A central motif that is prevalent throughout the entirety of this article is death, and how it represents more than just the unfortunate act of dying. The jolt of emotions experienced when facing death, according to this article, must have been pervasive across time and culture, as proven by the author’s comparison between the destroyed school in Haiti and the tragedy of 9/11, and how the author uses bones to provide insight into their speculation into the stories of those who have just been reduced to bones, even using the analogy of the bones of the humans from millions of years ago, and how those bones must have told a story as well.
This idea is then extended by the author through her underlying implications that legacy is forged by death rather than by life. The author’s father is a perfect example of this, as one of the significant details that she mentioned about her father was that he died of the same cause that a majority of the first responders in 9/11 died of. In this connection, the deaths of these characters are what linked them together and caused them to be associated with each other, possibly proving the author’s point that death will be remembered more than life. Additionally, the author’s account of the ‘jumpers’ in 9/11 act as a link between the idea of legacy and the motif of bones. In the same way that the bones represent the person and their legacy, the graphic images and videos of the ‘jumpers’ on the news act as the legacies of those who unfortunately faced death.
It was particularly intriguing how the story is told in the first person, as the author’s direct account of the events that occurred in her life, along with the structure following a chronological order of events. It almost acts a biography, rather than a story, which impacts the audience into perceiving as more of a personal account of thoughts and events rather than a story which follows a narrative and has a set plot. It feels more raw, which connects to the audience in a different way.
A final idea that acts as an overarching theme is the idea of how death and tragedy bring people together. This idea was most explicitly communicated in the author’s account of the bus ride following 9/11. The fact that all the people on the bus’ eyes were “teary and red” reveals how the pain of death is universally pervasive and impacts all in different ways.