Back to New York

We drove through midtown Manhattan, surrounded by more red, white and blue than I've ever seen on any Fourth of July. Street vendors had flag-patterned umbrellas, and billboard ads had turned from giant Coca-Cola cans to enormous American flags. Even the graffiti had literally turned patriotic.

I had returned to New York City for two funerals.

While CNN's news at the top of each hour was something that the rest of the world only watched and listened to, in New York, it had become something you breathed--you had no choice. Every tidbit of it buzzed through the air, from the frozen yogurt servers at Tasti-di-Lite asking if anyone had heard the casualty count to the D'Agostino checkout girls burying their heads in the newspaper between customers. The feeling weighed on you and gave you chills. New York's roots had been shaken.

But nothing prepared me for the shock of the first funeral. The body of my high school classmate's father had never been found. Apparently he had been burned up like thousands of others and became part of the tidal wave of ashes that rolled across lower Manhattan when the World Trade Center towers collapsed.

Ours was an all-girl high school, and now we girls who had grown up together gathered outside St. Thomas' Episcopal Church on Fifth Avenue.

"How is your family?" was the first question out of everybody's mouth. That was enough to throw me off balance even before the funeral started. People my age never ask how each other's families are unless it's Parents Weekend, and even then they're actually more curious about boyfriends, roommates and where we're going for lunch. But this time we meant it: "How is your family?" The World Trade Center's population was the equivalent of a small city, and practically all of us knew someone who was killed, hurt or narrowly escaped.

I remember when we used to go home for breaks. We'd all meet at Serfina or E.J.'s diner and talk about clothes and boys and maybe classes and then reminisce about a party last summer or the time that someone was caught making out in a bathroom somewhere, or when one girl used fake tanner and came to school the next day looking like an orange raccoon. Then we'd go to Bloomingdale's or Starbucks and talk about whether or not we'd been back to our school or who in our class we'd seen. This time we were here for encouragement. We stood in line outside the church holding our parents' hands, there for something so unfathomable. We didn't know whether to smile or frown from sorrow, but we all looked each other in the eye. We all shook as we walked into that church, striding down the aisle into the pews.

Our eyes watered at the sight of the altar, even though a third of us were Jewish; at the sight of Mrs. Smith, one of the mothers, even though we used to make fun of her double-rimmed purple bifocals; at the presence of our high school math teacher, who used to pretend to trip on the garbage can to make us laugh when class was getting boring. Then came the footsteps of our classmate and her mother descending from the front of the church into the first pews. It just didn't make sense to see her up at the front of St. Thomas' reading from Corinthians to an audience of over 200 people because her father had died. As we sang the hymns, whether celebratory or somber, we all just stood in a trance, completely taken aback.