After a first anniversary passes, it’s always the 10th that’s most significant. We regard the intervening years as mere markers as we await the bookend, a decade signifying something of a mental and emotional time capsule.
Tenth anniversaries are the last to evoke any real pageantry, because once this day passes, the event itself begins to slip into history. There’s both relief and pain in that, a sense of loss involved even in the loosening of bonds to the loss.
There’s a theory — simple, small and human — that we mark time in gaps of fives and tens because we have five fingers on each hand, 10 in all. It’s a poignant notion, the sense that, for all we’ve come to understand about the world and our place in it, some things are just too enormous to comprehend in any other way.
COMPLETE 9/11 ANNIVERSARY COVERAGE
“Every day is 9/11 for me,” says Monica Iken Murphy, who lost her husband, Michael, in the north tower. (She has since remarried.) For her, the 10th anniversary is significant only because the memorial is finally there, the direct result of the 10-year mark used as a deadline. “This is the happiest for me — that my Michael is finally home, that if I need to get to him, I can get to him now,” she says. “But the sadness never goes away.” There’s no such thing as moving toward closure, she says: “There’s moving into the space that you’re given.”
This 10th anniversary has a unique aspect: the poetic symmetry of the death of Osama bin Laden, the punctuation mark to a decade spent trying to comprehend how 9/11 has changed us as individuals, a city, a nation, a world. There is now the memorial, and next year the museum will open, and there are buildings going up where once there were craters.
“Sometimes it does bother me when they make a big deal of the milestones, but at the same time, I understand,” says Anthoula Katsimatides, who lost her brother, John, on the 104th floor of the north tower. “This year, it’s a bigger deal, but I guess people want to pay tribute. And there’s nothing wrong with that.”
For her, too, the unveiling of the memorial is the true catharsis. “When our family is gone, the memorial and the museum will be the holder and the keeper of my brother’s memory,” Katsimatides says. “It’s not only a place where people can come and grieve, but we’re hoping that it’s a place where people can come away feeling a little bit hopeful.”