In Remembrance

 

I was reminded today while at the public library for book research, that for Arlington, like New York City, the events of seven years ago are still very much a local story, with the library broadcasting a live TV feed of the Pentagon 9/11 memorial dedication ceremony this morning. I'm also reminded of the local angle every time I hear stories of that day told by people via various points of connection—such as an acquaintance of my husband's who was driving by the Pentagon right as the fateful plane flew over the man's car and slammed into the Pentagon, yet who still had the presence of mind to collect his camera and take snapshots which the FBI later used in its investigation.

The memorial includes one bench for each victim, laid out in a pattern according to the year each victim was born, from 1930 to 1998, and then aligned according to the plane's flight path into the building—if the nameplate of the victim on the bench can be read with the Pentagon in the background, the person died in the building, and if the sky is in the background, the person died on American Airlines Flight 77. One hundred eighty-four people lost their lives, from the youngest, 3-year-old Dana Falkenberg, to one of the oldest, Max Beilke, 69, the last U.S. combat soldier to leave Vietnam.

The stories of those victims are told on a Washington Post tribute titled "Sacred Ground: Remembering the Victims," with an interactive layout of the placement of each victim's memorial bench on a separate link, found here. Stories such as Capt. Robert Edward Dolan Jr. of Alexandria, Virginia, who "could quote Shakespeare and Monty Python in the same sentence" and "was equally comfortable commanding a billion-dollar ship and chatting at the church picnic"; Paul W. Ambrose, a family doctor in Arlington who was engaged to be married, with a wedding to take place the following September in Madrid; Amelia V. Fields, of Dumfries, Virginia, who had turned 36 that morning and whose husband had baked a chocolate cake for when she would have arrived home that night; and James Daniel Debeuneure of Upper Marlboro, Maryland, whose college junior son Jalin said, "What hurts so bad is that when [R&B singer] Aaliyah got in that plane crash, I was telling my dad and everyone that I was going to live my life differently because you never know when it's going to be your last day. He agreed with that. Now, two weeks later, he dies in the same way—in a plane crash."

Remembering tragic events can be extraordinarily painful, but forgetting can be much, much worse.