IT WAS like listening to the voicemail on heaven’s answering machine, messages to loved ones absent 10 years: The kids just started school. I’m holding down the fort. We love you, we miss you something awful. We know you’re watching over us. My brother, I named my son after you.
It took four hours to read the 2,983 names of Osama bin Laden’s victims, each reader ending with a personal message to his or her dead relative. Ten years had dulled the thirst for revenge, but the permanence of grief was etched on their faces.
A weeping Chinese woman held a photograph of a young man in an elaborate gold frame. When the sobs convulsed her, she hid behind the picture. A gaunt Mexican in a parks department uniform and Yankees cap stood with his arm around his mother, dressed in peasant clothes, both as immobile as statues. Red Cross volunteers proffered boxes of tissues.
The heroes of 9/11 have entered US folklore. Like Moira Reddy Smith, the daughter of a Dubliner and the only female New York police officer to die on 9/11. As bodies crashed around her, Reddy Smith guided dozens out of the towers. “Don’t look. Keep moving,” she told them.
Reddy Smith’s daughter Patricia was only two when Moira died. She stood on the podium yesterday, “the very picture of her mother”, said her father James. Patricia left her own message on the heavenly answering machine: “Mom, I am proud to be your daughter. You will always be my hero and the pride of New York City.”