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It takes skill for a writer to convey both facts and feelings in a way that enhances both. When I asked scholar Sam Martin to write about the 25th anniversary of 9/11, I did so because she has proved adept at just that kind of writing, where facts don’t stand alone and disconnected, but rather are tied to emotions.
And what are the memories of 9/11 for many of us but unimaginably gruesome facts that are inextricable from the horror and fear that began that day?
Yet Martin, who teaches public affairs at Boise State, is increasingly aware about how her experience of 9/11 is dramatically different from her students’ perceptions of the event.
“I remember the shock and fear, the replays of the second plane hitting the World Trade Center, and the moment the second tower fell,” she writes. “I remember the bravery of the New York firefighters and police.” But her students, writes Martin, “have no such memories or feelings. Most were born years after Sept. 11, 2001.”
That shift, Martin says, “is ordinary and still somehow startling. An event that once felt like it had split time into a permanent before and after is fading into history itself.”
There are facts in Martin’s story, because that’s what stories in The Conversation convey – how 9/11 triggered “an argument about war, security, patriotism or political allegiance.”
But it’s also a tender elegy, a lament for not only the dead but for a way of understanding an event that moved all of us to “collective grief, along with the extraordinary human response that grief engendered.”
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