How I learned to love the 9/11 Memorial after years of being a skeptic

“That’s the most depressing thing I’ve ever seen,” I said.It was January 2004, two years and four months after 9/11, and the wounds to our city and New Yorkers’ psyches still felt raw.A panel of judges had just revealed the results of an international design competition for the National September 11 Memorial, to be built at what we all kept calling Ground Zero.Their choice: “Reflecting Absence” by unknown architect Michael Arad, a minimalist pair of vast black stone squares that would weep streams of tears into solemn pools, carrying our city’s sorrows into a pit of gloom at the center.I hated it — and I wasn’t alone.“We failed every one of them,” said Lee Ielpi, whose firefighter son Jonathan had died in the rescue effort.“Funereal” and “grim,” declared The Post’s Steve Cuozzo, a blight that made “victimization … a defining theme of American life.” I didn’t know Steve then — I was a stay-at-home Staten Island mom with another baby on the way — but I thought he was spot on.And while I “wasn’t directly affected” (as we’d say in those early months, our shorthand phrase for “No, I didn’t lose a spouse or sibling or friend or colleague that day, did you?”), 9/11 had shaken me hard.

By that time we’d learned the stories of so many heroes: Rick Rescorla, the Morgan Stanley security chief who ushered 2,687 colleagues to safety but perished himself; Betty Ong, the coolheaded flight attendant who identified the terrorists for the FBI in the earliest moments of the crisis; Orio Palmer, the FDNY battalion chief who climbed to the South Tower’s impact zone, 78 floors up; the passengers of United Flight 93, who turned the tables on their hijackers and prevented untold carnage.American troops, including a dear friend of mine, were at that moment fighting courageously for us in Afghanistan and Iraq.But a pair of dank holes in a barren plaza was the best we could do? It was an outrage.

So I refused to go see the memo...