Anniversaries

Like all the other blazoned dates of our lives, private and public, Sept. 11, too, will fade away.

By David Alford

Sep 11, 2002 | "We die containing a richness of lovers and tribes, tastes we have swallowed, bodies we have plunged into and swum up as if rivers of wisdom, characters we have climbed into as if trees, fears we have hidden in as if caves." The character, Almasy, in Michael Ondaatje's "The English Patient," is vividly remembering the intensity of his personal life as well as the historical panorama of his part of the twentieth century, as he lies nearly inert in the monastery bed with nothing left but memory. His journal is kept in a copy of Herodotus' "History," a deeply layered synthesis of the personal and the global.

The year 2001 burned its way into my consciousness like recurring Jovian bolts, almost too much for the circuits to bear, and though the number 2001 will slowly subside, the burnings, deep etchings, will be a part of this remembering until I, too, lie on that deathbed.

The year began with the tumultuous excitement of new life. My first grandchild, a boy, was born at 4:55 a.m. on Jan. 21, 2001, his coming into being welding emotions into perceptions: a tiny baby examined on a table by people in white coats, my red-eyed son, the exhausted mother, all four grandparents staggering from an all-night vigil, the blip of dehydration, the waiting, the going home and then the long, long aftermath, still going on, as the boy burrows further into our bodies and our brains.

Life, and then death. The year would contain the entire continuum. My younger sister fought a losing battle against liver disease for years. Throughout part of the winter, she waited at the Stanford hospital for an organ that never came. I watched her breathing more and more slowly, having put herself into a near-coma as part of her desperate struggle to remain alive long enough for a new liver to miraculously appear, finally giving up at about 1:30 a.m. on March 15, 2001. She lay on her hospital bed before being draped in flowers and a beautiful print dress by the women. Dazed and bewildered, I nearly had to be dragged in to see her, curled up and so silent, so silent. Her death was unacceptable, a death completely unredeemed and tragic. She, too, is deeply embedded in memory.

In life, near tragedy. In early September, when fire paranoia in the Sierra Nevada has usually given way to anticipation of fall wistfulness, an inferno roared out of control in the Stanislaus River canyon just over the ridge from the old family ranch where I live, and we watched nervously from various perches on the hills as it charred the green canyon into fingers of blackness. After we had decided that the danger was over, the fire apparently having moved northeast and away from us, and we had gone back to work, on September 10, 2001, a huge, apocalyptic plume of smoke suddenly appeared in the sky to the southwest. Only four hours later, the firemen were making plans for escape routes into our meadow in case the inferno came down the mountain, and I was evacuated to town. I watched the sky with a combination of horror and fascination for the black smoke that would signify the burning of the barns and the end of the history of our old family ranch. But the fire-fighting bomber planes won a narrow victory; the ranch still exists.

In life and death, tragedy. The next morning, Sept. 11, 2001, back in the ranch cabin, grateful but shaken, I was awakened by a phone call from my older sister in Berkeley -- this time not in despair about the fire but to tell me that two airplanes had crashed into the World Trade Center in New York City and that the twin towers had fallen. It was as if the near-disaster of the fire had had to be trumped by another, greater catastrophe, a prelude and then a finale in the realm of nightmares. And then, in the great synchronicity of modern existence, the airplanes fighting our fire were not allowed to fly in Calaveras County, California, because of what had happened in New York City and Washington, D.C.

Life, as it is lived, is punctuated by anniversary benchmarks: birthdays probably the most important -- the coming into being of ourselves -- and then weddings, deaths, the birthdays of our children, our parents, our siblings, our friends, Christmas, Hanukkah, Ramadan, Buddha's birthday, the first steps, the first kiss, and so forth. These days resonate differently with us depending on life situations, cultures, accidents. My own birthday rises and falls in significance depending upon mysterious personal factors: how I feel about myself, what I see in the mirror, the attention of other people, whether it is a decade celebration. But I wake up in the morning on my birthday feeling my existence a bit more poignantly, remembering what day it is.

I usually forget the birthdays of everyone except my children, and now my grandson. Even those days involve some anxiety about the appropriate gift as well as the social responsibility to properly recognize the importance of the day. The anniversaries of the deaths of loved ones, in my case both parents, a sister, a few close friends, vary enormously in significance but all tend to recede surprisingly rapidly. I don't even remember the dates of my parents' deaths, but the death of my sister, the "unacceptable death," is vivid. On the first anniversary of her death I lit a bonfire in the meadow and then walked far out into the night so that I could look back on the faint glow of the remnants. But even on that first anniversary I found myself struggling to conjure up anything like the emotion surrounding her death.

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