Above, Jumpers, 9/11/01, Reuters photo
"The Falling Man," 9/11/01, ap photo by Richard Drew, via Esquire
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- "Almost all of them jumped alone, although eyewitnesses talked of a couple who held hands as they fell."...
- "Nearly 3,000 children under the age of 18 lost a parent on Sept 11. The average age was 9. A total of 108 were born in the months after their fathers died."...
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I sat down and looked up only to see more people jumping. I thought for a moment that they might have fallen, but there were too many people, their arms windmilling as
they subconsciously tried to fight gravity and avoid the inevitable.
Haunted by these visions numerous times since the incident, I have
tormented myself by trying to
imagine the extreme conditions that those people must have faced
that they should choose certain death by leaping from the building
over clinging to any hope of rescue. What were they thinking when they jumped; what did they think on the way down?...But my fear is that to forget is to fail the lesson and lose the opportunity.
That’s why this raw wound will never completely heal and that
things can never go back to ‘normal’. Because even as a simple
bystander I have a responsibility to incite change for the rest of my
life or I watched all those people die in vain."
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- 9/6/10, "September 11: Recalling my day at the World Trade Center," the experiencejunkie.com by msw
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