Eighty-eight years apart, two sounds. One in a Pennsylvania field, one on a New York City subway car.
At the 50th anniversary of Gettysburg, in July of 1913, 50,000 surviving veterans gathered to-reenact Pickett's Charge. The old Confederate soldiers came out of the tree line one more time, walking toward the stone wall where the Union men were waiting. What happened next was not cheering. David McCullough, narrating Ken Burns's The Civil War, described it as "a gigantic gasp of unbelief." And then the two sides embraced.
A piece in the Journal, published last weekend before this 25th anniversary of 9/11, described something similar happening on a Manhattan subway on the morning of September 11, 2001. A car full of strangers turned together to look out the window at the place where the towers had stood. A debris cloud where two buildings used to be. The whole car let out a collective groan, a low sound pulled from somewhere involuntary. A union worker standing nearby watched for a moment, then sat down and cried.
Both sounds are the same sound, really. The sound of a group of people realizing at the same instant that something is not behind them. It is still here. Still raw. The wound did not close the way they thought it had.
A piece of writing worth holding onto puts it plainly: never lie about the things that break your heart. The line in the tree trunk, the darkened ring, never goes away.
That is true. And it is worth sitting with that truth before getting to Dominic Carella, because what he did on September 11th only makes sense inside that truth.
Carella was working at Frank E. Campbell funeral chapel in Manhattan when the towers fell. Around 4:30 in the afternoon, while the city was still locked down, while nothing was moving and nothing was certain, he started getting calls. Back to back. The assignment was to retrieve Father Mychal Judge, the FDNY chaplain, from the medical examiner's office. Father Judge had been the first certified fatality of the day, killed by falling debris while giving last rites inside the North Tower. His image, being carried out by five men through the rubble, became one of the defining photographs of that morning.
Carella now serves as general manager of Mangano Family Funeral Homes on Long Island. He described the timeline to American Funeral Director: the calls came around 4:30, the city was sealed, and there was no death certificate signed. A body cannot legally be released without one. Nobody had written a protocol for September 11th, because nobody had imagined September 11th. The legal and logistical infrastructure that normally makes this work possible had no answer for what was being asked of it.
So Carella stayed with the problem. He joined a late night meeting that included Mayor Giuliani and Governor Pataki, working through the legal impasse until there was a path forward. He got Father Judge released, and he got him to the people who needed to receive him.
The city was in shock. The legal system had no ready answer. Carella had a job to do, and he did it.
That is what this profession actually is, on its clearest days. When every other infrastructure fails or freezes, there is still a person in this line of work who has to pick up the phone, solve the problem that nobody planned for, and carry a human being home. The families waiting for Father Judge were not waiting for paperwork to resolve itself. They were waiting for someone to move toward the problem rather than away from it. Carella was that person on that day.
The gasp at Gettysburg and the groan on the subway are the sounds of people confronting the permanence of a wound they hoped had healed. The work of a funeral director is the answer to that sound. Someone has to be the one who acts when everything else has gone still. Someone has to understand that the body belongs to the people who loved him, and that getting him there is worth a late night meeting at the highest levels of city and state government if that is what it takes.
Twenty-five years later, Carella still remembers. That is the right way to carry it: present, specific, honest and clear about why it mattered. The darkened ring in the tree. It does not go away. That is not a failure of time. That is what it means to have been part of something real.