The 9/11 Decade - Falling in Love With Death - Jim Dwyer - NYTimes.com

Remembering 9/11 is something I would rather not do, rather not recall my first vision - smoke just beginning to rise from the second tower to meet that of the first, the shock when the south tower collapsed, the realization of awful incalculable loss, the futility and loss of the rescuers, walking past firehouses displaying the names and photos of the men lost. Hard to know how to remember it when misguided revenge inflicted such suffering in Iraq, satisfied with the execution of Osama Bin Laden, the day is almost past. But as so often for me a writer with an Irishman's ear strikes the note I long for. - GWC

The 9/11 Decade - Falling in Love With Death - NYTimes.com:
by Jim Dwyer

William Butler Yeats wrote of an earlier, bloody era in "Meditations in Time of Civil War.”
We had fed the heart on fantasies,
The heart’s grown brutal from the fare;
More Substance in our enmities
Than in our love

At vast cost in human capital, we carved 9/11 into the history of loss in other places, the enmities of a decade rising from the horrors of the day. But the majesty of that day does not belong to the chronicles of war. It lives in truths the size of atoms, nearly invisible and — one hopes — indestructible.

That morning, Raffaele Cava, age 80, was working on the 90th floor of the north tower. After the plane hit, no one could open the exits, so he went to another office and sat with Dianne DeFontes and Tirsa Moya. The hall floors were melting. Suddenly, two men in the stairwell pried open the door, walked in and ordered everyone to go. They were Frank De Martini and Pablo Ortiz, Port Authority employees who worked one flight down, and who took it on themselves to climb up and down 14 floors, getting scores of people out. They never left.
Tirsa Moya walked Raffaele Cava down all 90 floors.

You could ask no more of human beings.

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