Shortly after I moved to upstate New Jersey in 2018 for work, my Dad flew out from the west coast to visit. He hadn’t been to the greater New York City metropolitan area in literally 20 years, when my family took one of those ill-advised, National-Lampoon-style drives-across-America in a cramped Ford Taurus sedan to see various Church and National historical sights across our great land the summer of ’98.
Although I dare say I’ve become a slightly more experienced traveler since then and can better appreciate my parents’ efforts now, my main take-aways at the time were of us driving past endless cornfields, eating turkey sandwiches from a cooler every lunch for a month straight, listening to a garbage-sack full of cassette-tapes, playing the same 6 CDs over and over on my headphones, and me being an awkward, self-conscious teenager in a wide new variety of contexts.
Like New York! For some reason, we only budgeted one whole day in the Big Apple–you know, the single most densely populated, cosmopolitan, and landmark-heavy city in America–where all we managed to accomplish was get lost on the subway, snap pictures in front of the Statue of Liberty, and wait an hour in the muggy July heat to ride the elevator up the Empire State Building. When my parents asked if I’d also like to the see the World Trade Towers “since they’re even taller”, I wearily responded, “Maybe next trip.”
And indeed, when the second plane hit the North Tower only 3 short years later, the dumbest thought that passed through my shell-shocked mind that Tuesday morning was, “I, uh, guess we should’ve gone up the Trade Towers that one time…”[1]Gather ye rosebuds while ye may and so forth.
Hence my Dad’s return to the Northeast for the first time since the Clinton Administration seemed as good a time as any to at long last pay our respects to the victims of the World Trade Tower attacks. I booked us all tickets to the 9/11 Museum & Memorial and drove us up to Manhattan–me, my Dad, my wife, and our 5-month-old baby boy.
Who hated it immediately. The baby, I mean. I need to here emphasize: this baby loves long car rides, he’d already been to New York with us several times without incident, he’d just taken a long nap, he’d eaten, and his diaper was dry. These were all usually recipes for a happy baby. Nevertheless, as we started down the elevator from the visitor’s center into the Museum itself (which inhabits the former basement of the South Tower), the baby started shrieking and crying uncontrollably, to the point where my wife and I determined we would have to take turns accompanying my Dad through the museum while the other consoled the kid. I elected to go on baby duty first–and sure enough, the moment we ascended back up into visitor’s center, the kid stopped crying immediately, reverting right back to his normal happy self.
I was still scratching my head as to what the kid’s deal was (his diaper was still dry), when my wife finally came back up the escalator and switched me spots. As I wended my way through the darkly-lit museum in search of my Dad–passing by the endless photographs of the 2,763 victims, their mounds of personal effects encased in glass, the smashed firetruck on display, the tattered American flags, the twisted steel recovered from the rubble, the mounted TVs endlessly-rerunning footage of the attacks on repeat–I had to finally confess: the baby was right. I hated it here, too.
I spent most of my time down there trying put my finger on as to why. Was it simply because it was the site of so much horrific death? But then, I’d been to Arlington, and Gettysburg, and Pearl Harbor, and the Holocaust museum in D.C., and the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin, and plenty of other memorials to mass-death besides–many of them melancholy, most of them depressing–but none of them felt as off-putting as the 9/11 Museum.
Was it simply because seeing all the personal effects of the victims encased in glass felt a little ghoulish and voyeuristic? (You don’t see, for example, the boots and pocket-watches of Civil War soldiers on display at Gettysburg National Battlefield).
Or was it because I still have recent memories of the sheer number of wars, tortures, atrocities, and xenophobia that this country used 9/11 to justify, including our present era of Muslim travel bans and immigrant child prisons? But then, the 9/11 Museum didn’t breath a word about the invasions of Afghanistan or Iraq–or anything else, for that matter.
Or was that it exactly–that the Museum didn’t seem to reference anything else at all? The Holocaust museum, by contrast, is depressing, but also highly educational, providing a full history of the rise of European fascism and antisemitism, all with a stated goal of preventing similar genocides in the future. The 9/11 Museum, however, provides no history lesson whatsoever–you will know just as much about, say, the rise of al-Qaeda, or the history of U.S. foreign interventionism, by the end of your visit as you did at the beginning.
Despite the surfeit of artifacts and personal effects filling the museum, there is absolutely no context given for what happened that fateful day, nor a stated goal of, say, preventing similar terrorist attacks in the future–only of endlessly fixating on this particular one, over and over and over, to the exclusion of all others.
That started to feel warmer.
Perhaps not coincidentally, I was at that time teaching Homer’s Odyssey in my World Literature class. Book 11 of the same is Odysseus’s journey into the Underworld, where he must contact the ghost of the blind prophet Tiresias to learn how he can at last return home to Ithaca. While down there, however, Odysseus encounters the ghost of Elpenor, one of his crew-members, who unbeknownst to him had recently rolled off the roof of Circe the Witch-Queen while drunk and died in Book 10. “He’d not been buried under the wide way of earth,” exclaims Odysseus with dawning horror, “not yet, we’d left his body in Circe’s house, unwept, unburied–this other labor pressed us.”[2]Robert Fagles translation, ll. 56-60, pg. 251
After Odysseus asks him how he ended up in the Underworld so quickly, Elpenor tells the sad story of his accident and implores of his old commander, “I beg you! Don’t sail off and desert me, left behind unwept, unburied, don’t, or my curse may draw god’s fury on your head. No, burn me in full armor, all my harness, heap my mound by the churning gray surf–a man whose luck ran out–so even men to come will learn my story. Perform my rites, and plant on my tomb that oar I swung with mates when I rowed among the living.” (Emphasis added)[3]Robert Fagles translation, ll. 79-86, pp. 251-252
“All this, my unlucky friend,” Odysseus solemnly swears, “I will do for you. I won’t forget a thing.”[4]Robert Fagles translation, ll. 87-88, pg. 252 And sure enough, Odysseus opens Book 12 by returning to Circe’s island to properly bury Elpenor; he and his men don’t dare do otherwise.
It was here that my students inevitably asked: why was it so important for Elpenor to be properly buried? Why would a curse fall upon Odysseus if he didn’t? It’s not his fault if no one buried him! Why did it matter so much anyways? It didn’t make sense to them. It was then that I recalled my recent experience at the 9/11 Museum & Memorial, and I realized: it’s not that the dead will be cursed if we don’t properly bury them, but the living.
If you don’t properly bury the dead–or more precisely, if you don’t properly grieve–then a curse falls upon you, I tried explaining. I don’t even necessarily mean that in a mystical or religious sense; but it has indeed been my observation and experience that it is psychologically unhealthy to not properly grieve. This, incidentally, is why Prince Hamlet is such a mess in Shakespeare’s most famous play: the Danish prince has not been allowed to properly grieve his father amidst his uncle’s rush to marry his mother the Queen (“The funeral baked meats did coldly furnish forth the marriage tables”), with most everyone telling him early on to just hurry up and get over it already (“Tis unmanly grief,” chides King Claudius, “It shows a will most incorrect to heaven.”)
This denial of the grieving process in turn causes Hamlet to lash out at all his friends and family rashly and viciously, ultimately culminating in that famous pile of dead bodies. (Remember that the only person Hamlet seems to get along with fine is Horatio–who was also the only one to actually express his condolences.) You have to let people grieve, or it can ruin anything.
But just as it is psychologically unhealthy to never let people grieve, so too is it just as psychologically unhealthy to never stop grieving. Grief is a task, one that must be performed, but also one that must be completed. The reason I think I generally feel peace at places like Arlington, or the USS Arizona, or Gettysburg, is because those were sites that not only memorialized the dead, but signified that the grieving process has been completed. If you never grieve, you never heal; but if you never stop grieving, you never finish healing, either.
And that’s the problem with the 9/11 Museum and Memorial: the grieving process has been arrested. They have never stopped grieving. The wound on the city has been permanently encased in concrete and prevented from healing over. And that psychological wound’s effects are clear and present: those aforementioned wars, xenophobia, Islamophobia, repeated violations of the constitution and civil liberties and Geneva convention and basic human decency, our travel bans and anti-immigrant hysterics and every other callous, inhumane thing, are all manifestations of our unhealthy refusal to ever quit grieving. Like Prince Hamlet, our arrested grieving process is killing us and everyone else besides.
But the ancients were wiser: we must complete the grieving process, we must properly bury the dead, or we will never heal.
Simply put: The dead have still not been properly buried at the 9/11 Memorial, and will not be until the site is finally, literally, mercifully covered over.
One might here protest that it’s real rich for a guy like me to say that, who recently published an entire book about grieving my Mom’s death shortly after I got home from my mission. Except I swear, that if you read the whole thing, you will find it is not only a chronicle of my intense grief, but of how I completed the task of grieving, for what it’s worth. The book is a tombstone, not a mausoleum. The 9/11 Museum does the exact opposite. It’s why my infant son hated it in there, and so did I. That’s why there’s still a curse upon us, collectively, as a nation.
To be clear: I have faith and belief in the resurrection, for what it’s worth; but no one can return from the dead unless you let them die in the first place.