so resigned to its fate. No longer solemn, plodding, dirge-like, the repetition feels anxious, almost neurotic. A story from the war, drunkenly recited over and over. A song, once a hit, played nightly to fewer and fewer people. Not a mantra. Not wisdom, which, by nature, bears repeating. The emphatic phrase sounds fearful, not of death, but of no longer being heard — of silence itself.

My grandma June was killed by her body’s determination to protect itself from further harm, by scars (a profoundly human sort of death, I think). The disease was the consequence of a collusion between her genes and a lifetime of pulmonary trauma. Toward the end, some of her doctors suggested that inhaling ash on September 11 might have exacerbated or even triggered the onset of her fibrosis. After she died, this stray diagnostic fact swelled in my mind. I collected medical studies linking pulmonary fibrosis to 9/11 smoke inhalation. I followed closely the lawsuits filed against New York City by firefighters, police officers, and construction workers who got sick after working at or near ground zero. I nurtured a quiet hatred for Mayor Rudi Giuliani, whose eagerness to show resolve, to reopen Wall Street, and prove that NYC could not be crippled, led to thousands of people being exposed to toxic debris. In all this, I experienced an odd sort of consolation, as if proximity to this great collective tragedy would give meaning to our family’s comparatively small, meaningless one.

 

At my grandmother’s funeral, one of many eulogists remembered her saying more than once, “You know you’re okay, until you can’t breathe.” Everyone nodded solemnly, agreeing. But I never heard her say that.

 

The trauma of September 11 is specific, locatable in time, and therefore, in some sense preferable to the everywhere-tragedy of mortality. My Grandma June wasn’t just an old person whose body surrendered. She was an indirect victim of the largest ever terrorist attack on American soil. Taking comfort in this fact —