Suppose your father was working high in the World Trade Centeron Sept. 11, 2001. You have been told by authorities in New YorkCity what intuition told you as you watched the two towerscollapse: Your father is dead.
Yet that conclusion is a municipal bureaucracy's intuition, nomore certifiable than your own. Your father's remains have not beenfound.
So your grief is compounded by a question as illogical as it isimpossible for you to shake: What if, somehow, he escaped? What if,in some perhaps tragicomic way that screenwriters might neverimagine, he managed to get out alive?
This sort of bizarre ending doesn't often happen in real life,of course.
Not so, though, for many survivors of the 2,792 people killed atthe World Trade Center. Working with body parts retrieved frommountains of rubble, the office of New York City's medical examinerhas confirmed the identities of 1,518 of those World Trade Centervictims. But scientific tests have failed to link any of the bodyparts to the more than 1,200 other victims.
Efforts to match them to known DNA samples provided by thefamilies of victims -- strands of hair lifted from combs left athome, for example -- have failed, often because the retrieved bodyfragments were so badly incinerated, crushed or deteriorated thattheir DNA was unknowable.
Unknowable, that is, using today's DNA technologies.
Under a protocol developed by city officials working withrepresentatives of victims' families, the remains will be interredin a memorial at the site of the twin towers. If the science oftissue identification advances, those remains can be removed andexamined anew.
The quest to identify remains addresses the need that manyfamilies feel for some sort of denouement, or closure. Somesurvivors want unambiguous proof of death. Others, forced to holdmemorial services without subsequent burials, want any remains theycan inter. "When you have no remains, it's important to havesomeplace you can go," says Nikki Stern of Families of September11, an advocacy group that represents the interests of survivorsfrom 46 states and several nations.
Part of what's driving the families, Stern says, is a yearningshe sums up as, "How do you control the uncontrollable?" These arenot, after all, the families of soldiers or astronauts whoappreciate the risks of their jobs. These are ordinary families,stripped of their loved ones and forced to revisit their losses atoccasional intervals.
Finding a means for preserving an inventory of the lost is ofcrucial interest only to the families of those who died on Sept.11. But given all that the survivors have endured, it's a smallachievement the rest of us can applaud.
