Posted on 12/11/2001 1:17:24 PM PST by RippleFire
'Here in the democracy of the dead is a marvellous mosaic of a great city' We come together, without ceremony, by the simple act of opening the New York Times, or reading its website. The section we fillet, A Nation Challenged, is journalism with its chin out. Most of its pages resound with the clamour of battle, the hunt for Bin Laden, the mystery of the anthrax spore, the ramifications of the Al-Qaida conspiracy. They are arresting enough, but they do not compel the attention like the back pages of this bristling section, which are quiet glades of sorrow and reflection. Here, day after day, we get to meet the people who died on September 11, and day after day, in minutes of silent reading, we mourn people we never knew, ache for the innumerable tragedies of their interrupted lives. The little obituaries, with a postage-stamp portrait and perhaps 250 words by a variety of reporters, began running on September 13. They have continued every day since, in groups of anything from 10 to 20, and they will continue well into 2002, in memory of every one of the 4,000 or more who, on September 11, got up to go to work as usual and were randomly and horribly murdered. Hardly any of these people would normally qualify for an obituary in the Times, or anywhere else. They are extraordinary obituaries of ordinary people, individually touching, cumulatively a more powerful evocation of our loss than the burning chasm of Ground Zero. The Times calls these pages A Portrait of Grief. That is not all they are, though it is true they cannot be read without a tear. Patricia Massari, 25, working on the 98th floor, called her husband at 8.40am. She had just got the result of a pregnancy test. Hurtling towards her, to be joined in death, was a mother-of-two Lisa Fenn Gordonstein, 41, one of the passengers on Flight 11. At 5am, she had awakened her two daughters, Samantha, seven, and Carly, three-and-a-half, so she could kiss them goodbye when she set out on a business trip from her home in Needham, Mass. That terrible night Patricia Massari would not be taking the examination for her studies in world civilisation at Berkeley College. The father of Lisa's children would be reading over and again a poem about maintaining a positive attitude in life that Lisa had slipped under his office door the night before. Paramedic Keith Fairben, 24, arrived at the towers minutes after the first plane hit. He was running in and out of the building, tending to the injured, when his father Kenneth reached him on his cell phone. Keith said he was too busy to talk. His father told him to be careful. They were the last words they spoke together. Michael Egan, 51, had invited his sister, Christine, 55, visiting from Canada, to come to his office at Aon insurance for a cup of coffee and a sight of the view from this 105th-floor windows. But he didn't neglect his regular morning call to his wife, Anna. She was on the phone hearing him say, "We're stuck", when she saw the pictures on television of his building disintegrating in dust. "He had to call," she said, "but all he could say was I love you darling." The stories are heartbreaking, but the privilege of the briefest of glimpses of the lost lives is also revealing and inspiring. So this is New York! So these are all Americans, these stunningly diverse people from Wisconsin and Alabama, Thailand and Albania, these people speaking Polish and Hindu, these tycoons and bus boys, these heroic firemen and clerks and commanders of fortune. Here in the democracy of the dead is a marvellous mosaic of a great city, of dreams small and large, of fretful talents and settled routines, of large ambitions and little common decencies, people of all faiths and of none. We are always told people come here from all over America and the world to make better lives, to strive, and so they do, but what shines through the portraits is how much these people lived for love and family, how many of them spent spare time coaching a basketball team, lobbying for a community skate park or teaching poor kids to read, raising money for little leaguers, the small change of benevolence. In our quotidian acts of reverence, we read these portraits with ineffable sadness, but every day we are exalted by them, joining in the community of a city that has discovered itself in a union of souls.
The New York Times aims to run an obituary for every person who died in the twin towers. The handful it prints daily have become required reading. Three months after the attacks, Harold Evans introduces a selection
Tuesday December 11, 2001
The Guardian
At the going down of the sun and in the morning we will remember them. Especially in the mornings in New York these days. There is a daily act of communion in which the whole city joins, and with us untold thousands across the land.
Read the New York Times obituaries
11.12.2001: Ordinary people (part one)
11.12.2001: Ordinary people (part two)
Full archive of obituaries from New York Times website
Read the New York Times obituaries
11.12.2001: Ordinary people (part one)
11.12.2001: Ordinary people (part two)
Full archive of obituaries from New York Times website
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