“Their Spirits Live Forever…” by Dave Feakes, Suffolk, England

topic: 9/11 medium: TEXT

as submitted for the “9/11” Open Call

For mere living mortals time passes by so quickly; ten years have gone like there was no yesterday, but remains as today, as if the events of 9/11 have only just happened. For those involved in that terrible atrocity there is no tomorrow. Time stands still, the pain, the agonies and the trauma will not recede.

On that fateful day my wife and I were visiting two Essex seaside resorts here in England, Brightlingsea and Frinton. What unfolded to us on the televised news when we returned home was incomprehensible.

What could we say as we stared in horror at the sheer evil of the action of two passenger aircraft deliberately flying into the Twin Towers? All those innocent people in the Towers, all those innocent passengers on the aircraft, their personal agonies untold, their horror shared with the world that day.

Then the Twin Towers crumbled mercilessly downwards sending nearly 3,000 people to those unimaginable final moments of their lives, moments to them that would have been a lifetime.

All the bravery of the rescue services, those firefighters, police, paramedics and medical technicians and so many other brave souls who did everything to help evacuate the buildings in the face of this terrible adversity but, in the end, succumbed to the deathly blow of the collapsing masonry.

The image that remains in my mind of the immediate aftermath of the collapse of those two Towers, is of mayhem, carnage and the choking, paralysing dust that covered not only the surrounding area and buildings but the citizens of New York, grey, choking, shocked and devastated.

Like a pebble dropped in a pond sending ripples across its surface so the effects of 9/11 caused shock-waves that still reverberate round our world even now, ten years on. Those shock-waves will continue ad infinitum…

I ask myself what generates the wanton hatred that causes so much pain and grief, not only to those who had their lives stolen from them, but the families and friends who were left behind.

As I sit, all these hundreds of miles away I relive only a minute proportion of the horrors of that day. How can I really understand the dreadful suffering even though I share the pain?

My prayers are with the many that our civilised world will never let us forget, for we remember and respect every single soul lost that day. Our prayers are said for all who have shared this atrocity, and for the others at the Pentagon and those who died in the field in Shanksville.

Their spirits live forever…