The Victors

My daughter is nine. I am a single dad. I took her to New York early this summer because she wanted to see where I’d lived when I was a younger man, before she was born. It was a life changing trip for many reasons, but most of those won’t interest anyone else.

She had an interesting reaction to the 9/11 memorial, though. Not the museum, she’s not old enough for that yet. But the outdoor memorial around the foundations of the old towers. I talked to her about what the names around the fountains meant. She was, of course, surprised to see how many there were.

I told her the story about what the day was like. She asked if I was there; I said no, I was younger and lived in Grand Rapids then, like we do now. She asked me if I knew any of the people who died. I said no.

She asked me if they were at work when they died. I said “yes, many of them.” She found that strangely affecting and got quiet. I worried maybe this was too much for her, but I decided to just continue slowly and see how she responded.

I figured I should reassure her that it was a very unique day, and that she didn’t need to worry about me when I was at my job because that was extraordinarily unlikely to happen to insignificant me in my office in Grand Rapids. That didn’t seem to change her feelings, though, which made me wonder if maybe I’d misjudged the concern. So I just stayed quiet and we kept walking.

We went to the second monument and saw the names. I showed her the ones thereupon, the firefighters and the police officers. She asked why there were so many; was there a police station in the towers? I said no, they came to help. Then she started crying.

We come from a really typical secular liberal family - I respect the police as an institution generally, but I don’t ever express any sense to my daughter that they’re uniformly heroes or unequivocal forces for good. She doesn’t grow up in an environment where I think she would feel any sense of associative loss purely based upon the status or vocation of thinking about firefighters and police officers being killed. Please don’t misunderstand - hearing cops tell stories of that day gives me chills just like anything else. But I guess I was surprised that she attributed more grief and loss to their deaths than the deaths of the other everyday folks. I gave her time and held her shoulders close to my body, and she is a measured kid often times, so she regained composure and we moved on.

I waited until much later, after we’d left the memorial and seen lots of funny stuff and laughed a lot and told stories and been bored and visited other attractions to bring it up and understand her feelings better. I asked her why she’d been so moved to learn that so many first responders died.

She said “Because they were at work.” And this confused me so I gently said, “but everybody was at work that day,” implicitly asking her to explain the contrast. And - call it momtwitter kid fanfic bullshit if you must - she said: “yes, but the people in the towers went to work and died. The police guys went to work TO die.”

I think about that a lot