Behind the faces
Yesterday, I mentioned that reading the daily “Portraits of Grief” in The New York Times became almost a religious ritual to me in the days after 9/11. I wasn’t exaggerating. There were days when I gave the rest of the paper no more than a cursory glance, but pored over those long pages of pictures as if my own life depended on it. Call it survivors guilt, morbid curiosity or whatever, but I somehow felt that I needed to connect to the victims in some way, and that this was the best way to do it. One thing I never thought about was how those pictures came to appear in the paper each day; in keeping with the whole religious idea, I suppose I thought it irrelevant. As far as I was concerned, they might have been conjured from whole cloth on the spot. Now, after six years, I am interested, and was fascinated to read yesterday’s blog entry by The Times’ Glenn Collins, who authored many of those profiles. It’s a touching tale of journalistic detachment—a required trait if you’re going to call families the day after they’ve lost their loved ones— breaking down in the face of shared tragedy:
Once I descended from the newsroom to the lobby of The Times to pick up the photograph of a victim, Paul Benedetti, from his wife, Alessandra. She was there with her mother, as well as her husband’s mother. They handed me the picture. Then they spontaneously hugged me. All three of us held one another, crying.
It’s also something of a revelation to me. As it turns out, I wasn’t alone in my near-obsessive reading of the Portraits. As Collins points out:
As the months went on, some readers told me that the Portraits of Grief were too painful to read. Some said that they always found themselves crying. So they made a vow, every day, to read just one portrait.But then they couldn’t stop from reading another.
And then another.
And soon, once again, they would read the whole page, and find themselves crying.
Six years later, that’s one thing that hasn’t changed.
