\u201cThat\u2019s the most depressing thing I\u2019ve ever seen,\u201d I said.<\/p>\n
It was January 2004, two years and four months after 9\/11, and the wounds to our city and New Yorkers\u2019 psyches still felt raw.<\/p>\n
A panel of judges had just revealed the results of an international design competition for the National September 11 Memorial<\/a>, to be built at what we all kept calling Ground Zero.<\/p>\n \u201cSo I refused to go see the [9\/11] memorial once it opened in 2011, and I made it a point to avoid the site for years after. Until, at last, I caved \u2014 and found how wrong I\u2019d been,\u201d writes The Post\u2019s Mary Kay Linge. Matthew McDermott for NY Post<\/p>\n Their choice: \u201cReflecting Absence\u201d by unknown architect Michael Arad<\/a>, a minimalist pair of vast black stone squares that would weep streams of tears into solemn pools, carrying our city\u2019s sorrows into a pit of gloom at the center.<\/p>\n I hated it \u2014 and I wasn\u2019t alone. <\/p>\n \u201cWe failed every one of them,\u201d said Lee Ielpi, whose firefighter son Jonathan had died in the rescue effort.<\/p>\n \u201cFunereal\u201d and \u201cgrim,\u201d declared The Post\u2019s Steve Cuozzo, a blight that made \u201cvictimization \u2026 a defining theme of American life.\u201d <\/p>\n I didn\u2019t know Steve then \u2014 I was a stay-at-home Staten Island mom with another baby on the way \u2014 but I thought he was spot on.<\/p>\n And while I \u201cwasn\u2019t directly affected\u201d (as we\u2019d say in those early months, our shorthand phrase for \u201cNo, I didn\u2019t lose a spouse or sibling or friend or colleague that day, did you?\u201d), 9\/11 had shaken me hard. <\/p>\n Of the 2,983 names engraved into the 9\/11 Memorial at Ground Zero, 11 are alongside the words \u201cand her unborn child.\u201d Matthew McDermott for NY Post<\/p>\n By that time we\u2019d learned the stories of so many heroes: Rick Rescorla, the Morgan Stanley security chief who ushered 2,687 colleagues to safety but perished himself<\/a>; Betty Ong, the coolheaded flight attendant who identified the terrorists for the FBI<\/a> in the earliest moments of the crisis; Orio Palmer, the FDNY battalion chief who climbed to the South Tower\u2019s impact zone<\/a>, 78 floors up; the passengers of United Flight 93, who turned the tables on their hijackers<\/a> and prevented untold carnage.<\/p>\n American troops, including a dear friend of mine, were at that moment fighting courageously for us in Afghanistan and Iraq. <\/p>\n But a pair of dank holes in a barren plaza was the best we could do? It was an outrage. <\/p>\n Linge encourages those visiting the memorial to \u201clearn one [victim\u2019s] name, just one, and do a little homework. Seek out that name (an online directory makes it easy), touch it, trace it. Reflect on that person\u2019s story.\u201d Matthew McDermott for NY Post<\/p>\n So I refused to go see the memorial once it opened in 2011<\/a>, and I made it a point to avoid the site for years after. Until, at last, I caved \u2014 and found how wrong I\u2019d been.<\/p>\n The water, falling in a rush rather than a teardrop trickle, created an enveloping white noise that shut out the surrounding city clamor. The dark parapets recalled the enormity of the buildings themselves.<\/p>\n And the names<\/a> \u2014 oh, the names: 2,983 of them. Not chiseled into unforgiving stone as I\u2019d imagined, but delicately traced through bronze panels in open lettering, ready to receive loving tributes and flowers and flags; glowing from beneath with golden light when evening gathers.<\/p>\n At the memorial, seen here from above, \u201cthe water, falling in a rush rather than a teardrop trickle, creates an enveloping white noise that shut out the surrounding city clamor. The dark parapets recalls the enormity of the buildings themselves.\u201d Courtesy of American Express<\/p>\n And for every name, endless stories, endless associations.<\/p>\n Of course I know only a few. But each familiar name I encounter provides a moment to stop and reflect, to think of who they were and the families left behind.<\/p>\n Here\u2019s Thomas Hobbs, the fierce Mets fan whose daughter took up the Amazins\u2019 cause<\/a> in his honor. She saved a quilt made from her dad\u2019s T-shirts so that she could wrap the grandbaby he\u2019d never meet in his embrace.<\/p>\n And Deanna Galante, a first-time mom just weeks away from maternity leave. She and her husband had already given their baby Matthew his name; she was building up a library of Disney picture books for him. They kept arriving after the two were lost.<\/p>\n Deanna Galante, seen here with her husband, Anthony, was a 32-year-old executive assistant for Cantor Fitzgerald\u2019s eSpeed division when she lost her life in the North Tower of the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001. Marie-Elena Aruta\/ Facebook<\/p>\n Alongside Deanna\u2019s name appears the heartbreaking phrase, \u201cand her unborn child\u201d \u2014 words that recur 11 times on the parapet panels.<\/p>\n I spot the FDNY\u2019s Kevin Dowdell, a lieutenant with Rescue 4 in Queens. His body was never found in the wreckage, but somehow his Halligan tool \u2014 a pry bar he\u2019d personalized with his soldered-on initials \u2014 survived intact. His sons, one of them now a firefighter himself<\/a>, have cherished it ever since.<\/p>\n