Within this review of What is Life Worth?: The Unprecedented Effort to Compensate the Victims of 9/11 is this little tidbit:

More significantly, he agreed to meet individually with anyone applying for compensation. As he recounts in the book, these meetings–he personally attended 900; VCF staffers attended another 600–allowed survivors to testify to their loss. That testimony became an unexpected memorial: Feinberg had all the meetings transcribed, and encouraged the participants to pass the transcripts on to their descendants.

One day, once we’re collectively far enough away from September 11th, 2001, someone will put together a book on the human toll September 11th took on the people most directly affected, the friends and family of those that died on that Tuesday. These transcripts will be a part of that book and these stories will hopefully become part of our collective experience of this event.

I often wonder what 9/11 was like to the people in, say, Des Moines or Helena or Lincoln. When you live in a place that is so far away from where you are, but when you’re a part of the event (the attack was on us all, not just New York or Boston or D.C. or PA), how does that work? My point is that it affects us all differently, I think. Maybe it’s just me, but I know what the national grief was like. I know what the national mood was like, but I know little of the grief of those that had family die. We’ve rightly given them their space, but at some point I think it would be instructive to know the story. Like Holocaust survivors or Pearl Harbor survivors or veterans of WWII, these people have a unique perspective on the events of that day. Hopefully we’ll learn from their experience someday too.