Personal and National Loss

Jay D. Homnick on grief, observed:

Sept. 11 is a day of great national mourning, noted in commemoration and steeped in reflection, but also a day of personal mourning for those of us who lost dear friends or relatives. My buddy, Simon "Shimmy" Biegeleisen, vice-president of an investment banking firm, was in the second building that was struck. He was on a higher floor than the impact, so he knew almost instantly that there was no way out.

Yet he kept his composure and modeled a new way of dying, made possible by the technology of our time. He spent the last minutes of his life on the phone to his wife and kids, to his friends and relatives, to his Rabbi and his mentors, saying loving farewells, Jewish last rites (known as Viduy, an acknowledgment of one's sins and expression of deference to God's right to judge), and asking that his memory be an inspiration for good works. He asked his wife to take care of the kids, he asked the kids "to take care of their Mom," and he asked his friends to look after his widow and orphans. Death with dignity.

Except that for me the grief does not end at midnight. As the clock chimes and the calendar turns over a new leaf into Sept. 12, I get a special delivery of personal pain. It was 37 years ago on that date when, as a boy of ten, I came home from my first full day of school. I said good-bye to my friends, the Liebb brothers, at their house, and started to walk the last two-thirds of a block to home. There seemed to be a crowd gathered down there and an ambulance in the street. Perhaps one of the neighbors.

Little did I dream that the tragedy unfolding was in our house, in the sturdy brick house that my father had bought brand-new just five years earlier. When I left that morning, I said good-bye to my Mom (I wish I could remember if she kissed me), who was still in bed 12 days after giving birth to my sister. She was being treated for a blood clot in her leg. Now, as I approached the house, some people spotted me and diverted me into a neighbor's house. My mother wasn't feeling well, they said.

Naturally, I was quite alarmed. But nothing prepared me for my father coming in an hour or so later and telling me that she had died. Somehow the clot had moved and blocked her heart. The decision was made that I should not attend the funeral. And that was it. My beautiful and brilliant, loving and generous mother was gone at just 30 years old. Whisked away in the blink of an eye.

My father passed away a little over two years ago. He'd been sick since Christmas, and died on the Ides of March, a small window of time which seemed to stretch out to the horizon.

My second eldest brother, my sister, and I were able to visit with him frequently, and took turns making sure someone was available to help him and my mother through his illness (she'd been diagnosed with Alzheimer's just after he'd been diagnosed with lung cancer). My eldest brother was himself dying of lung cancer.

It was a tough, tough time for all concerned. When he passed, at home, still sleeping through the haze of the morphine I'd administered to him as part of his home hospice program, it was a blessing. So much pain, so much suffering, so stoically and manfully endured. He'd looked relieved, as well he should.

Over 200 people showed up at the wake, a remarkable showing for a humble bricklayer. We stayed for 3 hours, shaking hands, laughing, and crying.

On the day of the funeral, we alternated between bouts of laughter and crying jags in remembrance of him.

When the Honor Guard fired off their salute, there wasn't a dry eye at the cemetery.

Later, at the reception following the funeral, I popped out of the hall to hit the restroom when the manager pulled me aside. "Sir," he implored, "Could you please ask them to keep it down? We've got a wedding reception next door and they've asked to tone the noise down."

The funeral party was more uproarious than the wedding party. That about summed it up.

The grief, the loss, never really goes away. A sharp pain simply recedes to a dull, throbbing ache, infrequently felt, much as the bone broken in childhood nags the elderly.

There are a lot of Americans who feel that ache, and that pain, following 9/11 and Katrina.

I hope that many of them will also get to experience the joy and laughter that comes from remembering the fallen as they were, hale and hearty and human.

Thank God for memory, where the dead live still, and always.