If you could chose how you were to die would you? If you knew, definitively that you would be meeting your maker within, seconds or minutes or even hours, and you had a choice of flying into the hands of God instead of burning to death, or being crushed or suffocated, would you?
Today we remember 911. I remember the images, the plane hitting the tower, played over and over. I remember thinking that’s weird, why would they be flying so close? Then the second plane hit and my heart sank and I burst into tears with the realization of what was happening. The images of the towers burning, the firemen and police everywhere, and then of images of people jumping from the horror that awaited them, flying into the arms of God, those images horrified me because I knew they were trying to create a fate less terrifying than the fate that awaited them. I can’t imagine what they were hearing, seeing, feeling when the decision was made. And then of the towers collapsing, of people running, dust everywhere.
I never judged these people who made this choice, I thought to myself I would probably do the same. But I think those images affected me the most, and caused me to reflect.
Today I read an article about the falling man. I had no idea there was so much controversy over these images, I know that the media stopped showing the towers falling every few minutes and the people falling from the towers, after a day or two because they were so disturbing. There was a mission to put a name to the face of the falling man. Maybe they did.