Into the Fire

I've got to say something and it won't be popular. The 9/11 families need to chill out.

Now, I have little standing to criticize. I have never lost a mother, father, brother, sister or child. My grandparents have died of natural causes.

A second cousin of mine who worked in the World Trade Center was killed on September 11, 2001. We weren't close. But when the family gets together at my aunt's house, his mother and sometimes his brother are there. He is not.

A fraternity brother of mine also died in that attack. He was three years older than me. We called him Freddy "The Bug." He made me photocopy my notes for a class we once took.

All this, and yet the tears I cried that day and since have been more for the overall tragedy. A shared grief with those who lost so much more. For our lost innocence. For the therapy of letting out what can only destroy from the inside. I have no right to criticize how anyone grieves. Grieving people often go a little insane. It's their right.

But while I'm driving in my car, and a woman whose son died in New York that day comes on the radio and demands that the city sift through every last piece of remains from the World Trade Center, full of rage that her son is doomed to spend eternity on a pile of garbage on Staten Island -- I got angry.

At her.

"It's a knife going through my heart. These type of remains deserve a proper burial and not that type of treatment," said Sally Regenhard, who lost her firefighter son Chris on 9/11 and is part of group suing the city. None of his remains were ever identified. "There is some remnant of human life there, no matter how microscopic."

Likely so. And so what? Does every person who has lost a loved one in a tragedy deserve no expenses spared for a proper burial? Is the site of every airplane crash hallowed ground? Do we sift the dirt of such disasters through an ultra-fine mesh and scan it with an electron microscope? Should we strain the oceans for every decomposed remnant of people drowned in sunken boats or eaten by sharks? Is it too late to raise the Titanic for surviving kin?

The 9/11 families exercise justified anger. At their government for failing to protect their loved ones. And even more, for continued failures to act for our protection outside business-as-usual pork barrel politics and ill-advised oversees military campaigns. Their voices and anguish have served us all, pushing for the creation of the 9/11 commission and working to see its recommendations implemented.

But they are not owed the world. Tragedies happen every day and to people without emotionally potent and well-connected lobbying groups at their disposal. The estimated hundreds of millions (or even tens of millions) needed to rake over the Fresh Kills Landfill would be money better spent almost anywhere else. Our country doesn't need more monuments and cemeteries. It needs border security and defenses for our infrastructure.

Again, I can't imagine how grueling it is not to have even the smallest physical token of my son's existence. But Chris Regenhard, like so many others, was likely vaporized in the sudden collapse of a 110-story building. More people may have breathed some of him into their lungs that day than attended his funeral. This is the cold, sad truth. Spending a fortune in public money to provide some solace to a mother who certainly could never be consoled would be an additional tragedy.

The songs and passages of our youth tell our simple story. We are stardust. Dust in the wind. From dust to dust...

Sally Regenhard, please understand. Chris is not stuck in a pile of garbage. He is golden. He is in your heart.