Something wicked this way comes. (original) (raw)

Last week I edited a story containing an excerpt from a book written by five 9/11 widows. The piece described the first time all of them met, at a bar downtown, in July 2002. They were the only people each truly felt comfortable around, because they were the only people who knew what it was like. They didn't have to be careful of each other's feelings, they didn't have to try to mask their pain. They didn't have to be strong if they didn't feel like it, and they could toast to their husbands without the others finding it macabre.

One of the women, her husband was only there that day because of a conference he was attending. Four of the five never had a body to bury; the one that did still had no closure because the funeral director wouldn't let her see him, he was in such bad shape; she couldn't even hold his hand. One woman had always had issues with self-image and low self-confidence, and her husband was the one who held her up, who showed her what she was really worth, who always made her see that it was okay and now she had no one to make her see it might one day be okay. One woman flipped out every time she saw a cop near her building because she was afraid they were coming to tell her that they had found her husband's body, and if that happened she could no longer live the fantasy that he was still out there somewhere and would come home one day.

How many more women are reeling from this same tragedy since then, in the name of that day? How many women have lost their husbands, mothers their sons, daughters their brothers? How many women themselves are gone? Since that day and all of the violence that has occured under the mask of it, even though we all know that is not what any of this is every really about, how many more women end their days eating fistfulls of sleeping pills to make it go away for even a few hours, have to pull over to the side of the road when driving the kids to summer camp because he should be there, in other countries have to beg in the streets for food for their children because he is gone and there is no one to care for them anymore?

I was hoping to have something bright and hopeful to share on this day, something that would show in the past five years we have learned something and we have become better and there is hope; I'm sorry, but I don't see it. Not when five years later we are still fighting this war over a thinly-veiled excuse to steal resources. Not when we had the chance to finish it in the last presidential election and we lost it. Not when I see new little girls crying on television because her daddy is gone, for no good reason. I can't. I'm sorry.