DAN CARPENTER THE INDIANAPOLIS STAR, 28 Sept. 2001

When loss seems total, life clings to words

September 28, 2001

He was about to leave for work from his home on Long Island, 20 miles or so from the World Trade Center, when he heard the news.

From his daughter. Calling from Indianapolis.

Norbert Krapf, professor, poet, devotee of the sweet life of intellect and family, turned on his television set and watched, over and over, an airliner penetrating a skyscraper just around his corner of the world.

For thousands of people, including scores of Krapf's own neighbors who had employment or business in the towers, life ended. In a sense, life stopped also for him, and the rest of us who survive.

That morning, said the Indiana-born author, "we were in a process of beginning to accept a reality much more horrible than we were prepared to accept. I saw it in the faces on the road."

Norbert Krapf went to work at the C.W. Post campus of Long Island University, then drove home after classes were cancelled at mid-day. He took a roundabout route back because the main thoroughfare was restricted to evacuation of the injured. His wife, Katherine, an eighth grade teacher, and their son Daniel, a high schooler, were safe. But their little community was not.

In the coming days, the Krapfs attended a memorial service at the firehouse down the street for a local fireman and policeman who died in the rescue effort. Then they went to the funeral of a family friend lost in the rubble. He was 29 and engaged to be married.

"It is very difficult. People are having to work through this. I don't think there are going to be any miracles."

But there will be prayer, and poetry. I mentioned to Krapf a book by the religious thinker Walter Brueggemann about the need for a bold, imaginative spiritual language to take over after political wordplay, techspeak and sermons have failed. The book takes its title, Finally Comes the Poet, from a line by Walt Whitman, Krapf's favorite poet and the uncrowned laureate of the American spirit.

Krapf, in turn, recalled his most cherished Whitman line, from Song of Myself:

"(W)hoever walks a furlong without sympathy walks to his funeral/ drest in his shroud."

Whitman, of course, put his body where his voice was, volunteering as a nurse, amanuensis and untiring friend to Civil War wounded. To many young men, his presence was their miracle.

And who's to say what is a miracle?

Elizabeth Krapf, calling from Butler University, where she is a senior majoring in music, was frantic that morning of Sept. 11. She knew that a good friend, a pre-med student at Columbia University, was due at the World Trade Center for a meeting at 9 a.m.

It turned out the friend was late leaving home and never got to the scene of destruction. But she went later that day to a hospital and volunteered with the stream of injured. She toiled 16 hours and returned later the next day.

"She has seen things," Norbert Krapf said, "that she can't even talk about."

The Jasper native, a graduate of St. Joseph's College and the University of Notre Dame, author of Somewhere in Southern Indiana and other books, asked me how the horror was affecting people back here. I told him we seemed neck deep in shallowness -- flags at ballgames, newspaper columnists prattling about shopping and baking bread as a rebuff to those nasty terrorists. Harking to the image of a young middle-class college student ministering to the wounded in a war zone, I saw my region as a dimension yet more unreal than Krapf's New York -- and infinitely removed from parts of the world already ravaged by war and fated for retribution.

Krapf had no answers. He had a poem, still unfinished, that he wrote on the occasion of a funeral, from which I'll rob fragments.

"To hug a mother/who has lost a son," it says, "is to feel how fragile/ is the lifeline that/ holds us all together."

It is "to hear a sob right/ in your ear that comes/ from a country worlds/ beyond where you stand."

It is "to feel her summon/ a strength from beyond" -- and to "find the sense of purpose/ to walk back to our life."

Carpenter is Star op-ed columnist. Contact him at 1-317-444-6172 or via e-mail at dan.carpenter@indystar.com