9/11: Janet Hendricks

04:30 PM Sep 11, 2006

By chance I ran upon the 2,996 Tribute Project, I signed up and was randomly assigned a name to memorialize from that epochal day.

So much of life, turning on chance -- the lost wallet of one's future spouse, wedged in the seat cushions of the corner booth. A late train, a long breakfast, a touch of the flu ... Janet Hendricks would never be known to me, would perhaps this moment be posting her own tribute to a friend five years gone from her offices at the Aon Corporation.

If the dead are denied their choice of biographers, we survivors are likewise denied the choice of victims, so often stubborn (when queried) against the meaning we impute by anticipation. Those trampled by deeds of statecraft and of villainy alike face the burden of victimhood: to somehow merit the insensible suffering left in their wake, to endure absorption by the cool archetype that effaces the etchings of passion, vice, foolishness that inscribe our humanity.

In a previous job, I had the privilege of working with murder victims' family members who had taken up the charge to struggle for more humane and restorative justice -- many of the bravest people one might ever meet. I think inevitably of Bud Welch, whose daughter was slain in the Oklahoma City bombing and who took up her energy for human rights to work against Timothy McVeigh's execution. Even Bud's noble reading was a survivor's reading: Julie's lips were silent.

Our deaths, finally, are not our own, but belong as all else to the ravenous living. Clicking through some of the many profiles already posted in tribute, one is struck not simply by the unsurprising paucity of information, but by the blind reach of the authorial arm, thrusting upon its shade the oration preached that day to its author -- invoking the dead no longer as an abstraction but audaciously in their individuality as agents whose loss gives warning or license or benediction.

Janet Hendricks did not deserve death.

And now, a name on a list, bounded to me by an algorithm of code, I grasp at her in my own blindness.

Janet faces me like a constellation -- the true self obscure; the few glimmers open to the clumsy, conflicting interpretation. One can offer her so little beyond humility. Even the basic obituaries available for most 9/11 victims fall silent over Janet, as if warning against the indecency of exposition.

Janet graduated from a tiny evangelical college in California in 1975, and to judge by the devotional phrases in her personal tributes online, remained deeply moved by her faith. She liked sewing. She left a grown daughter. She is missed for her good humor and friendliness ... but how is one to read this commonplace of remembrance? These spare points shroud the whole topography of her life.

I ask, gingerly, a few of those who knew her if they would help me. I am entitled to no reply, and receive none.

In the end, one must abide her privacy, her dignity. No eloquence equals the lamentations, fresh as that Tuesday morning, still periodically posted to her legacy page by a friend. And what is there -- in the bombs upon Afghanistan, the tributary shafts of light, the bound volumes and miniseries -- that can ever quench that loss?

Janet's story has been written in the hearts of those who loved her. That is enough to know.

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