Somehow I – like so many others I know and many more than I don’t – have a morbid desire to read about all the gory and painful details about death, especially when it happens en masse. We scan headlines in newspapers and cover stories in magazines, surf television channels and keep up with updates and timelines and personal profiles and responses from friends and family. And we know, somewhere inside our rational selves, that we are being not just silly, but self-depressive as well. But the fascination never goes away, not unless a conscious effort is made to shoo it out of the mind. Which is easier said than done.
For me, I first got really aware of this strange predilection when Princess Diana died in that horrific car crash in a tunnel in Paris. With many of my friends I, too, watched every moment of replay on television and every second of grief that her family went through. For some reason, we looked at the website dedicated to her memory every few hours, talked about what she wore and how she looked and that song, the original of which we could never listen to again without thinking of that tragic dying. Perhaps it was then that I decided that I would never ever be associated with a gossip publication, never ever be part of a genre that, in a way, contributed to the death of the princess so many people cared about.
Then, some years later, came 9/11, as it is known. I had just come home from work and was all set to watch a travel show on television, one that Father often spoke of with words of praise. But instead of the warm tropical waters of wherever and the exotic cuisine of wherever else, there were these images of something I could not every imagine would happen in real life. For a while I believed that it was a film, a fairly bad movie being telecast because its director was dead or perhaps it had just released somewhere significant. Only after I flipped channels and found everyone was showing the same horrific scene of a tower slowly collapsing into itself and a plane hitting the other building did I realise that it was actually happening, reality, not fiction, fact, not nightmarish fiction.
And in the weeks, perhaps months or even years, that followed that devastating day, I – and my friends – went back to the scene of that crime, reliving it as we read about how the various planes crashed, how people died, how the people responded in New York, in Washington, in Virginia, how the world was still reacting to what had happened so quickly, without warning. And, every year since, we all go back to that tragic place and stop to think about the people who died, the people left behind and the people who were responsible for the whole event that was, in totality, the phenomenon known as '9/11'.
It is almost like poking a bruise or picking at a scab. Even while it hurts, it feels strangely good, a sort of reaffirmation that the pain was nasty, and could happen again. Even while it heals, there is a bizarre need to know once again that it had been wounded, that there had been trauma. And maybe in that knowledge there is a surety that I – or you, as my friend – will never be responsible in any way for a tragedy of this kind anywhere, any time. Maybe all potential student killers on college or school campuses all over the world need that lesson now. And maybe we all need to remind ourselves at regular intervals that it could happen…to you, to me, to ours.
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