Last week on a business trip to New York, I visited the 9/11 Memorial.
It’s truly a magnificent tribute to the nearly 3,000 people we lost as well as a memorial to one of the saddest, most horrifying events of our modern history.
If you’ve not been, there are two enormous pools that sit exactly where the Twin Towers stood. Water pours down every side of them into a basin, then falls again into a square opening in the center that appears to be bottomless.
The void that never fills.
Many of us have that kind of void in our lives. Someone you loved more than breath itself, gone. Or perhaps it’s the loss of something so significant in your life that you feel you cannot find the strength to move on. It’s not a competition, and it’s deeply personal.
Grief is grief.
But there’s one part of the memorial I almost walked right past.
A few steps from those massive pools, there’s a tree. A Callery pear. What caught my eye was that the fence surrounding it was covered with brightly colored tags. As I got closer, I could see those tags had handwritten messages of prayer, encouragement and love all over them. Then I read the sign…
It’s called the Survivor Tree.
The story of the tree is that weeks after the attacks, workers found it in the rubble, burned, broken and down to one living branch with a few leaves still clinging to it. By any reasonable measure, it was done. Nobody would have thought twice if they’d hauled it off with the rest of the debris.
But for some reason, they didn’t. The city took it to a nursery in the Bronx and nursed it back to life. It was, in fact, the last living thing pulled from the rubble of the World Trade Center. In 2010, it came home to the plaza where it stands today as a symbol of resilience and overcoming.
You can still see where it broke. The old trunk is gnarled and scarred, and the new branches are smooth. Every spring, it blooms first, and blooms white.
I thought a lot about that tree on my trip home. We talk about grief and grit like they take turns. First you fall apart, then you pull yourself together and move on with your life. That’s not how it works. They stand on the same ground, at the same time. The water in the memorial doesn’t stop falling because the tree blooms. The tree doesn’t stop blooming because the water is still falling.
Everyone who survives a tragedy is living in both at once.
If you’re carrying something right now, you’re not weak because you still feel it and aren’t “over it.” You might never be. But like the tree, salvage what you can from the rubble, nursing back whatever small part of you is still alive…and make it bloom.
There’s a line often credited to Bob Marley: you never know how strong you are until being strong is your only option. We’ll all learn that lesson at some point in our life.
NEVER forget.