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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Dorothy Dearaujo’s twin passions were her painting and her garden, the red and yellow roses and mounds of colorful impatiens edging the front of her cottage in Long Beach’s island neighborhood of Naples.

Dearaujo, who was 69 when she earned a bachelor’s degree in art at Cal State Long Beach, was a passenger on United Airlines Flight 175, which crashed into the south tower of the World Trade Center.

Clad in beige polyester pants and a T-shirt, the 80-year-old redhead would prune and weed her little garden, then render it on paper in vivid watercolors. Her eye was inspired by straightforward subjects: flowers, canals, pleasure boats, a corner market, local schools, the Queen Mary. Dearaujo, who lived alone in Naples for two decades, often painted them for friends.

Next-door neighbors Earl and Karen Anderson have several of her works mounted on their walls. One more for the Andersons was in progress--a detailed portrait of their sky-blue two-story seaside home. There were only a few bare patches where Dearaujo needed to daub in the flowers of their garden. She promised the Andersons she’d complete her work when she returned from a three-week visit with her son in Bedford, Mass.

In the spring, she planned to attend her grandson Jonathan’s graduation from Providence College in Providence, R.I. After that, she expected to vacation in Holland to paint flowers.