Always Remember - 2019

I was sure I’d already written something about 9/11 that covered the experience definitively for me, since that day and so much after it had such an impact on my worldview and my sense of the meaning of life — the fragility and preciousness and uncertainty and importance of this time we have.  But when I read what I’ve written in the past about that day, it’s clear that I’m not done, maybe never will be done, making sense of the day, of the fact that this thing happened.  These events happened.

And what I thought about that day, 9/11, on that day, and what I thought about it a year later, and even sixteen years later, is not the same as how I reflect on that day today, or how I will reflect on it tomorrow and next year.  

And that experience of remembering, of mourning, of paying a kind of mental tribute, is what it is.  Today, for starters, I can reflect on the day without that feeling of re-living the events of the day.  

This may be the first year I’ve felt that way, and I wonder if it is because of the EMDR work I did in connection with the mudslides we had here, which brought me back to 9/11, that close close close-ness to death.  The smell.  

I wonder if I can remember without re-living because of the EMDR, or maybe the resilience work I’ve been doing with my husband, which has created an unfamiliar and pleasant feeling of spaciousness in my head — a new kind of manageability of the thoughts-memories-feelings-thoughts-images hot stew my brain used to generate around the day and its impact on my life trajectory, the Country’s trajectory, the fallen.  

Whatever it is, it’s better this year, for me.  And for that I’m grateful.  And I still remember, and mourn, and value the crap out of my life and the lives of others.  I’m gonna keep going.