The Husband and I were looking at prints (or as he would call them, paintings–he calls all wall-hung artwork paintings; I love that guy) online the other day, trying to find a photograph of the New York City skyline for our family room. He asked me to choose between two, both of lower Manhattan: one with the World Trade towers present, and one with the double-light memorial instead. “The lights,” I told him, and he agreed. “That’s our New York.”

I never visited the city before 9/11/01, but I was there six months after to stare at the gaping holes that hatred had left in the ground. I will never know the searing grief felt by family members of the lost, but I have shed my own tears over the destruction. We are, none of us, an island.

When I saw the photographs taken in my home state yesterday–in particular a man holding his injured toddler son in his arms and sobbing–I felt the (in this world, all too familiar) shadow of sadness, of Why?, upon my heart. And there are too few answers for our taste at a time like this, when people are literally picking up the pieces of their lives. And these are the lucky ones. But then I looked at the background of the shots: of rescue workers, neighbors pitching in. Of the same toddler being carried by a different man, likely the father’s friend or relative, because, again: none of us is an island. And sometimes community is brought about in the most tragic of ways, but its beauty cannot be denied. Whenever love and goodwill are exposed, whenever they rise to the surface and push hate out, there is cause for thanksgiving.

My New York skyline was absent two towers, and for those who had been there during and before that great tragedy, they must have looked like gaping holes. But once every year, those holes are filled with light. I don’t know the answer to Why?, and I may not even understand the answer if it were given. Yet. But what I do know–and this I can say from experience–is that there is never rubble without redemption.