Liberty Bell

Although it has been months since London’s July 7th bombings, and years since 9/11, people are still struggling from the effects of these terrorist attacks. British Reverend Julie Nicholson and Alexander Briley, an American Baptist minister, are still struggling.

Both have children who died during the terrorist attacks. Both are ministers and as such have had to tell others to forgive, to move on. And they struggle, as others, to practice what they preach.

Reverand Julie Nicholson, the priest-in-charge at St Aidan Church in Bristol, has decided to resign her position. Since her daughter Jenny was killed in London’s July 7 bombings she can no longer stand behind an altar preaching forgiveness when she herself cannot forgive.

While Alexander Briley has continued preaching, as the five-year anniversary of the 9/11 tragedy is approaching, he has still not come to terms with the manner of his son’s dying. “I can’t talk about it,” he says. “My life’s work is telling people that they have to go on after tragedy, but I can’t do it for myself.”

Alexander Briley is the father of the late Jonathan Briley, a 43-year-old who worked in a restaurant at the top of the north tower. Jonathan had just been another victim for these years, until recently when he was indentified as “The Falling Man.”

This news has not, and cannot, be confirmed. We are left knowing what we have known all along.

Yes, Jonathan Briley might be the Falling Man. But the only certainty we have is the certainty we had at the start: At fifteen seconds after 9:41 a.m., on September 11, 2001, a photographer named Richard Drew took a picture of a man falling through the sky—falling through time as well as through space. The picture went all around the world, and then disappeared, as if we willed it away. One of the most famous photographs in human history became an unmarked grave, and the man buried inside its frame—the Falling Man—became the Unknown Soldier in a war whose end we have not yet seen. Richard Drew’s photograph is all we know of him, and yet all we know of him becomes a measure of what we know of ourselves. The picture is his cenotaph, and like the monuments dedicated to the memory of unknown soldiers everywhere, it asks that we look at it, and make one simple acknowledgment.

That we have known who the Falling Man is all along.

But as Jonathan’s sister, Gwendolyn, says: “It’s not about trying to find out who he is, but what his death says to all of us.” And what it says is … never again.

The Falling Man - one of the pictures