Sept. 11 terrorist attacks: A decade of public mourning

Associated Press

HILLIARD, Ohio

Carla Gilkerson, a 54-year-old school-bus driver, sits at a table with friends at Abner’s diner on Main Street in this small Ohio town. She’s never been to New York City and doesn’t know a soul who died Sept. 11 — but talk of the terror attacks a decade ago immediately moves her to tears.

Step outside of Abner’s and there, across the road at Main and Center streets, is one of the largest Sept. 11 memorials outside the attack sites: a granite monument etched with all the victims’ names, surrounded by four giant pieces of World Trade Center steel.

Gilkerson often walks and bikes past the memorial, stopping to run her finger over the names. “I feel like I knew them,” she said. “And that I can keep their memory alive.”

A decade of public mourning for the nearly 3,000 people killed in the nation’s worst terror attack hasn’t abated; in fact, it thrives in this country, from the steel memorial parks to the fake Statue of Liberty outside a Las Vegas casino to a tiny chapel by ground zero. The attacks have spawned a ritual of extravagant public mourning that hasn’t waned; even Americans who didn’t lose a loved one Sept. 11 are still grieving as if they had.

Gilkerson says it best: “I think we’ll always mourn our losses from that day.”

Experts in grief say the outsized sorrow for “our losses” is Americans’ way of processing the most- devastating public event of their lifetimes, which they need to do before they can begin to let go. “This,” says Michael Katovich, a Texas sociology professor who teaches on death and dying, “is a process of solidifying our memories.”

They’re still grieving in Hilliard, a suburb of the state capital of Columbus, an eight-hour drive from New York City. None of its 28,000 residents died in the attacks Sept. 11, yet the people who live in the new subdivisions and work in the small brick buildings that line the downtown still mourned.

Mayor Don Schonhardt was one of the mourners, and he went to New York to ask authorities there for trade-center steel for the city’s memorial.

“We felt it was important to be a community in middle America that would say to the U.S. and the world that we do remember what happened that day,” Schonhardt said.

The memorial fills a city block in the center of town with its two pieces of rusted track from the subway that ran underneath the World Trade Center and two other large hunks of twisted metal from the towers themselves.

Las Vegas has a permanent memorial at the Statue of Liberty replica outside the New York, New York-Hotel Casino. There’s a rotating exhibit of items that were left at the casino in the days after the attacks.

Recently, about a dozen fire department and police T-shirts from around the U.S. were on display in the shadow boxes, which are lighted at night.

The hundreds of other items are archived and stored at the University of Nevada Las Vegas.

In a city of excess and fantasy, the memorial is a sober reminder of reality, and visitors stop and peer into the shadow boxes while walking from one casino to the next.

The small western Pennsylvania town of Shanksville is touched like no other by the attacks; it’s believed to have been an attack site by accident but one whose residents had little connection to the 40 people who perished aboard the hijacked jetliner that crashed at more than 500 mph into the lush, green landscape.

A $60 million memorial is being built in the field.

Psychologists and sociologists who study grief and public mourning say that most of us — at least those who didn’t lose a loved one in the attacks — still are processing the pain, which will dwindle with each successive generation.