What Has Changed For All of Us

by Barbara Kingsolver/ the Boston Globe

I travel in airplanes so often, I have enough frequent flyer miles to go to China. I never watch violent movies, so my uncalloused psyche was laid wide open two weeks ago to images of real airplanes slamming into real buildings. And I have an overgrown, acutely visual imagination. It's the combination of these three things, I suppose, that has nearly debilitated me in recent days with my own visions of what thousands of people went through - but did not live through - on Sept. 11.

In the days since then I've walked through the motions of a normal life, like everyone else who's lucky enough to do that, but my mind's eye has been watching this movie in my head. Seeing the blue stars that blur my vision in times of panic; breathing too fast, gripping the hand of a stranger beside me; thinking in frantic minutes about the years my girls will have to get through without me. Wishing I had, in spite of my grudge against them, bought a cell phone. Murder with knives, desperation, watching the end of the world from an aisle seat.

I'm not trying to be melodramatic, it's the truth: I wake up from dreams of this, and in those first confused seconds while I struggle to identify my impalpable burden I see it again, not as dream but reality. It plays in front of me while I'm stopped at traffic lights. When a death in our own family followed close on all those others, my husband decided to brave the airways immediately after they reopened. As he left for his father's funeral I wept again from my bottomless well of grief, feeling sure I would not see him again.

''It's probably safer to fly right now,'' he told me reasonably, ''than any time in the last 10 years.''

''I know that,'' I said, ''but I don't feel that.''

This is what has changed for us: not what we know, but how we feel. We have always lived in a world of constant sorrow and calamity, but most of us never had to say before: It could have been me. My daughter and me on that plane, my husband in the building. I have stepped on that very pavement, I have probably sat on one of those planes.

This was us, Americans at work, on vacation, going home, or just walking from one building to another. Alive, then dead. It's probably only human to admit that a stranger's death is more shattering when we can imagine it as our own. Worse disasters have happened - if ''worse'' is measured by numbers of dead - to practically every other country on earth. In my lifetime I've argued against genocide, joined campaigns for disaster aid, sent seeds to places of famine. I have mourned my fellow humans every way I've known how, but never before have their specific deaths so persistently entered my dreams. This time I am not just sad, I am in some way lost. I need to see the rest of the movie, to finish this out so the awful loop in my head might finally end. If it could have been me that Tuesday, then I need to imagine what that could have meant. First, of course, I'd want my husband and children to know I loved them. But they know this from the way I lived - for them, with them, cheering them on. With them even when I was apart from them; every survivor must seize this comfort. And I hope every member of my family will remember what fine people they were in my eyes and will carry that into the rest of their days. I want my daughters to be brave enough and gentle enough to remember me by embracing the world and engaging in its design. I don't need to know how they'll do this, only that they will earn the unquenchable happiness that comes from leaving your place more beautiful, somehow, for your having walked through it.

A murder is an unspeakable thing to have to pack away in a human heart. There is the temptation to bitterness, a particular pain that cries out to be healed with pain. There becomes a momentary sense of truth about this: that some other anguish will erase your own. I have felt that rage myself, but was lucky enough to live past it. There is no greater spiritual joy than to come through brutal trials and then look back and see that mean times didn't make you a mean spirit. If I hadn't had the chance. I would still want that joy for my children. Of all fates I can imagine for myself, there is no legacy I could want less than bitterness and hatred. I would rather be forgotten entirely than be held in any way responsible for the vengeful loss of a single life - let alone thousands, or any historic moment of jingoism and ethnic hatred. It leaves me feeling chilled and forsaken to imagine kissing my children goodbye some morning and, by nightfall, having all the beauty of my days reduced to a symbol claimed by opportunistic military men as an act of war. I would rather be remembered as a lesson learned, a sympathy made acute, a moment in which humanity rose humanely to an occasion. It is in no way a concession to murder or its perpetrators to learn nonviolence from our losses. Martin Luther King, four little girls from Selma, and hundreds of other murdered souls in our history have given us a pause in which to examine the national conscience and embrace a more generous vision of ourselves than we ever thought possible. That is our monument to them.

I've lived long enough to eat many youthful words, but a few things I have always known for sure, and this is one: If I had to give up my life for anything, it would be elementary kindness. It would be love.

Barbara Kingsolver is a novelist. Her most recent book is ''Prodigal Summer.''

(c) 2001 Globe Newspaper Company

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