“And then there was one…” Â This was my fear.
Like so many people around the world, on September 11, 2001, I tore through my mental Rolodex wondering if those I knew in New York were safe. Several college friends had studied at the business school and had good jobs in New York. Did they work in the Towers? One friend I especially worried about was B.
B. and I had not stayed in close touch after graduation, but I’d seen him at our reunion in 2000. He and his wife were living in Manhattan with their young family. He had done well for himself.
Back when we were in our second year of college, B. and I had played bridge, of all things, with our roommates. His roommate J. had a thing for my roommate, L. The bridge game, B., and I were props for their budding romance. But it was all right. The four of us had a good time and we became unexpectedly addicted to the game. Our weekly match turned to semi-weekly, and then for a while, to nightly. Our grades suffered, but we were all overachievers who needed to slack off a little. Several months passed, and then J. and L. went on a date. After the success of that, they didn’t need the bridge game anymore. We stopped playing.
J. and L. both died before graduation. L. perished in an automobile accident at the beginning of our junior year. Less than twelve months later, J. took his own life. The shock and tragedy of their deaths has not diminished with time.
It occurred to me on the night of September 11, that at the age of thirty-three, I might be the only bridge player left.
Three days later, I learned that I wasn’t. B. and his family were safe. On the night of the terrorist attacks he had waited in line for hours to donate blood.
He was the same person I remembered from another life.
The base of a cross forged from World Trade Center steel and concrete by Virginia blacksmiths David Munn and Fred Christ. The artists asked me to write an excerpt from Walt Whitman's "On the Beach at Night" on the underside. In 2003, I had the honor of accompanying Munn and Christ to St. Paul's Chapel at Ground Zero in Manhattan to deliver the cross as part of its permanent collection.
Munn and Christ's design for the cross references the twin towers of the World Trade Center. Two steel nails indicate where the planes struck.
To those souls, fatefully lifted on that day, far above and away, heavenward:
A thousand flowers–each seeming one
That learnt by gazing on the sun
To counterfeit his shining;
Within whose leaves the holy dew
That falls from heaven, has won anew
A glory in declining.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning