31/2 Years On, Nothing to Bury

It came quietly the other day, news few anticipated amid the distracting flotsam of so many other transitory items drifting by. Yet unlike election runoffs and unfolding celebrity trials, this news haunts like no other: New York City’s medical examiner has abandoned for now efforts to identify remains of those who died at the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001.

After all this time, 1,161 people are still missing. Over 42 months, it seems, most of us have buried 9/11 memories to mute the pain of that day. It’s understandable. And convenient. But it’s a tad too easy to compartmentalize in personal archives the once overpowering, now dimming details of that awful attack. Archiving is, after all, how the human mind heals. But it’s also how we forget. Forgetting is impossible for families left with nothing -- or nothing but pieces to ritually bury, providing some kind of closure.

After painstaking, sympathetic and determined efforts over 3 1/2 years, examiners identified 1,588 victims. They used fingerprints, dental records, tattoos and DNA tests on 10,196 body parts as large as an arm and as small as a fingertip. One family received 200 fragments, others one, many none.

Of the 19,916 body parts recovered from 2 million tons of Trade Center debris, a third of them small enough to fit into a test tube, 9,720 pieces remain unidentifiable with current technology. They’re being freeze-dried and vacuum-sealed for revered storage at the ground zero site, awaiting possible future advances or a collective resignation to the emptiness of death by disappearance.

Which leaves the living to cope as best they can with a tornado of lingering emotions.

Time covers some edges, but not scars. Some families will hold formal burials. Some already have, even with caskets carrying only clothing and mementoes. Others suspected they’d have nothing to inter, honor or visit; one man erected a bench where he met his wife. Many prefer living with whole memories, having held horrible hope they’d get remains and be forever forced to ponder the last moments of their missing ones’ lives.

Jill McGovern bought a headstone for her husband in a New Jersey cemetery, not for her own sake but for her puzzled little daughters who wondered where Daddy had gone. The cold stone makes his invisible end real, but marks nothing but a place to go and remember, something we could all use. “You try to find solace where you can,” says McGovern.

Even this far away in time and miles, so do we all. So do we all.