Last year on this day, I wrote three very different entries with one theme: The Beginning.
My entries were The Beginning, literally, of a long and heartbreaking search for friends who were probably dead before left my apartment to search. In the big picture, it was the beginning of my metamorphis into who I am now: a bit more weathered, a bit more aware, a bit more joyful, a bit more somber.
Today, I offer three new entries, also with a common theme: Closure.
The victims' names, split into two parts, because this page could not contain them all at once and I later realized, symbolically, compressed into parts for the friends I lost in both Towers.
It's incomprehensible to me that we could have arrived at the 1-year anniversary of all these deaths. All of these men and women in my life who were strangers to each other, but died together.
The best thing I can document today, is the feeling of closure I have as it registered that I have lived a whole year without these people. Life has gone on for me, and they were with me everyday of that year. My memories of them have not faded, but in some ways, grown stronger through remembrence and celebration of them.
In this third entry today, I conclude with this, written by Henry Holland Scott:
Death is nothing at all.
I have only slipped away into the next room.
I am I, and you are you.
Whatever we were to each other, that we still are.
Call me by my old familiar name, speak to me in the easy way which you always used.
Put no difference in your tone, wear no forced air of solemnity or sorrow.
Laugh as we always laughed at the little jokes we enjoyed together.
Pray, smile, think of me, pray for me. Let my name be ever the household word that it always was, let it be spoken without effect, without the trace of a shadow on it.
Life means all that it ever meant. It is the same as it ever was; there is unbroken continuity.
Why should I be out of mind because I am out of sight?
I am waiting for you, for an interval, somewhere very near, just around the corner.
All is well.
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