Traveler63135258351
Sep 2024
All Americans across the country, in some way had a deep, personal experience of shock on 9/11/2001 as we all heard about, watched live on TV, witnessed from some place in NYC, or even watched in horror from across the Hudson River in NJ.
Some of us lost family---wives, unborn children, husbands, sons, daughters, sisters, brothers, mothers, fathers, uncles, aunts, cousins, grandfathers, grandmothers---who were killed in the attack of hijacked jet liners that were used as bombs to strike those two iconic buildings, the World Trade Center. Others lost friends, lovers, fiances, fiancees, or previous spouses.
It serves us all well to take any oppotunity presented to us to visit and honor the sacred ground where so many of our loved and beloved are burried. The Memorial Museum holds a magnificently crafted space to see an almost endless number of presentations, all breathtaking in their simplicity, and so poignant in the shock they elicit.
Seeing actual parts of the foundations, staircases, firefighters and first responders gear, as well as some personal items from the people who just came to work on that day, is so wrenching in their being familiar, common, everyday items. To visit and tour the Museum is to become a part of a stunning, shocking, faintly peaceful, always touched with grief in the air, and silence in our hearts, experience. It is an experience unlike any I have ever had in my life and it is one I cherish dearly always touched with a deep sadness in my heart.
Walking the campus around the heart-stopping void where once stood such magnificent buildings, punctuated by the brilliant Reflecting Pools with the names of those who died inscribed on a magnificent bronze border to the pools, is touched with both sadness and hope as children, and other groups play, entertain with music or song.
The "Survivor Tree" is a spectacular source of wonder as it stands staunchly and proudly radiating life and hope, and change. Everyone is enriched and made oddly whole when you make sure you learn the simple and yet complex story behind and within the "Survivor Tree."