Grief and elation and the start of true closure for America.

[Lyric]

I've read a lot tonight, and what I've read proves one thing to me more than anything: liberal or conservative, most of us have been harboring an enormous amount of grief over 9/11 that we had never been able to deal with because we never got real closure. Tonight was the most significant step toward that long-denied closure that I have personally experienced. The grief is there all over again, but it's a cleaner, less poisonous kind of mourning now. An old, half-healed wound was re-opened and made clean. It's not healed yet, but now, at last, the real healing can truly start. Maybe it'll take years, or maybe it will never really heal for those of us who witnessed it and lived through the years of anger and grief and resentment, and all the terrible social and political reverberations of our thwarted mourning, but our kids won't have this inherited, unresolved national wound hanging over their heads anymore.

Some say that we shouldn't be celebrating death, but I don't think that it's really "death" that's being celebrated tonight. This is the shaky, tearful, relieved kind of elation that you feel when you've been victimized and the person who hurt you is brought to justice. It's not about joy or happiness; it's about resolution. It's about relief. It's about closure.

We are, in the end, only human.

Much love to my fellow Americans.

[nadinbrzezinski]

1. You know having a husband

at sea that day... (he ended up in the front lines within 24 hours)... my closure really came not today, but the day he retired from the Navy.

[dhill926]

2. very well said.............n/t

[blondeatlast]

3. I think you've nailed the underlying, shared emotion very well.

Once again, we all share a special spirit and tonight we feel free again even if we didn't know we felt bound.

:hugs:

[Lyric]

4. *hugs back*

We're trying to explain the significance of this to our son. He was just a baby on 9/11, but it's become such a part of our national consciousness that even *he* knows who OSL was. He's home sick from school today, so we're keeping him from seeing any of the actual news.