My first day at Amherst College in 1987, with Aaron and my parents

For the past three years I’ve been writing my way towards a more public stance in sharing my loss of my brother, Aaron Jacobs, in the World Trade Center on 9/11. This started with a piece in The Awl in May 2011, about how my status as a 9/11 family member connected to reactions when Osama bin Laden was killed. I’ve posted other memorials at this anniversary each year, talking about how changes in my own life made me reflect on Aaron’s life in new ways. I have many blessings in my life, in particular Amy and our kids, but amidst this plenty I do still feel shocked and haunted every day by Aaron’s loss. The hole in our lives where he should be is in no way healed over, but moves and changes shape as we keep on living.

This past year I had the chance to connect with someone who also lost a family member on 9/11. I was introduced last fall by a friend who teaches at Hampshire College to her student, Colby, whose senior project was on narratives of 9/11 family members as they negotiated their private journeys of mourning in the context of intense public and media coverage. Colby was nine years old when she lost her mother in the World Trade Center, and until she met me had never spoken about that day or the aftermath with another 9/11 family member. We did a long interview at my house in November, talking about Aaron and my experiences since then, addressing questions like how I felt about the Iraq War, how did I feel about media coverage etc. It brought up the fact that I had not really been “out” as a 9/11 family member and I’ve wondered since then about whether the lens of being closeted or open with regard to gender could be a useful way to look at myself.

The first slide of Colby’s Prezi presentation: “Navigating Loss in the Public Eye: Narratives of 9/11 Family Members”

I was grateful to have the chance to support this younger person dealing with a similar loss but at a different place in her journey. Then in April, I had the chance to go out to Hampshire to hear Colby’s final project session, which I thought was great in the sense that it hit the marks of an undergrad thesis, but whose subject matter was so powerful and ineffable that it could not be channeled into such a defined presentation. What really brought home that disjunction of medium and subject matter for me was the fact that Colby used a presentation software called Prezi. Prezi is different from Powerpoint in that it conveys meaning not just in words or pictures on slides, but in how the presentation moves from one slide to the next. You start at a homescreen and then zoom in (or out), twist from one slide — as it were, to change an angle of discussion — and in other ways illustrate progress and motion through the various points you want to make. Personally I prefer the static, oppressive vibe of sitting through Powerpoints to all this juking and bopping, but that’s just me. Get offa my lawn kids!

Something about framing the mourning journey in a Prezi provoked me to try and write a poem, and I have brooded on it all summer with today’s obvious deadline. What I realized in writing it was that it marks some ambiguous transition for me, as I continue to try and deal with my own loss in a private way but also feel capable of connecting with (or even helping) others in related situations. I tried to capture what is sort of awful about using Prezi for this purpose–the smooth new-corporate glossiness for a topic that is so raw–but also how the structure Prezi provides is not unlike other structures we adopt to keep ourselves moving through grief. I know that most of you oldsters reading this have never seen Prezi in action, so between that and my own vaguenesses there is some obscurity going on here. I wish I had more time and urgent motivation to write throughout the year, but am grateful at least to be able to write from this most powerful and deep-seated motivation every so often.

As an experiment, I’ve added this recording of me reading the poem. Props to my man jh0st for suggesting this.

Remembering Aaron, and so many others, today and every day.

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A Prezi for the departed

 

The mourning template has a pleasant face—

It melds inviting blurs of voicemail clips,

Stray photographs, the downloads from the dead. 

 

The face becomes our starting point. We click

This eye to follow one loss down, from who

(We hear the wedding speech), to what (the plane,

 

The cancers), to the living. Quarter-turn: 

We trace the mourner’s path from boom to now: 

Our view pans over impact statements, blinks

 

A flashback like a strobe across the page—

And then we bounce, yanked forward to the next

Departed, all the g-force metered out

 

To give that first-day kick, the next years’ drag,

And drift us to “conclusion” at the end. 

Oh Prezi, logo-shirted Virgil, steer

 

Along these rails and never stray: for if

These dead are not yet ours to mourn, this dance

You lead, so briskly guiding hands and knees

 

In painted steps along this path, is one

We all start from the floor. Your glib bright hand

Is what we have to grab to follow on.

 

September 2014

© Joshua Jacobs