On September 11, 2001, I spent 24 hours in the emergency department of a major midtown hospital in New York City. We waited for patients, and every so often some change in the news (such as when we heard that traffic downtown had been cleared and ambulances could get in) heightened our expectation that they would arrive.
They never arrived. I washed out a few firefighters’ eyes, and that was about it. For the most part, people either got out relatively unharmed, or they didn’t get out at all. My friends in emergency medicine who went down to Ground Zero faced a similar situation, except in their case they were climbing over rubble or setting up shop in collapsing buildings. The profound impotence was the same for everyone.
Over the next couple of weeks, as I walked into the entrance of the hospital, I would pass about two blocks of fliers. From just above eye level to the ground, every structure leading into the building was plastered with papers displaying the smiling faces of the missing, put there by friends and family desperate for news that perhaps their loved one had survived. I became familiar with many of them after seeing them day after day.
The Times was full of messages of support from across the country and the world the following weekend. I’m not embarrassed to admit that when I got to the one from the people of Oklahoma City, my attempts at stoicism failed and I cried.
I was very proud of the city that was my home at the time. When I would emerge from the subway downtown, I would always orient myself by finding the World Trade Center. It was hard to get my bearings after the towers were gone.
Despite knowing it will bring nobody’s lost family member or friend back, and despite knowing that our foreign policy will become no less complicated by the news, I cannot help but smile with grim satisfaction upon learning on my drive into work this morning that Osama bin Laden was shot in the head and dumped at sea. May history deliver him to the same dunghill reserved for the worst of humanity’s monsters.
