Remembering the Personal Loss of 9-11

On this week's Campbell Conversation interview--moved from its normal spot to the Morning Edition broadcast for Friday, September 9--I'm speaking with Mark Morabito.  Mark lost his wife, Laura Lee Defazio Morabito, in the September 11th attacks--she was a passenger on American Airlines Flight 11, one of the two planes flown into the World Trade Center.  In this interview he remembers the day and looks back at the 10 years that have passed--and how that event, and that loss, have affected his own life.  What is a vivid historical event for most Americans is a wrenching personal loss for him.  He talks about how some of his political views, as well as his views about life and death, have changed, and he also describes how he plans to mark 9-11 this year.

I left the interview thinking about this combination of an immediate personal loss and a historical event that remains vivid for those old enough to remember it, but which is also receding in time.  And I was reminded of a moment several years ago when Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. visited our Syracuse campus to give a speech about the environment.  Along the way he referenced John F. Kennedy’s presidency and his memories of that era.  He then began a sentence with “When my uncle was murdered…,” which stopped me cold, and in that second reframed my sense of the Kennedy assassination—what had been a historical event captured on amateur film became a crime victim’s personal story. 

I imagine that dealing with that paradox will follow the families of the victims of 9-11 throughout their entire lives.