From Families' Grief, a Symbol of Loss and Hope

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The Nation's First 9/11 Memorial

Seven years after the tragic events of 9/11, the memorial park, featuring 184 light benches for the 184 victims that lost their life at the Pentagon, will be dedicated.

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And give they did, in small amounts and big bundles. Donors included AT&T, Boeing and the government of Taiwan. The state of Maryland gave, as did Fairfax County, former defense secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and his wife, Joyce, and the Philip L. Graham Fund of The Washington Post.

Much of the money was gathered through large corporate gifts.

Partly because of the fundraising effort, the Pentagon Memorial has been completed several years ahead of the country's other two permanent memorial projects, in Lower Manhattan and Shanksville, Pa., the crash site of United Airlines Flight 93. Construction is underway on the $610 million National September 11 Memorial and Museum at the World Trade Center site, but its planners said recently that they are aiming for a 2011 opening.

The National Park Service is leading the creation of a memorial for the victims of Flight 93 in Shanksville, but construction has not begun. Some victims' relatives have raised concerns that the proposed design, which includes a grove of trees planted in an arc, resembles an Islamic crescent.

For at least several years, then, the Pentagon Memorial will probably be the emotional center of the country's Sept. 11 observance. It has cost more and taken longer to build than planned, but in its completion, there is hope among the builders, donors and family members who have created the memorial that its evocative design will challenge the indelibly dark memories of Sept. 11 with a new set of images: flowing water, polished steel and light.

From a window near her desk, Kathy Dillaber has watched the construction crews come and go at the memorial site. A personnel manager for the Army, she was at work at the Pentagon on the morning American Airlines Flight 77 hit the building like a bomb. Her youngest sister, Patricia E. Mickley, working as a budget analyst one floor below, was killed, along with two dozen of Dillaber's colleagues.

Over the years, Dillaber has seen the bulldozers clear the site, the excavators prepare its foundation and the 184 stainless steel memorial benches lowered into place, one for each of the dead. Just as she has observed the construction process from above, she will now look out on the completed memorial and its visitors. It will never be an easy view for her.

"I have a love-hate relationship with it," she said. "It's a beautiful memorial, and I'm very grateful. But I wish it wasn't there. I wish it didn't have to be there in the first place."

For several years, Dillaber has organized fundraisers for the memorial through her community theater in Alexandria, collecting $17,000. "It's been a kind of therapy for me," she said. "But I can't tell you how many good people we lost."

Even as rescuers and recovery crews combed through the rubble of the Pentagon site after the crash, family members began asking how the victims would be honored. Ideas for a memorial first turned up in a suggestion box at a family assistance center set up by the Pentagon immediately after the attack. One was from Laychak.

"In those horrible dark days, he was already writing suggestions for how to memorialize the people we lost," recalled Meg Falk, former director of the Pentagon's Office of Family Policy, who set up the center and is now retired.

In 2002, after Congress authorized the Pentagon to build the memorial, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers announced a worldwide design competition. The agency asked Falk to form a group with a dozen or so victims' family members who could advise and guide the project. Laychak was the first person Falk called.