On Its Face

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I can say with complete confidence that a Scientific American article has never made me cry. Until today.

On its face, the topic of this article might be a curious piece of trivia but nothing more. Apparently, when you look at the 9/11 Memorial there's no obvious order to the 2,983 names etched in bronze surrounding two pools, one north and one south. They're not alphabetical. So how are they arranged?

This story explains that the names are arranged in a way that represents the relational networks among the people whose deaths are memorialized there. It wasn't easy, as the article explains. But I'm so glad it's true.

To me, there's something hauntingly, inexplicably beautiful about the intentionality in this. And about how the interconnectedness among so many people is captured in time and space on the face of the memorial -- from the Vigiano brothers, John and Joseph, whose names connect fire and police squads responding at the South Tower to Victor Wald and Harry Ramos who met for the first time in the North Tower stairwell where they died together  on September 11, 2001.

I don't know when or if I'll get to see the memorial in person. But knowing about this relational network changes the way I think about all those names. What on the face looks random and chaotic has an underlying meaning, defined by the interconnections between people, the way their lives and their souls intertwined. And knowing that could change the way I view a lot of what looks random, on its face, in this world.