September 11, 2011

I had gone up to campus early to finish an assignment before class, but I finished more quickly than I expected and decided to walk over to the bookstore to see if the University Chorale music had come in yet. The bookstore had only recently installed television monitors on the main floor, to sometimes stream news and to sometimes stream ads for bookstore sales. Today when I walked in through the first floor Wilkinson Center entrance I could see a small cluster of people standing around one of the televisions. On the screen I saw smoke coming out of the top of a building in a city I didn't immediately recognize and I thought, "Oh my gosh, someone crashed an airplane into a building again." I was imagining a little Cessna because I remembered that happening once before.

I was there for a purpose, though, and I continued up to the textbook level without stopping. It wasn't until I came back down and saw even more students clustered around the television monitors that I slowed and paid attention. I stood there for just a few minutes, but in those few minutes I watched the first tower collapse, right there in real-time, and I felt a sick feeling of enormous tragedy.

I remember that I had statistics that morning. My teacher was quite shaken. Several of the students were as well, but many had not yet heard anything. It seemed strange to me that one of the tallest buildings in the world could collapse and someone wouldn't know about it, but if I hadn't walked through the bookstore I wouldn't have known either. I can't remember if that statistics course was one of my BYU classes that always started with prayer, but I remember that it did that day. My professor introduced the new material, and she let us out early.

I spent the next three hours between classes in front of the big screen television on the lower level of the Wilkinson Center, sitting cross-legged on the floor among a crowd of students. I tore myself away to go to class, and then to work, where my office mate had his computer tuned to NPR. When I came home in the evening I learned that one of my roommates had not seen or read or listened to a single news report that day, and that she had done so on purpose. She didn't want to talk about it. I desperately did. I've often thought about our very different reactions. Originally I judged her, just a little bit, for ignoring that something huge and awful had happened. But I also wonder about myself, about the fact that I couldn't stop watching or listening, taking in information, almost obsessively. Somehow it felt wrong to just turn off the stream and go back to living my life. I didn't know how to process that something huge and awful had happened, but not to me, not personally, and at least for that day I didn't know how to feel okay about living my life as if nothing had.

A year later I was living just outside of Washington, D.C. There were signs on the freeways that broadcast terrorist threat levels. A couple kids in my high school classes had parents who had been in the Pentagon on September 11 of the year before. There was a sniper at large that fall, shooting people in gas stations and parking lots of the cities where I worked and lived. I wasn't as far away from the effects of terror as I had been in Provo, Utah. In a way, though, that made it easier for me to process. I lived my life, just like I had in Utah, and I knew that it was okay to do so; it's what everyone else did.

The big questions that came out of the events of September 11 for me personally are not questions of patriotism or politics or clashes of culture. Rather, they're questions of what my role is in tragedies that are not fully mine. How do I mourn when the loss is great, but is not my own? How do I tell someone who has lost a sibling or parent or child know that I feel some of the pain they feel, when I really feel so little of it? How do I show appropriate reverence for the sadness of strangers, and how do I reconcile the distance between sadness that results from great loss, and my own relatively minor sorrows?

Today I will walk my dog and teach a Primary lesson and make guacamole for family dinner and read my scriptures and hold my niece and nephew, and it will be a normal Sunday. But today when I play the opening hymn on the organ at church it will be America the Beautiful, and I will post a reflection on my blog, and I will remember.