SACKCLOTH AND ASHES
By Cappy Hall Rearick
“To every thing there is a season. A time to be born, and a time to die; A time to kill, and a time to heal; A time to weep, and a time to laugh; A time to mourn, and a time to dance; A time to love, and a time to hate; A time of war, and a time of peace.”
On the second September Saturday morning of 2021, we Americans will turn off our alarm clocks, get out of bed, put on the coffee and do our morning rituals.
At some point, we will glance at a calendar and remember exactly where we were when terrorists attacked our country twenty years before. We will experience, just as we did for nineteen previous years, a sickening feeling in our bellies; fear, helplessness and unbridled anger. It has been a very long twenty years.
9-11 made such a profound change, whether needed or not, in our lives. We saw things differently because we looked at life in a different way. We know now that nothing can ever be the same. How then, have we dealt with its effects twenty years later?
The following is my story.
After the attack in 2001 someone asked me, “How can you write humor after everything that’s happened?” Actually, I didn’t have one creative thought after the attacks. Fortunately for me (and my editor), I had tucked away six upcoming columns during an August streak of manic productivity. I was not alone; many of my writer friends were struggling with the same affliction. Some said it was writer’s block. I called it writer’s paralysis.
Mystery writer Ed McBain reported that he expected to throw away most of what he had been able to get down on paper since that dreadful day. His admission provided me with a better understanding of the national grief attacking us all at that time.
National grief is not something all Americans have experienced. I was a baby when Pearl Harbor was attacked, a young mother when JFK was assassinated and middle-aged at the time of the shuttle explosion. As saddened as Americans were at those times, nothing compares to the magnitude of national grief, the sackcloth and ashes worn by us because of September 11, 2001.
Maya Angelou said, “Now is the time for thinking Americans to think.” We did that. We ran the gamut of emotion, in fact, from shock and disbelief to vengeful hatred. Who among us was not touched by the incredible burden placed on a newly elected President? He told us to go into the world and live courageously. He said we should pick up the pieces and continue to go to our jobs, to school and to church. We should hold our heads up high, he said, and be thankful that there were not more victims when the Twin Towers were struck by evil.
As appalled and saddened as I was following the tragedy, I knew in my heart that it was unhealthy for me to wallow in grief, to remain out of touch with everything except sadness, but knowing something doesn’t make it happen. CNN’s constant coverage of America’s New War offered no comfort to me. It frightened me instead; it made me cry harder.
It took time, but eventually I came to realize that laughter was long overdue, that laughter, even in the midst of my mourning, was something gone missing in my life. I needed to put grins back on your faces as well as my own because I owed it to the innocent souls who died on September 11, 2001.
As the twentieth anniversary of our nation’s tragedy once more brings up so many emotions, I ask myself this question: Can laughter be the medicine to help heal our brokenhearted country? Is it possible? Maybe, or maybe not, but I think it is worth considering.
So this is what I propose. I will do my part but you’ll have to do yours. I will sit at my keyboard day after day and week after week writing good humor and sometimes not so good, but always with the sincere hope that you, my readers, will look on the bright side of things so that your smiles and your laughter will light up our world once more.
September 11, 2021
All day today, rain
Gray, sad
God
Is still crying.
