Do you remember this photograph? In the United States, people have taken pains to banish it from the record of September 11, 2001. The story behind it, though, and the search for the man pictured in it, are our most intimate connection to the horror of that day.
It is perhaps the most terrible legacy of 9.11. The thought of a loved one falling to their death in the moments before the World Trade Center towers collapsed is something almost impossible to comprehend.
THEY BEGAN JUMPING NOT LONG after the first plane hit the North Tower, not long after the fire started. They kept jumping until the tower fell. They jumped through windows already broken and then, later, through windows they broke themselves. They jumped to escape the smoke and the fire; they jumped when the ceilings fell and the floors collapsed; they jumped just to breathe once more before they died. They jumped continually, from all four sides of the building, and from all floors above and around the building's fatal wound. They jumped from the offices of Marsh & McLennan, the insurance company; from the offices of Cantor Fitzgerald, the bond-trading company; from Windows on the World, the restaurant on the 106th and 107th floors—the top. For more than an hour and a half, they streamed from the building, one after another, consecutively rather than en masse, as if each individual required the sight of another individual jumping before mustering the courage to jump himself or herself.
I cannot begin to account for nor imagine the sheer terror that would drive someone to leap to their deaths from as much as 107 stories above ground. Perhaps that is what I still find so traumatizing about 9.11. No matter how terrible I think it was, no matter how much I think I understand, I inevitably discover something even more terrible and impossible to understand than I could have imagined.
Imagine having to wonder if this is how your loved one met his or her end. Did they think their situation so hopeless, so terrifying that they felt they had no other option but to jump? Worse, what if the falling man in the picture was someone that you recognized as your husband, brother, son, lover, or friend? CAN you imagine this? I'm not sure that I could handle it.
Will it never end??
