Five years, Part Two

I made it through the day with a minimum of essential tears. But the anger and heartache aren't so easily tamed.

I needed to watch something tonight. On CBC there was a documentary presentation on The Passionate Eye called 'The Falling Man.' It details the attempts by an author to identify a particular man who was photographed falling to his death from the 106th floor of the World Trade Centre, and how that photograph came to represent the sad humanity of the day.

Call it ghoulish if you want to, but at one point during the chaotic, frantic coverage of the events at Ground Zero that day five years ago, one of the news programs briefly showed footage of a person falling to their death, and then it was gone. I would see brief, unfocussed, scattered evidence of people who, either by choice or by the force of the blast, were sent to their deaths from such a dizzying height, but for the most part, these poor souls were ignored, and pictures of them were condemned as wrong, immoral even. I wanted to know that those people who made that desperate decision were being accorded due respect for their actions.

And I started to get angry.

For years we've been bombarded with the emblematic, heroic or heartwrenching photos from the World Trade Centre site, and absolutely all due respect to the men and women of the emergency services, but there are definitely more stories then just theirs, and I don't know whether it's a sad commentary about the depths of political society or my own deeply-rooted cynicism that I feel those Emergency Services workers' deaths have been exploited to a large extent by politicians on both sides in the US. But still, after 5 years, no one wanted to talk about those individuals who plunged to their death, and to me that's wrong, and it dishonours their memories, laying them aside as a discreet percentage of deaths that day we'd rather not talk about.

Faced with the choice, who's to say which of us would decide to jump or potentially succumb to the horrifying heat and flames. Faced with those equally terrifying choices, some people made the decision to exert one last moment of control over their lives and not one of us left standing in the aftermath has any right to pass judgement over them. For five years, I've lived with the image of a person freefalling through the air against the backdrop of a crisp, bright blue sky and a raging inferno of shattered building materials.

Tonight's documentary was a cathartic experience for me. I was able to watch, at times in complete anguish, and learn that I was not alone in stopping to ponder the actions of the few who died this way. To me, those images represent the very essence that is complicated Humanity just as much as any other image that day produced. And the anger I've felt for those people, ALL those people who made the choice one way or the other, has finally started to subside enough to make this day easier to bear. I will forever mourn and respect all those who died on September 11, 2001 in New York, Washington and Shanksville, and today, learning that I was not alone in wanting to respect "the falling man" and all those he represented, I feel vindicated that someone else out there recognizes that those deaths were just as dignified as the rest.