By Tabitha Bozeman
As our country remembers 9/11 this week, I am reminded of the seasonal nature of love and loss and remembrance, and how universal loss is to the human experience. This has been a season of remembrance, and today is a day for remembrance. All of my children were born post 9/11, but I was a college student. I will always remember where I was when I first heard the news, and how I watched the coverage all day. Classes were cancelled, people were checking on friends and family who were travelling that day, and no one had any answers yet.
Days like today ask us to do more than just remember where we were when something happened, though. They ask us to move past the spectacle aspect of catastrophe, loss and tragedy. Remembrance is more than recalling a moment in time. Instead, it asks us to pause and give of our most finite resource: time. Moments in memoriam ask us to consciously choose to recall an event, a person, a moment or emotion and to fully immerse ourselves in that memory not as a trick of nostalgia, but as a discipline of remembrance. Many works of literature are focused, in one way or another, on remembrance: on loss, avoiding loss, recovering from loss, reimagining life after loss and on remembrance. On the latter, Merwin tells us that “what you remember saves you.”
Bonhoeffer says, “There is nothing that can replace the absence of someone dear to us, and one should not even attempt to do so. One must simply hold out and endure it. At first that sounds very hard, but at the same time it is also a great comfort. For to the extent the emptiness truly remains unfilled one remains connected to the other person through it. . .the more beautiful and full the remembrances, the more difficult the separation. But gratitude transforms the torment of memory into silent joy. One bears what was lovely in the past not as a thorn but as a precious gift deep within, a hidden treasure of which one can always be certain.”
I know that for many losses in my life, time has never completely taken away the pain, but it has made me able to be glad of this aspect of loss Bonhoeffer describes: the loss and pain still sneak up, but in time it becomes a poignant and bittersweet reminder of how much I loved the person, rather than memories only registering the stark shock of the loss. Virginia Woolf ponders how “the beauty of the world which is so soon to perish, has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder,” acknowledging that both love and loss coexist in our experience of life. Woolf also views remembrance as a creative act, one that redeems loss by building something new from it. This is a beautiful way to think about personal and public losses. Tragedy on the scale of 9/11 is something we will hopefully never experience again, collectively, as a country. Holding the memory of it and marking time’s passing through remembrance of that day is a reminder that we can survive tragedy, come together to make it through the tunnel of loss and grief and move forward to reimagine life after loss. It is also an opportunity for truly feeling the magnitude of loss others worldwide are experiencing due to natural disasters, war and hunger. We have witnessed our own loss, and when we spare a moment for remembrance we have the opportunity to create something new from tragedy: a new way of viewing the universality of loss and looking for ways to be kind to others knowing it is part of our human experience.
