Finding words

The isolation of accidental death, those panicked last moments, has been breached, finally, by technology

Special report: Terrorism in the US
One haunting story among the many which have emerged from America over these past days is the story of last words; disembodied words spoken from doomed planes or from beneath the ruin of the World Trade Centre. The isolation of accidental death, those panicked moments which have always represented the extreme of human loneliness, has been breached, finally, by technology. Mobile phones were designed to be useful but the use we have found for them is more narrative than practical. We are telling the story of ourselves, not after the event but while our lives are happening. It isn't surprising that this story should include death, but the way it makes involuntary witnesses of those who hear it, those who might by instinct cover their ears, is shocking nonetheless. Our worst fears are far more often dramatised or imagined than realised: these eerie conversations from America are a difficult combination of both.

The difference between something happening to someone else and it happening to you is blurred by them, and while this is the justification for and indeed the definition of good reportage and war photography, being present and yet powerless in the naked terror of another person begins to seem uncomfortably voyeuristic. But as the mystery of death is unpicked from this inalienably modern angle, it contains less to fear than you might expect. By and large, it seems that the passengers of the hijacked planes did not use their last call to alleviate their own terror. One flight attendant called the airline to tell them what had happened and give them the seat number of the hijacker. Another man rang his wife to tell her to contact the authorities, and then, in a tragicomic reflection on marriage, rang a second time to make sure that she'd done it. She told him to sit down and stop drawing attention to himself. He told her that he wasn't going to sit down, he was going to try to save the plane.

A man on the flight that eventually crashed in Pennsylvania told his wife that he knew he was going to die but wanted to stop the plane crashing into a building. He joked about taking on the hijackers with the butter knives from the in-flight breakfast. The wife of the US solicitor-general locked herself in the toilet and rang her husband to ask him, as if it were her responsibility, what she ought to do. Most numerous, though, were the calls avowing love, and while Americans are generally unusual, at least compared to us, in their ability to say that they love each other, these valedictory words of affection have value for people to whom they were not spoken. They suggest that ultimately we want to express ourselves as loving beings; that in the words of Philip Larkin, "what will survive of us is love".

Down in the rubble of the World Trade Centre, ghostly voices, as one rescue worker put it, were drifting up into the world above. People trapped in air pockets in the wreckage were calling the rescue services. About these desperate conversations little is known. These are the last words we don't want to hear, or think we don't: the words of people who are almost certainly doomed, but who retain some hope that they will continue to live. This is death being faced in real time, being lived. It would perhaps be better not to know that there were people alive in there, and yet we do know: along with our heroism and our humour, our ability to love and to accept, these communications from limbo delineate too our impotence and our capacity to suffer.

It seems odd that this space between life and death about which we have always known so little has been wired up, switched on, electronically illuminated.

I remember reading about a mountaineer who had got into trouble while climbing and realised that there was no hope of his being rescued, that he was going to die. He called his wife on his mobile, from halfway up Everest, and spoke to her until his battery went flat. I wouldn't have wanted to be him, but I wasn't sure I would have wanted to be her either. She was with him and not with him; she could hear him suffer but couldn't help him or even comfort him, except with words.

That's a big "except". The love that survives us is inextricably bound up with words. These conversations, with the curious formality, the meditated core that comes from physical separateness, present a challenge to our ability to be sophisticated. Where these people together would have clung bodily to each other, instead they speak. I admire them.

I'm not sure I could have found the words. But perhaps we just haven't known how to talk to each other. Perhaps we're learning.

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