Ground Zero offers reality and closure

I believe that everyone who is able should visit the World Trade Center site in New York City.

Like you, I remember where I was on 9/11. But I did not realize the full effect until March 2007.

I was in the Big Apple for the first time, and was bitterly disappointed by the weather. We trekked through the city, sight-seeing, and after walking and riding subways for several hours, we found ourselves at Ground Zero.

It was a big mess. That's the best way to describe it. Fences, dirt and construction. Nothing to look at, and if it were in any other part of the city, no one would even stop to peer through the chain-links.

I didn't want to go to the site, because I didn't see much of a reason to be there. I wanted to see the prettier parts of the city, the touristy areas. But I begrudgingly joined the crowd that gathered there.

It was just a small inlet-- an area where we could get out of the sidewalk’s lanes of people. A timeline of that day was displayed above the crowds that gathered there by the hour. I glanced at a small area in the fence that, unlike the rest, had an opening in the tarp big enough to see through. There were trucks, equipment and construction workers on the other side.

I heard a man in a hardhat laugh. Laugh.

"That man laughed. This isn't a place for laughing," I thought in anger.

Then, I tried to imagine his position: coming here, day after day, pretending I'm not standing where innocents were buried in agony for days before dying. Pretending that there aren't people every day who pass by and remember their loved one who took their last debris-filled breath here.

On the timeline above me, photos showed firefighters carrying people out of the destruction. Underneath, a caption told that they were killed in the collapse later that day. I became aware of the diverse faces around me, staring silently at the pictures with wide, no-longer-innocent eyes and gaping mouths.

Then, I noticed buildings across the street: immense structures standing somberly in the drizzling rain with still-boarded windows. I impulsively began snapping pictures of everything, thinking in desperation, "These are the last things that those people saw."

I saw the passers-by who weren't acknowledging the hole where two gigantic towers once stood. I realized that they were natives, and probably see this spot almost everyday. There's a good chance that they, or a close friend, never saw someone they loved again after those two planes rocked Manhattan.

Loss. Death. Yet uncomfortable normality prevailed.

I was standing where so many perished. This was real. Death stood where my feet were planted.

The emotions surged into my chest. I grabbed the corner of the chain-linked fence and wedged my body into it. I sobbed into the other side, hoping that somehow my delayed grief would plant itself in that place, and that I would never again forget or take for granted what was lost by so many that day.