and beyond borders we now know are insecure-without whom we cannot survive? If any hope remains, it is that our weakness might become a source of strength.

As we ascended from the subway to the growing darkness of uptown, I realized that our pilgrimage had not erased Aaron's scars; nothing ever will. In this difficult time, we must not seek premature closure, but should linger with the wound to learn the profound lessons it harbors.