Rain and administration have washed away the thousands of missing person posters from the Armory Building which once housed the reporting center for affected families. Now it has been moved uptown and the station has transitioned into the place to go to register for death certificates.
Hundreds of posters still remain hung on the surrounding walls of adjacent buildings. There is also a prominent wall on the side of the Staples store shielded by the scaffolding which had been erected prior to "9/11." Underneath the planks and the metal pipes a new and harrowing tribute has been hung next to worn portraits and spilled wax. It is a long chain of a hundred or so multicolored construction paper rings, each bearing the name of a lost loved one inscribed by what is undoubtedly a different child's hand.
The fact that those who have died are memorialized in such a fashion is sad enough, but to have to expose young children to this tragedy and explain our mortality in such a way is grief of much greater weight.
I don't remember when I first learned about death, and have been fortunate enough not to have lost someone close, yet. But yet, I am plagued with empathy.
It seems that I will not have reached the depth of my sorrow until I have shed a tristful tear for each lost soul.
And everyday, I cry a little more.
I know not what it does to me, but everyday I cry a little more.
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l.m