The Things We Leave Behind

The epic dimensions of Tuesday’s tragedy have summoned a language of superlatives. The worst terrorist attack in U.S. history. New York’s tallest buildings, laid flat. The biggest blow to America’s sense of security since Pearl Harbor.

Historians eventually will try to make sense of the tides sweeping through America. For the moment, however, the random mementos that the victims left behind give an eloquent voice to some of the nation’s private yearnings. An unmade bed, a prized set of golf clubs or a small glass souvenir from a long-ago family outing.

Every one of the some 5,300 missing or dead in the attacks left traces of a life, each as carefully unique as a snowflake. Collectively, these simple things form a mosaic of human experience, a national scrapbook dedicated to a great national theme: the singularity of every individual.

While investigators in New York continue foraging for forensic evidence, it will be left to the families of the missing people to begin sifting through their loved ones’ personal artifacts. Inevitably, in the weeks and months ahead, there will be questions about what to keep and what to let go.

Last week, Americans joined in an elegiac national symphony of somber pride and grief. The stories below are of a different scale, evidence of the loss and longing, and in a few cases--against all odds--of hope.

Reed Johnson

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The twin mattress is at an angle, the beige gingham sheet and matching comforter twisted and pulled to one side. A pink-and-white stuffed bunny rabbit hides its face in the folds. Piled one on top of another, two small square pillows made from jade-colored Chinese print satin are well worn from so many nights of cradling a soft cheek.

“She was supposed to make her bed before she left for work but, well, you know,” says Sonny Goldstein, whose daughter Monica, 23, has been missing since Tuesday morning.

Everything is just as the petite brunet left it in the basement apartment of her parents’ Staten Island house. She took off in plenty of time to make it to work by 9 a.m. in the payroll department of Cantor Fitzgerald, on the 100th floor of the World Trade Center. Around 8:30 a.m., she called a friend on her cell phone to say she was approaching the bus stop at Cortlandt and Church streets, two bus stops away from the World Trade Center. That was the last anyone heard from Monica.

At the foot of her bed lay a pile of freshly folded clothes--a pair of jeans, an Abercrombie & Fitch plaid shirt. “Her mother brought down clean laundry,” Sonny says. “She was supposed to put it away when she got home.”

On the floor, near an overstuffed closet just a few feet away from the bed, a pair of flip-flops looks just stepped out of. Her dad says, “They are just waiting for her to come home.”