Those Who Jumped

A part of September 11 that most coverage moves past quickly. It is the part the people who were there have never been able to move past.

Above the impact zones in the North Tower, there was fire, there was smoke, there was heat, and there was no way down. That is the whole of it. Everything else about their situation — how long they waited, what they said to one another, what they hoped was coming — is unknown to us and will stay unknown.

Some of them chose the open air.

Estimates from photographs, video, and witness accounts put the number near two hundred, nearly all of them from the North Tower. It began soon after the first plane struck. It continued until the building came down.

What the witnesses carried

Firefighters, police officers, and ordinary people standing in the street that morning have said that the sight and the sound of those falls were among the hardest things they carried away from the day.

That is worth sitting with. These were men and women who also watched two 110-story buildings collapse, who lost friends and colleagues by the dozen, who worked the pile for months afterward. And this is what stayed.

We have a habit in this country of handling the unbearable parts of our history briefly. The footage gets cut. The photographs get pulled. Within days of the attacks, most American outlets had quietly stopped running the images, and for the most part they have never run them since.

Some of that restraint was decent. Families should not have to identify a loved one from a newspaper front page. But restraint and erasure are not the same thing, and over twenty-five years the line between them has blurred.

They were not abstractions

The people who went out those windows were not a category, a statistic, or a hard image to be managed. They were office workers. They were parents who had dropped children at school an hour earlier. They were colleagues who had been standing at a coffee machine that morning making ordinary conversation about an ordinary Tuesday.

Each of them, in the last minutes of a life, faced a decision that no person should ever be asked to face, and they faced it alone, and faced it in a matter of seconds.

We do not know what any of them was thinking. We do not get to narrate it for them, and we should not even attempt to. What we know is that they were there, that they were real, and that the thing that killed them was not a choice they made. It was a decision made for them, hours earlier, by men who boarded a plane intending exactly this.

Why we tell it

There is a Christian instinct, when we meet a death we cannot explain, to fall silent — and that instinct is a good one. Scripture does not rush to explain suffering either. Job's friends do the most damage when they start theorizing.

But silence is not the same as forgetting. Reverence is not the same as looking away. One of the oldest things the Church does for the dead is simpler than an explanation. It simply refuses to let them be anonymous. It says the names, it keeps the count, and it holds the memory when the world would rather move on to something easier.

That is what we must do today.

On the twenty-fifth anniversary, most of what you will see is the part of the story we have made peace with — the firefighters climbing, the flag raised, the boats in the harbor, the tower that stands there now. All of that is true, and all of it is worth telling, and we have told it.

This part is true as well. Nearly two hundred people, most of them in the North Tower, in the open air above lower Manhattan on a clear September morning.

We remember them without looking away.

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