Paul Vallely: There is something inadequate about all this public grief

Lucy Thompson spent yesterday by a beach. She and her daughters went swimming. At least that was the plan. They were going to spend the day together as a family, eating some nice food, watching some videos. But videos only; there would be no live television.

So she told us in an extraordinarily moving interview broadcast yesterday on the Today programme as part of its coverage to mark the first anniversary of 11 September. It had been recorded well ahead of time. Mrs Thompson's husband was one of those who was killed when the second plane hijacked by suicide bombers crashed into the World Trade Centre. He had telephoned her minutes before to say that a light aircraft had crashed into the first tower and that it was now being shown on television. She should turn on CNN to watch – which was how she came to be watching when the second aircraft crashed into the second tower, at just about the exact floor from which she knew her husband had just spoken to her.

She then sat transfixed to the television and watched – as the rest of the world did – as an awful reality unfolded like cinematic drama. But she did so in an experience of trauma which the rest of us must hope we can never begin to comprehend. The way she spoke of it was the first sign of the dissonance between public and private understandings of what happened that day – and how we have responded to it since.

I don't reckon much to anniversaries, she went on to tell the interviewer. Anniversaries are for people on the outside. To those for whom the anguish of that day was personal, every day is 11 September. Indeed every hour is – for the ordinary moments of life bring constant reminders of the husband and father the family had lost. She did not, though she was too polite to say so, want to participate in the public grief, for what her fellow citizens were mourning was something very different to the inconsolable, stomach-wrenching loss that she felt that day and has continued to feel every since.

Her words should give us all pause for thought and bring us to reflect, perhaps critically, about the outpouring of words, emotional and analytical, that have flooded like a tidal wave over the icon that 9/11 has now become. For there are some crucial differences between private and public mourning, and their consequences could prove pivotal in a time when society's emotional discharge over the terrorist atrocities threatens to lead us into a war in which far more people may die even than perished in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania a year ago yesterday.

Rowan Williams, who takes over as Archbishop of Canterbury at the end of October, gave a hint of the explanation of this yesterday in a characteristically penetrating meditation on 11 September in Today's Thought for the Day. "It's got something to do with how we concentrate on dramatic pictures to spare us from the personal reality," he said, contrasting those images of the crashing planes that were played over and over, like a form of violent pornography (my notion, not his) with the reality for the individuals involved.

Dr Williams himself was trapped in a neighbouring building that day in New York. We outsiders have had etched into our minds some single dramatic image of impact. But what those inside would remember, Dr Williams said, was "the chaos, dark and dust; and the unexpected intimate conversations and touches of the hand between strangers as we waited".

There is something about the depths plumbed in personal bereavement that dislocates us from other people. "Stop All The Clocks," wrote Auden in a screaming demand that individual bereavement should be acknowledged by a world whose everyday business makes it oblivious to private pain. Public mourning, by contrast, brings people together rather than setting them apart, and yet its grief is an attenuated one. It is, in the present case, one suspects, mourning not the loss of individual lives so much as the affront that has been delivered to a society's previous image of itself. That is why there has been so much sloppy talk about the death of innocence – as well as the growth in America of a sense of vulnerability and non-specific fear.

Private grief is, for worse or better, a transformative process. Its public equivalent more often, as so much of the writing about 11 September has shown, merely reinforces people's pre-existing attitudes and prejudices. And those are wide and varied – as was shown at yesterday's service of remembrance and commemoration in St Paul's. It spoke of sympathy, gratitude and pride; of despair, blindness and fear; of wisdom, courage and brokenness. And yet it seemed somehow a cocktail of vicarious sympathy and highly charged righteousness that was unable to pick a clear path through these collective emotions.

Terrorists can inflict violence on the innocent, said Dr Williams, only by not seeing certain things or by seeing them from a distance, which denies the humanity of their victims. The danger is that public grieving does that, too. Which is why Lucy Thompson yesterday wanted to see no live television coverage. And why the rest of us would be wise to try to unravel what is real and what is bogus or self-comforting in our response to it all.

p.vallely@independent.co.uk