9/11 and Facing Mortality

On the anniversary of the terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington, DC, it would be easy to go on a long diatribe about the failure of the Bush administration to pursue the perpetrators of this attack, but I will restrain myself. There’s a surprise in itself.

I remember being with friends at an event in the woods of Michigan watching the horror of 9/11 unfold on a TV above the resort’s bar. The collective shock and grief we felt will never leave me, but now I think more about the people in the towers and offices and airplanes. What was their reaction like, when they realized that to an extent their fates were sealed. That is the true horror. I remember watching people jumping from the World Trade Center rather than be burned alive and wonder how they felt.

Call it morbid, or perhaps just an over active empathetic response, but I feel a physical pain imagining their last moments. Each one met their fate and at some moment might have wondered what they did to deserve this. That lingering “why” is the hardest thing to understand.

I suppose I will never know, and that is as it should be. Each of us will someday find ourselves in the same position. It may not be a dramatic or as sudden, but mortality is something we all live with. How we face that last moment will always be a secret. Nobody can see into the human mind and read those thoughts.

It is that mystery that will always be a mystery. Once we learn its secret we can never tell anyone. Even “near death” experiences are not accurate, for they are “near” death. I only hope that when my time comes, I will find myself drawn into the memories of all the friends and family I have ever known, and in some way meet the God of my understanding. That is what I pray those whose lives were lost on this day six years ago found as well. That is the hope of eternal life that was promised by Jesus so long ago. May it be so for us all.