Remembrance

9-11.

Used to be just the number you dialed for emergencies. Now it has become the ground zero of national life, the beginning of our collective recognition of vulnerability.

But politics aside, is it really the worse day in memory?

I didn't know anyone who died in the attacks on the twin towers, the Pentagon, or the airliner over Pennsylvania. I don't know anyone who knew anyone. The six degrees of separation between us might come up with some connection, but the point is, what happened in those places on 9-11-01 hasn't affected me personally. It wasn't my worst day.

My worst day was 9-6-95. That is the day my wife of five years died in her sleep in her mid-thirties. For ten months before that horrible morning, I watch cancer eat away her mind and body. I saw it reduce her to a mere shadow of the woman I loved. I saw it take away her faculties, her pleasant personality, and her peaceful nature.

Worse yet, I watched our child watch her die.

Hers was not a violent death. No one accosted her with bombs and guns. Terrorists or criminals did not invade our home. Her disease was insidious, silent. It did not make news. Ultimately it took a jury longer to acquit O.J. Simpson than it took cancer to kill my wife.

When I think of bad days, when I think of the worse day, 9-11 holds no candle to 9-6.

A friend once told me that it does nothing to compare tragedies. After all, what do you end up with...tragedy. I suppose tragedies are not better or worse, they are just tragedies.

Still, ask me to remember 9-11 and I do so with a distant, sympathetic, respectful silence. But ask me to remember 9-6 and I do so with an anger and sorrow and empathy that I reserve for the life of a woman who died too young and very sadly.

And my son and I have no one--no terrorists, no evil doers--to blame. 9-6 is our 9-11. It is,in our memory, the worse day.