11/10/01: The Missing Are Still Here
I wrote this in late September, but I didn’t have the heart to put it up in public until now. It’s a little purple, but it’s hard to not be.
There’s a sort of shrine in the hallway of Grand Central Station. It was originally a folding partition set up as a place for people to put up posters of their missing loved ones. With the passage of time, as the missing began to shift in status, and as the flowers and puddles of wax – erstwhile candles – began to appear, this wall became a shrine to the missing who are now not missing but lost.
They may be lost but we can see them. The photos in the posters are inevitably candid. One man grins at us from the drivers side of a car, so we become his beloved passenger. One woman is lying in bed, looking up at us with a smile, so we become her welcome surprise visitor. But the lost are more than their photos -- they are a list of their distinguishing characteristics. Brown hair. Blue eyes. Of a certain height and weight. And more in depth, more personalizing details. Someone’s husband is “balding.” Someone’s dad is “heavy.” Someone’s fiancée has “a large chest.” Which means the family is so desperate to find their lost, they don’t mind sacrificing a little dignity. And even worse than this are the signs of a more desperate desperation – identifying scars, tattoos, marks. Someone’s son is missing a kidney. Someone’s wife has no tonsils. We just want them back. We’ll take our lost back any way. Their lost become a sum of parts. Which, horribly, (write it!) they may not be.
I am looking at the shrine, because to ignore it is to let the lost slip further away, when a man behind me says to the shrine lookers: “These are the dead people, right? These people are dead.” Someone mummers something to him, and a small ripple of disapproval flows over us, but we all know, as we have known since the start, that the missing are lost because they are dead. And what’s worse is, they’re not missing at all. We know exactly where they are.