I’ve traveled in airplanes so often, I have frequent-flyer miles enough to go to China.

I never watch movies that feature violent, spectacular horrors, so my uncalloused psyche was laid wide open to the images, when they came, of real airplanes slamming into real buildings.

And I have an overgrown, acutely visual imagination. It’s the combination of these vulnerabilities, I suppose, that nearly debilitated me for many days with my own particular visions of what hundreds of people must have gone through—but did not live through—on Tuesday, September 11, 2001.

In the weeks following that monstrous massacre I walked through the motions of a normal life, like everyone else who was lucky enough to have a “normal” to get back to, rather than an aching hole where a loved one used to be. In literal terms I was untouched; my home is thousands of miles from any site where an airplane crashed that day. But I have many friends who are much closer to the catastrophe: one who often works near the Pentagon; another who was passing through Washington Square on his way to work in lower Manhattan when his eyes went up to the tallest building as it began, incomprehensibly, to fall down. He likened the sound that rose from the bystanders to “a packed stadium filled with keening.” One of the people dearest to me on earth was on a plane that took off from Newark, I was certain, at the same hour and minute as two of the fatal flights. For the first time in my life, my calls to that city that never sleeps were answered with a dead line. I was worried sick about my far-flung friends for the hours and days it took until I could talk with each one in turn, reassuring myself that my community remained more or less as it had been. I have two close friends who lost people they loved, so I stand one degree separated from a tragedy that directly bereaved so many in one horrendous blow.

Only my soul was scathed. My mind’s eye kept watching this movie in my head: seeing the blue stars that invade my vision in times of panic; breathing too fast, gripping the hand of a stranger in the seat beside me; thinking in frantic minutes about the years my girls will have to get through without me. Wishing I had after all, despite my grudge against the things, bought a cell phone. Brutal murder with knives; desperation; watching the end of the world from an aisle seat.

So many people. They crowded my consciousness with a silent cry for memorial. I woke from dreams of facing the end beside them, and in those first confused seconds while I struggled to identify the impalpable burden that weighed on my heart I would see it again, not as dream but as reality. Throughout my day I would find myself gripped by distraction, looking out the window at the haze on the mountains as the scene played in front of me again and again. Only a few days before September 11, I had needed to undertake the new (for me) experiences of general anesthesia and surgery. And so the acute pain, foggy-headedness, and disturbed sleep of my slow recuperation became confused and intermingled for me with the pain and recuperative trauma of my nation in a slow, hallucinatory grief.

Then a death in our own family followed upon all those others by just three days, a further devastation, and we faced the difficulties of trying to get to my father-in-law’s funeral in a distant city. The airways reopened, but a timely arrival was by no means guaranteed. I wasn’t yet well enough to travel, so I stayed home with the children while Steven made the trip alone. As he left, I wept again from my bottomless well of grief, feeling sure the world was ending—feeling sure that my husband’s airplane would also fall out of the sky, and I would not see him again.

“It’s probably safer to fly right now,” he told me reasonably, “than at any time in the last ten years.”

“I know that,” I said, “but I don’t feel that.”

This is what changed for us that day: not what we know, but how we feel. We have always lived in a world of constant sorrow and calamity, but most of us have never had to say before, It could have been me. My daughters and me on that plane, my husband in that building. I have stepped on that very pavement, I have probably sat on one of those planes. This was us, Americans at work, on vacation, going home, or just walking from one building to another. Alive, then dead.

It’s probably only human to admit that a stranger’s death is more shattering when we can imagine it as our own. We all began to say, that week, “This is the worst thing that has ever happened.” To us, I know we should have added, for worse disasters have happened—if “worse” can be measured solely by the number of dead—in practically every other country on earth. Two years earlier an earthquake in Turkey had killed three times as many people in one day, babies and mothers and businessmen. The November before that, a hurricane had hit Honduras and Nicaragua and killed even more, buried whole villages and erased family lines; even now, people wake up there empty-handed. Some disasters are termed “natural” (though it was war that left Nicaragua so vulnerable), and yet their victims are just as innocent as ours on September 11, and equally dead. Which end of the world should we talk about? Only the murderous kind? Sixty years ago, Japanese airplanes bombed U.S. Navy boys who were sleeping on ships in gentle Pacific waters. Three and a half years later, American planes bombed a plaza in Japan where men and women were going to work and schoolchildren were playing, and more humans died at once than anyone had ever thought possible: seventy thousand in a minute. Imagine, now that we can—now that we have a number with which to compare it—seventy thousand people dead in one minute. Then twice that many more, slowly, from the inside.

There are no worst days, it seems. Ten years ago, early on a January morning, bombs rained down from the sky and caused great buildings in the city of Baghdad to fall down—hotels, hospitals, palaces, buildings with mothers and soldiers inside—and here in the place I want to love best, I watched people cheer about it. In Baghdad, survivors shook their fists at the sky and used the word evil. We all tend to raise up our compatriots’ lives to a sacred level, thinking our own citizens to be more worthy of grief and less acceptably taken than lives on other soil. When many lives are lost all at once, people come together and speak words such as heinous and honor and revenge, presuming to make this awful moment stand apart somehow from the ways people die a little each day around the world from sickness or hunger. But broken hearts are not mended in this ceremony because really, every life that ends is utterly its own event—even as in some way every life is the same as all others, a light going out that ached to burn longer. Even if you never had a chance to love the light that’s gone, you miss it. You should; you have to. You bear this world and everything that’s wrong with it by holding life still precious, every time, and starting over.

In my lifetime I have argued against genocide, joined campaigns for disaster aid, sent seeds to places of famine. I have mourned my fellow humans in every way I’ve known how. But never before have their specific deaths so persistently entered my dreams. This time it was us, leaving us trembling, leading my little daughter to ask quietly, “Will it happen to me, Mama?” I understood with the deepest sadness I’ve ever known that this was the wrong question to ask, and it always had been. It has always been happening to us—in Nicaragua, in the Sudan, in Hiroshima, that night in Baghdad—and now we finally know what it feels like. Now we may learn, from the taste of our own blood, that every war is both won and lost, and that loss is a pure, high note of anguish like a mother singing to an empty bed.

In the coming spring I will plant a long raft of Legion of Honor poppies, the same ones that bloom in the graveyards at Verdun, across the bottom of our hay field. I decided to do this early on, as my own cenotaph. Every summer when the poppies’ scarlet heads rise up from the earth, I’ll remember that grief is eternal and so is life.

So many people were taken from us all at once this year, such courage and grief and fury cry out silently through our still-beating hearts, asking our nation for the right memorial. How can we build it, what material shall we choose? What will be the quality of its soul? I’ve seen the thousand paper cranes in the quiet monument to peace in Hiroshima; the dark slash in the earth whispering the names of those we lost in Vietnam; the endless orchard of white crosses in the poppy fields of Verdun. And I’ve studied how all these nations behaved in the aftermath of their losses. The most crucial memorial must surely be in what we carry forward.

It will probably always be hard to speak of September 11 without using the words unthinkable, unbelievable. And yet somehow we did and do believe it. From the first moment I understood what was happening to us that morning, I felt my bones going soft with the most awful recognition I’ve ever known, the aching perception that this had been working its way toward us for so long. I did not, and will never, believe that such a blow was deserved; no one deserves to be murdered, least of all those blameless people sitting down to their desks, carrying breakfast to diners in a restaurant, or setting off on vacation. What I do believe is that the losers of all wars are largely the innocent, and we are a nation at war—we have been for many lifetimes, reinforcing or inventing reigns of power that mollify some and terrify others in many lands, for many reasons. In the years since I became a taxpaying adult, my money has helped finance air assaults in Afghanistan, Chile, El Salvador, Grenada, Iran, Iraq, Libya, Lebanon, Nicaragua, Panama, the Sudan, Vietnam, and Yugoslavia—and those are just the ones I can name without getting up from my desk to search out the history books that will remind me of all the others. How could I—how could anyone—reasonably have expected that we could go about our merry lives here in War Headquarters without being touched by war? Whether or not we deem all these campaigns just, we can’t possibly expect to wage war without living in wartime. Elsewhere on the planet, no one is banking on that program. War is not just some game played by the strong against, or on behalf of, the weak. Lethal germs, airliner bombs, nuclear sabotage, suicide missions—these are the weapons of the fiercely resourceful warrior raging against the mighty. In my bones I understand that they are not just going to be aimed at others every time; at some point they will be coming toward me. Assigning blame on this score is about as useful as looking at a hurricane through a drinking straw. The vast injuries comprising this picture surely call for justice, but the word justice itself calls for a system of accounting that may not be up to the task, when so many wounds have been inflicted for different reasons over the course of centuries, all in the guise of retaliation. I feel intensely linked with those who died on September 11, not because of any particular culpability, and not because I can presume to take anyone’s place in any story, but because their deaths forced me wide awake to the immensity of what is wrong. This story belongs to every one of us, as a price somehow exacted in blood and anger and conscience. I am linked to a chain of events that has wrought devastation.

In those first weeks I found myself not stunned by this truth but in some way lost, watching the end of the world on an airplane again and again. I needed to finish this out so the awful loop in my head might finally close. I needed to understand what the dead were asking of me. People often say funerals and memorials are for the living, not the dead, and maybe that is so. But if we can’t summon the empathy to imagine what our dead would have asked of us, or the selflessness to give it, then we must accept the desperately sad verdict that each generation’s hopes will die with it, and no cumulative progress is possible for the human will. Thousands of people awakened on the morning of September 11 and hurried or lingered over coffee, saw children off to school, made plans, kissed spouses, and bent their shoulders to the good they hoped to make of a new day, without ever dreaming they would not see the sun set again. To transsubstantiate these unfinished lives into some honorable endeavor on behalf of what they might have been—this is surely more necessary now than satisfying our own anger and cravings for safety.

I can only hope to know what is being asked of me if I can somehow get beyond a survivor’s panic and anger, to fly through all this or above it to glimpse another point of view. Possibly this is what each of us needs in order to go forward, the answer to the hardest question: If it could have been me on that awful Tuesday—if it could still be me, and the ones closest to me, the next time—what memorial would I ask the world to build for our remembrance? What would I want to have written on stone? Not to complete some national agenda, but just for us?

First what goes without saying and has to be said: I would want my husband and children to know I loved them. But they know this every minute of our lives, from the way I have always lived—for them, with them, in every way cheering them on; with them even when I’ve had to be apart from them. Every survivor must seize this comfort. And I would hope all members of my family—including those who are unrelated by blood but who’ve proven themselves to be my devoted tribe in good times and bad—would remember what fine people they have been in my eyes, and carry that reinforcement into the rest of their days. That is the best reincarnation I can imagine: to be a cricket on someone’s hearth, a small, encouraging light in the heart of a friend who looks at the world and its challenges as I would.

And my daughters, as precious as my eyes: I would have them be brave enough, and gentle enough, to remember me by embracing the world and engaging in its design. I wouldn’t need to know how they’d do it, only that they would earn the unquenchable happiness that comes to those who leave a place more beautiful, somehow, for their having walked through it.

I would want someone to plant a raft of poppies for me.

It is one thing to imagine the gentle end that most of us envision for ourselves, with our survivors at our bedside; to imagine death by violence, and its aftermath, demands a magnitude of labor I can scarcely marshal. A murder is an unspeakable thing to have to pack away in a human heart. It brings the temptation to bitterness, a particular pain that cries out to be healed with pain. There comes a momentary sense of conviction: that some other’s anguish will erase our own. I have felt that rage myself, when I was attacked by someone who did not care if I lived or died; I’ve felt it even more fiercely on the occasion of harm, real or threatened, to my children. I still sometimes feel an intense longing, as sharp as the knife that once touched my ribs, to hurt another person. I felt it, of course, after September 11. Even now the feeling rises like the undead, adapts like a germ to new bodies and forms, tries to pass itself off as righteous at times. I struggle to forgive the unforgivable and doubt I am up to the task.

But I have lived long enough and had the help of wise enough friends to feel how the stones in my heart can settle when the substrate of my rage transforms into a kinder species of force. Sometimes I’ve survived anger only one minute at a time, by saying to myself again and again that the best revenge is some kind of life beyond this, some kind of goodness. And I can lay no claim to goodness until I can prove that mean people have not made me mean.

This transformation isn’t easy; possibly nothing is harder. In the days after September 11, my mind led me repeatedly to the edge of tasting my own death at the hands of a heartless murderer, though never into the more awful terrain, of which I can hardly make myself speak, of surviving the loss of a child. I was brought to tears during those weeks by the expansive grace of some of the parents who did lose sons and daughters on those airplanes and in those buildings. Oscar Rodriguez, whose son died in the World Trade Center, said, “I know there is anger. I feel it myself. But I don’t want my son used as a pawn to justify the killing of others. We as a nation should not use the same means as the people who attacked us.” And a bereaved mother in Washington, D.C., was able to assemble the composure, only days after her daughter’s murder, to speak publicly of her gratitude for the years she had been given with her twelve-year-old, rather than reviling the men who had stolen the many more years she might have had. Rita Lasar, the sister of a man who died on the twenty-seventh floor of one of the towers because he stayed with a wheelchair-bound coworker while others fled, brought me to know her grief when she wrote of having helped raise her much younger, much-beloved brother. And she brought me to understand the magnitude of her love when she declared eloquently, as our country rushed toward war, “I will stay behind, just as my dear brother Avrame did. I will stay behind and ask America not to do something we can’t take back.” These loving family members are a monument. To take them at their word is to understand what is possible from the human spirit.

There can be no greater spiritual accomplishment than to come through brutal trials and then look back and see that mean times did not render us mean spirits. If I had never been granted the chance to do this, I would still want it for my children. Of all the fates I can imagine for myself, no legacy leaves me colder than that of bitterness and hatred. I would rather be forgotten entirely than held in any way responsible for the vengeful loss of a single life, let alone thousands of lives, or any historic moment of jingoism or ethnic hatred. I feel chilled and forsaken when I picture kissing my children good-bye some morning and, by nightfall, having all the beauty of my days reduced to a symbol claimed by military men as an act of war. No bomb has ever been built that can extinguish hatred, and while I have been told that this is not the point, I insist on it as my point, if one is ever to be made for me. Vengeance does not subtract any numbers from the equation of murder; it only adds them. Empathy, comprehension, resolution—these are the only powers for murder’s reduction. Who would really wish to be a cause for taking bread from the mouths of the hungry in a desperate rush to beat more of the world’s plowshares into swords? That is surely a despicable memorial. I speak for many more than myself, I know, when I declare that I’d rather be remembered as a lesson learned, a sympathy made acute, a moment in which humanity rose humanely to a fearful occasion.

A close friend of mine in Virginia who is also a mother and writer, with whom I have shared the struggle against the culturally complex anachronisms of Dixie, wrote me a few days after the fall with this report: “Even the Confederate flags are at half mast.” That sentence struck me as a poem, complete in itself.

Maybe we’ve had the wind taken out of our sails for just long enough that our course will realign, however infinitesimally, toward a kinder star. We would not be making a concession to murder or its perpetrators if we were to learn from our fears and our losses. Martin Luther King Jr., four little girls from Selma, and hundreds of other murdered souls in our history have given us a pause in which to examine the national conscience and embrace a more generous vision of ourselves than we ever thought possible. That must be our monument to the lost.

I’ve lived long enough to eat many youthful words, but a few things I have always known for certain, and this is one: If I had to give up my life for anything, it would have to have the resilience of hope, the elation of new literacy, the brilliant life of a field of flowers, the elementary kindness of bread. Nothing short of that. It would have to be something as sure as love.