9/11 makes my stomach hurt...

I've been watching/listening/reading things about September 11. Last night I was up until 7am watching Fox News because they were replaying what had been the live news reports in 2001, and I was watching it, trying to remember things. I was listening to a 9/11 version of the song "Heaven" by DJ Sammy (Sara was talking about it at work today), and I actually had 3 tears fall from my eyes. This little girl is talking to her dad, who died in the attacks a year earlier. She's telling him about how she started kindergarten, and learned how to swim, and she can open her eyes underwater; she asks him if he can see her. Then she says she can swing on her own, but she likes it better when he pushes her. And she says she tries not to cry even though her mom says its okay because she knows her dad doesn't like her to be sad. But that not crying makes her stomach hurt. And that she misses him tickling her belly, and that missing him made her stomach hurt, too. At the end she says she's going to bed, and that she sleeps with the light on in case he comes home to kiss her goodnight, and that's when the tears fell. How horrible for that child to have to grow up and not be able to understand that her dad isn't coming home. And that he might be one of the 1000+ people who's remains haven't even been identified yet, so there's not even any closure. That was something I hadn't thought about until tonight - over ONE THOUSAND bodies haven't been recovered. There are piles of human remains sitting in the NYC medical examiners office, waiting until advanced enough DNA identification tools come along and they can figure out who is who. At least as recently as March of this year, they found more bone fragments in vacant skyscrapers near Ground Zero while cleaning crews and construction workers were getting ready to tear it down or something. That blows my mind. I can't believe how quickly I brushed it off. I was looking at another website that had something of a timeline for the WTC and all the business, and I guess I remember it now but hadn't really thought about it - the site burned for 99 days. 99 days there were fires burning in the unimaginable heaps of debris from the falling towers. Which is another thing I can't get my head around - how big must that have been? And how far did debris, dust, etc. go in diameter around the city? I imagine there was at least dust that went tens of miles. I can't conceptualize it. I can't imagine having been anywhere near there. I've been sitting in this ridiculous world of my own for the last 5 years, and for some reason never thought about the fact that you couldn't just have been in the next building over and lived. People were literally running for their lives, away from those buildings. And I wonder, in the video clips they show of people running down the street as huge, stories-high clouds of debris come rushing between buildings towards them, did any of those people on the TV end up dying from that? Were they killed by a random hard object flying through the air that just happened to hit them? How many people were crushed by support beams as they collapsed onto the street? On one of the video clips they showed last night, of the live coverage in the morning of the attacks, you could see bodies jumping out the window of the building. It made my stomach sick when I realized what I was seeing. Those people literally knew they were going to die, and actually jumped out of a window 100 stories in the air because they would rather have died from impact, or pressure, or who knows what...then die in a fire, or when the building collapsed. I can not begin to imagine how that would feel, to have to think that, to have to make that decision. Nearly 3,000 people died that day, many of them within two hours. After the final death toll, one website said the youngest victim was 2 years old; the oldest 85. The average age of a child who lost a parent in the attacks was 9. "Tuesday's Children". They don't even have closure. There was no funeral with a body. Maybe they were one of the lucky -2,000 families who had some sort of remains they were able to lay to rest, but otherwise they will never be able to tell themselves that their parent is actually gone. They must always have a nagging in the back of their mind that they might come back. One girl on a video clip was saying she can't really remember what her dad looked like. Another girl says she remembers his voice because her mom left it on his voicemail, and sometimes she listens to it and it says "I'll get back to you" and she gets sad because she knows he won't really be getting back to her. One boy was saying that it's only been in the last couple of years that he's not angry at everyone he sees. It makes my stomach hurt.

Where is a benevolent God in this?