This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.

Welcome to the New Yorker Radio Hour.

My family in Haiti has been removing rubble from a school that was shattered during the earthquake of January 12, 2010.

They have found bones, human bones.

Because they're not scientists or DNA experts, it's impossible for them to trace

the bones back to the bodies to which they once belonged. Active, lively people who spoke and laughed

and danced and loved.

In 2011, Edwidge Dantikot wrote an essay for the New Yorker called Flight.

It was the 10th anniversary of the September 11th attacks.

Dantikot was also writing in the wake of a devastating earthquake that it hit her home country of Haiti the year before.

Whose bones are these, they wonder? Do they belong to the bright student who was always first in her class?

To a parent with whom a teacher had an appointment.

Are there the teacher's bones? It is the burden of the survivors and the curious to decipher final moments, whether there occurred a year, 10 years, or 1,000 years ago.

After two years, after 10 years,

there's still enough people around to look back and to remember.

After 100, a thousand, or 10,000 years,

the bones and images will have to speak for themselves.

The image that lingers most in my mind from September 11, 2001, is that of human beings attempting to fly.

Men and women catapulted from or fleeing a volcano-like inferno of fuel, fire, heat, and smoke, then cutting across a clear blue sky down toward the ground.

Some were alone. Some were in pairs. Some tried to make parachutes of ordinary things, curtains, clothes.

One woman held onto her purse, perhaps thinking that she might need it on the very slight chance

that she landed safely on the ground.

...