10 year wedding anniversary gift

Eight months after the twin towers fell, a small village in Kenya first learned of the tragedy from a returning Masai tribal member who had been in the United States. Overwhelmed with grief and astounded at the enormity of the loss, on June 3, 2002, this Masai tribe took the first step in creating a ritual to express their pain and their solidarity with the victims of 9/11. In a sacred ceremony, they blessed 14 cows to be given as a gift to the people of the United States. "The cow is almost the center of life for us," said one of the Masai men. "It's sacred. It's more than property. You give it a name. You talk to it. You perform rituals with it.... That's the cow for us" (Lacey, 2002, p. A6). The United States government, through its emissaries in Kenya, turned down these cows, stating that it would be too difficult to bring them to the United States.

We are now at the third anniversary, and authentic rituals continue to collide with government, corporate, and media plans for 9/11 remembrances. Authentic rituals have the capacity to embrace our human need for continuity, connecting us to that which has come before us, while offering us a vision of change and a bridge to a transformed future. They announce transitions from one stage of life to another, and serve as the most powerful mode of conveyance through the seasons of life. Cradling contradictions, authentic rituals at once enable healing and celebration, singularity and community, memorial and re-engagement with life.

Immediately following September 11, 2001, the human need to make authentic Rituals--those rituals generated by individuals, families, and communities, and not imposed by others--emerged. We saw tapestries of "missing" posters, most with a photograph depicting a lost loved one in the midst of a prior joyful ritual--a birthday, a wedding, a vacation--juxtaposed with the cruel word "missing." New Yorkers interacted with these posters, writing messages, laying flowers, Wing ribbons in solidarity, and mourning. Across the nation, we poured out of our houses at 7:00 p.m. on September 14 and lit a candle, a thousand candles, 10 million candles, announcing our connection, our embrace of the victims, our survival. I recall my own first glimmer of the return of sanity that Friday as I baked challah for the Jewish New Year with my then 4-year-old granddaughter Josie at my side--a new generation learning to knead the fragrant dough and shape it into Jacob's Ladder climbing skyward.

CREATING AND PARTICIPATING IN 9/11 ANNIVERSARY RITUALS

The anniversaries of the 9/11 terror attacks have posed powerful dilemmas for families and communities who want to create and participate in meaningful rituals of remembrance. How to prevent this hallowed day from being stolen by the media, co-opted by politicians, or made superficial by star-studded concerts and greeting cards emblazoned with flags and eagles? How to reclaim this day in memory of ordinary citizens who got on airplanes, went to their offices, or struggled to rescue others, and deliver it from the banal "Patriot's Day" designation that has egregiously encouraged some communities to make parades and fireworks?

This dilemma is apparent in the short history of anniversary rituals

of 9/11. Many survivors who attended the first of these, the one-month anniversary on October 11, 2001, spoke of feeling traumatized by a public spectacle held at a then-burning pile of rubble with the smell of human flesh still hanging in the air. The 6-month anniversary was an invention of the media; we are not a culture that typically marks a half-year anniversary of a death. The first-year anniversary, a date that marked the passage of one full cycle of the seasons, holidays, birthdays, and simple day-to-day living without lost loved ones offered the contradiction of private grieving in a public context. Approximately half of the families who lost a member attended the public ceremony, while half chose to organize their own rituals far from the television cameras. Solemn and singular cello music accompanied the profound ritual of the reading of names of all who died. This litany reverberated with so many different ethnicities, cultures, social classes, and religions, simultaneously expressing the breadth of our loss and the potential depth of our capacity as a nation to embrace difference. At the same time, no original speeches were allowed, preventing expression that might have helped us make new meaning of our loss. Family members were told they must bring roses and sunflowers that would later be taken away and gathered into a permanent display. In silent rebellion, many families chose to bring different flowers, no doubt the favorite flowers of their loved ones.

Terry McGovern, who lost her mother in the attacks, told me, "I went to the one-month anniversary. I went to the 6-month anniversary because I felt I needed to be where my mother died. I thought I could find something there, but I began to realize I couldn't. And I went to the first anniversary and that was the last time I went to 'ground zero' because it was clear that our memories were being exploited for political purposes." The site was rapidly becoming a tourist attraction, replete with buses and souvenirs. Many family members spoke of feeling robbed of the hallowed ground that swallowed their loved ones. Others, especially those who have been given no remains, continue to visit the site and hold it sacred.

PRIVATE RITUAL MAKING

Between the anniversaries, surviving family members have made their own authentic rituals with no help from the government and far from the intrusive eye of the media. Many families make their rituals outdoors--planting a tree in a loved one's honor that children can decorate on holidays, releasing balloons to celebrate a life cut short, informally renaming a park for a lost parent, creating a garden, sending a child's first lost tooth up to daddy in a helium balloon--perhaps because the death of their loved one was a death in which they literally vanished in the air.

Unlike most mourners of a death, the families and communities of 9/11 have not been allowed the prescribed rituals marking loss. Rather, their rituals have had to be new, specific to a tragedy for which there is no intergenerational map. And as the site became politicized, survivors have had to make an amalgam of meaningful rituals and political positions regarding recovery, uses of the site, permanent memorials, and the demands for a national investigation.

The Association of Black Firefighters and their wives and families, the Vulcans and Vulcanettes, lost 12 men on 9/11. Numbering 300 in a fire department of many thousands, these African American firefighters went unnoticed by the media. In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, surviving Black firefighters joined their comrades at the site daily for months in a rescue and recovery effort that risked their health to the extent that over half now live with chronic breathing problems. And as a community, they began to make rituals that focused on telling the stories of the lives of those lost. One young firefighter who died that day was an immigrant from the Caribbean who had just become a citizen and planned to vote for the first time on 9/11. In a mourning ritual, his mother spoke of how he serenaded her with Ray Charles's version of "America the Beautiful" as he walked out her door for the last time.

In 2002, when New York City precipitously announced it was pulling the firefighters out of the World Trade Center, thereby stopping the recovery effort, the Vulcans and Vulcanettes created a series of rituals that were at once emotional, spiritual, and political, and successfully challenged the city edict. Again, in an outdoor and community setting, firefighters made vows to the children who lost fathers, promising, "The needs that your father might have met, we will meet them," and set aloft balloons tied with blessed messages to their loved ones (Smith, 2002, personal communication). The families who lost husbands, brothers, and fathers remain especially connected to one another, held by the larger community of Black firefighters.