An eye for an eye

Seth told me as soon as I woke up this morning. He knew I would want to know.

"Osama bin Laden is dead. They killed him. Obama had a press conference around 11 last night."

"Holy shit. Where was he?"

"In Pakistan."

"I've been waiting almost ten years to hear that."

The reason I've been waiting for such news is that all the evidence shows that Osama bin Laden orchestrated the murder of my friend, Peter Morgan Goodrich, almost ten years ago on September 11, 2001. Peter was killed on United Flight 175, the second highjacked plane to hit the World Trade Center.

That day is crystal clear in my memory. A perfect, blue sky September day. My then-boyfriend's mother calling me, telling me to turn on the TV. I was unemployed, still in bed. Her panicked, garbled words about planes crashing into the World Trade Center made no sense. I gasped and shivered with horror as I watched the black smoke pour out of the Twin Towers, as that second plane crashed. I went over to my boyfriend's parents' house, unable to be alone. An e-mail that morning from my friend Janine, thankful that her friends and family were all safe. Only a couple of hours later, she had to retract it in sickening grief, as she learned her brother-in-law had been on that second plane. There are no words for how numb and stunned and sick I felt. I could not watch the television anymore, not those plane crash images, because it was Peter dying, over and over and over again, in full, sharp technicolor. Then there was confusing television footage of planes bombing something in the Middle Eastern night- Baghdad? Afghanistan? My boyfriend's sister cheered, punching the air, "Yeah! Ooh! Get 'em!"

I crumpled, my energy gone, full of nothing but aching sadness. "No more death," I thought. Please, no more death. That can't be the answer. I went home, huddled indoors with the dog, escaping the eerily silent, empty, perfect crystal-blue skies above Washington, DC.

I flew with friends to Peter's memorial a week or so later, crying as airport security made me take off my shoes in the deserted BWI airport, because I knew I had to take off my shoes because Peter (along with hundreds of others) was dead. Murdered.

We huddled in the box pews of the Old First Church in Bennington, where we'd watched Janine marry Peter's brother, Foster, just exactly three years before. It was their third anniversary that day. We should have been toasting them, but we were listening to the unbearable sound of Foster's voice cracking with grief as he eulogized his only brother, as we wrapped our arms around each other, and ran out of tissues.

Some essential piece of all of our innocence died with Peter on that September day. So many things fell apart after that day, like it was the final blow. We were all so broken. Janine and Foster were absolutely overcome and drowning in their grief. Janine, Foster, Becki, her new husband Chris and I were all struggling with employment and unemployment, all trying to find our footing in this tilted "new normal." I had been knocked breathless by a bitter breakup with that boyfriend, and I fled to my friends in Vermont, who were struggling just as much as me. But we couldn't fix ourselves, or each other. We were all too sad and raw and struggling. That time was so bad; I don't have adequate words. It resulted in Becki and I not speaking to each other for seven years, in all of us feeling nothing but sick and sad and helpless. There was no comfort. I think now that it was the beginning of the long, slow, end of Janine and Foster's marriage.

I am not an advocate of the death penalty. The way it has been done in this country is barbaric, uncivilized and arbitrary. However, anytime after 9/11, if I had seen Osama bin Laden, I would have tried to kill him with my bare hands.

I never thought the U.S. would find bin Laden. Central Command for Afghanistan was, at that time, run out of MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa. A friend was an Air Force colonel there, and he told me that they had technology and real-time information that I would not believe at MacDill, all focused on finding bin Laden. He used to hassle some of the guys working the bin Laden search: "Come on, with all this, you can't find just one guy?" But it was a needle in a haystack; a pebble in the rough Afghan mountains.

Peter's brother and parents felt very connected to the World Trade Center site as Peter's final resting place. Visiting there gave them some measure of comfort. Months and months and months after 9/11, some of Peter's remains were identified, from DNA extracted from his hairbrush or toothbrush. A femur. They had a goddamn femur. All Foster could say, his voice breaking with tears, was, "Where's the rest of him?" Wounds newly raw, opened up by that bone, Peter's wife and family tried to plan yet another service.

I have hated the image of bin Laden every time I saw it on TV, as he looked smug and alive in those videos that would surface from time to time.

I can't believe the U.S. actually found him, that he is actually, finally dead and gone. It is closure, I suppose. I am not one of those people who feels like celebrating, like waving the American flag and cheering like we just won the Superbowl. It is some measure of justice of the oldest fashioned kind - an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. It feels somber to me. I am not cheering. I am quietly remembering Peter, one of the most thoughtful, generous and intellectually curious people I have ever met. I am remembering his own copy of the Koran, well thumbed, intensively bookmarked, that he had read and studied on his own, out of sheer curiosity and interest, a book whose text he likely knew better than his murderers who invoked it.

Are we even? No, we never will be. The ripples of only Peter's death immeasurably, irreparably changed the courses of dozens of lives. i can't even imagine what the deaths of all the 9/11 victims has collectively changed forever. Death never makes it even. Never. At most, it closes one loop, an eye for an eye. A femur for a femur. At the end, all we can do is remember, and try to move forward, our boats beating against the current, borne ceaselessly into the past.*

 
Peter Morgan Goodrich

*Borrowed from The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Comments

[A'Dell]

This mirrors my feelings. I never thought he'd be found, I don't feel celebratory but I am glad all the same that it finally happened.

Nothing makes it better, erases the loss, makes anything whole that is broken.

I'm deeply sorry for your loss.

[Life of a Doctor's Wife]

A'Dell is right - you're a hell of a writer. This is beautifully, heart-wrenchingly said.

I'm so sorry for the loss of your friend.

It feels right, somehow, to have someone to blame for the horrors of the past decade. Natural to want to make someone pay, and right that he has at long last. But there's no joy in that redemption now that it's come. No freedom either.