The Aerie
I've long considered myself a cynic and a skeptic, a hardbitten soul facing the world with a smirk of resigned amusement. But the truth of my posturing was revealed a year ago when the planes slammed into the Twin Towers. In fact, I'm not tough at all.
I had already had a week-long training session scheduled to start in New York city on September 17th when nineteen lunatics carried out their infamous plans. Upon reflection a year later, the odds of being scheduled to be in Manhattan that week seem pretty slim.
I was deeply affected by what I saw, both the normal and the exceptional. The busy streets of New York's concrete canyons were little different, although smaller than I remembered from my childhood. The pairs of armed National Guardsmen scattered on various streetcorners were exceptional. The sidewalk hucksters, nothing new. Their wares -- misspelled patriotic T-shirts and American flag pins -- were exceptional.
(I distinctly remember one T-shirt for managing to spell the same word two different ways in one sentence: "America: You may destroy our buildings, but you can never distroy our spirit!")
My friend Sager joined me in visiting Ground Zero while its hideous remains reared high over the rescuers. A very moving and painful journey. While I was there, a small, blond woman in front of me began sobbing, clutching a crumpled kerchief in her hand while she bit her knuckles and stared at the towering wreckage. I reached out impulsively and placed a hand on her shoulder. She glanced back at me, gripped my hand a moment, and squeezed it gratefully, then turned back to the scene.
Many times I could forget the tragedy, while absorbed in the minutia of a Midwesterner's visit to New York: not being run over; catching the right train; negotiating the dark alleys and bright streets.
But sometimes I'd turn a corner and be struck again with the fresh pain of the event. One day I wandered away from class at lunch in search of a camera store, and stumbled across a neighborhood pizzeria. As I left, there around the corner was a fire station, and within the open doors, a shrine to the five firefighters they had lost a week before. Portraits on the wall were surrounded by letters of condolence, and on the floor were flowers, votive candles, cards, and children's stuffed toys. Standing before their rigs, surviving firefighters spoke with people off the street about their experiences.
Most moving of all were the shrines to the missing. Every light post and building face bore dozens of posters in search of loved ones, every inch of space covered with paper and tape. Public spaces in Times Square and Union Station had sprouted spontaneously into memorials, cards and candles and flowers everywhere. In Union Station, a particularly moving scene: ten yards of flowers and candles had been subjected to rain the night before. Passersby had given up their umbrellas, and positioned them over the photos, the toys, the candles and the cards, to keep them out of the rain. Other papers, less fortunate, had fallen sodden upon the umbrellas, fixing them into the shrines in a grievous papier mache.
As the rains threatened to claim more posters one night, I made my way back to my hotel from Times Square, looking closely at the posters of the missing. Out of all the thousands of posters of thousands of victims, my eye fell upon one: a picture of a tall, vivacious, lovely woman, with the name "Dr. Sneha Ann Philip."
It seemed to me the very statement of the tragedy: beautiful, smart, successful, a woman of the East married to a man of the West, she was everything that America had to brag about. Opportunity, diversity, equality, and promise, all snuffed out in one horrible moment.
I carefully took down one of the posters, feeling ashamed as I did so -- was I being macabre? Was I removing the poster that would otherwise lead to her discovery? I didn't know, but I knew the rains would soon claim this one. I rationalized that at least I'd be saving one poster.
And so I returned home with the poster, a grim memento of my trip. And, a month later, looked online to find out what had been learned of the fate of Dr. Sneha Ann Philip.
The results were no less tragic, for all that they were unusual.
Of all the thousands of posters of thousands of victims, the one I had picked out was unique. Dr. Sneha Ann Philip was not, apparently, a direct victim of the attack on the World Trade Center. Dr. Philip had in fact disappeared from the neighborhood surrounding the World Trade Center the night before.
For her husband, this was no relief from the nightmare. Where the families of the tragedy faced one set of horrors, he faced another: that his missing spouse would be overlooked in the face of the larger nightmare unfolding around him. Several media outlets learned of his situation, and stories were run on [5]TV and in the [6]press, hoping to uncover her fate.
On the afternoon of September 10th, Sneha Philip left her apartment, and did some shopping. Witnesses, security cameras, and charge receipts trace her movements until about 5:30 p.m. When her husband returned home at 11:00 p.m., she was nowhere to be found. Less than twelve hours later, the World Trade Center collapsed. She has never been seen again.
A memorial service is planned for her, on Saturday, September 14th, 2002. To this day no one knows her fate. Was she a victim of foul play on the evening of the 10th, within blocks of the World Trade Center? Or did and her husband somehow miss each other, and then as a physician was she caught up in the tragedy of the next day? Or are other possibilities true: bitter, cynical notions too cruel to voice, but all too common?
It seems we'll never know. And so, in a new and twisted way, the lunatics of September 11th have claimed another victim. A victim whose fate may have been fulfilled before their own, but whose destiny they nonetheless obliterated.
Rest in peace, Sneha, wherever you are.