What to tell the kids...

May 02, 2011, By Craig J. Heimbuch 7 comments

Everybody has their 9/11 story. Everyone remembers where they were when they heard the news and the months of numbness that came after. For me, I was right out of college, working my first daily newspaper job in northern Virginia. It was a warm morning, I remember that, and the sky a pure, almost iridescent blue. I remember how spooky it was that no planes were in the skies, how eerie empty air felt. I filed three stories that day and dozens more in the days that followed. I watched the Pentagon burn. My heart sank when I realized that two people from my church were on board that plane. It sank again when I heard the story of Flight 93 and realized how close to where I lived it went down.

Two weeks later, I was standing at the World Trade Center, watching it burn, listening to the construction vehicles as they carted off house-sized piles of twisted steel. There was no other traffic, no one on the streets inside the military cordon. It was 20 degrees cooler there than in mid-town, a ghost town with thousands of ghosts. I won my first journalism award for the piece I filed from New York, and I remember pacing the small office I worked in for two hours after I got back, trying to think of a lede that did the experience justice. I wrote:

"The first thing you notice is the smell."

Light, acrid, oddly clean, it is the most distinct smell I have ever encountered. I still wake up some nights with it in my nose. Other nights, I wake up from a dream. It's always the same dream, one based on a story New York Firefighter Bill Butler told me. He was one of the 'Lucky Six from Ladder Six,' a group of firefighters who survived being trapped in the South Tower as it collapsed. We were sitting in a VFW hall. He was in town—a friend of a friend had invited him—to tell his story. How he was in the stairwell when the building started going down in a thunderous crush of concrete and steel, how he heard those bells going off—warnings of expired oxygen tanks from other FDNY brothers—how the bullets from the Port Authority armory began popping off as the fires reached the lower levels. In the dream, I am him. I am trapped amid the bodies and the rubble. I cannot get out.

There were the stories of the survivors, of PD Fyke, the man who lived in Tribeca and agreed to pose as my uncle in order to get me closer to the Trade Center. There were rumors of more attacks, the National Guardsmen at the airport when my wife and I flew to Maine at the end of September, a trip I had planned for a year and the place where I proposed. There were wars and fear, fear-mongering and genuine reasons to be afraid. 

And then, last night just as I was about to go to bed, there was the TV news and the headline that Osama bin Laden had been killed, his body in US Custody. I had managed—apart from the occasional nightmare—to move on, to put things in the back of my head. I moved to Ohio, got married, had kids, changed houses and jobs, left behind the constant assault of 9/11 and moved on in my life. But, last night, it all came back. In waves. It came back clear and crisp like that September morning sky. It came back in ghost whispers of empty streets with no planes overhead. It came back in pieces and whole swaths as I sat transfixed, a drink in my hand, watching the news until two or three. It came back and I wondered: how am I supposed to feel? How are all those people I met, those first-hand witnesses, supposed to feel? And what, if anything, do I tell my kids?

Everyone has their 9/11 story and other stories from the decade that has followed. We have stories of shock and horror, of inconvenience and political fights. We have our own stories and our American story. These stories are, at times, conflicting. They butt heads. But life is not a book. Conflict and contradiction are the strands that weave our fabric. I am both relieved and fearful at the news. I feel as if a weight has been lifted, pressure released, but also daunted by what comes next. And I wonder when, if ever, my kids will understand. I can't be sure exactly what I will say to them, but I hope it involves this:

One death does not undo all those that have gone before it. One life cannot make up for all those destroyed. And it is not in vengeance that we prove our might, but in dignity and perseverance, in our ability to heal together and remember without being drawn into wallow. There will never be a time when evil does not exist. It is not our place to imagine a world without those forces that would hurt us, but to build a world in which we overcome them. 

I hope I never forget those days, those people, those places, even if it means a few sleepless nights. But today, I hope I can move on at least a little bit, at least for now, knowing that one chapter has been brought to an end.