By Tanya Bricking
Advertiser Staff Writer

Maybe it's weird that I have a picture from Sept. 11 hanging on my bedroom wall. It's an eerie image, with smoke blanketing the Manhattan skyline and seeming to billow above the torch of the Statue of Liberty.

My sister, Tara Bricking, a Boston Herald photographer assigned to document the tragedy, took the picture on a day my family feared for her life. She was rushing toward the very place people were fleeing.

With camera in hand, she headed toward the Empire State Building when there was a bomb scare Sept. 12, instead of running in the other direction. Days later, she was assigned to cover a church service in a parish that lost 80 people, and she told me she had to stop taking pictures because she was crying so hard.

"Most guys in that situation are all business," she told me the other day as we reflected on tomorrow's anniversary. "And I tried to be all business because I didn't want to be perceived as weak."

In the news business, no one's supposed to see you cry. But Sept. 11 gave us enough reasons to have no shame about being emotional.

That's part of the reason I have that picture on my wall.

It evokes too much sadness to be art. But acknowledging the worst details in life makes me appreciate the best, like keeping a prayer card from a funeral or saving a picture of a car totaled in a wreck that I survived.

That picture reminds me of my sister and the people I love in my life. And it makes me think of all the people who lost theirs.

Even though I was on the opposite side of the country, capturing the impact of the attacks was my job, too. And as with my sister, it was easy for me to get caught up in the sadness of Sept. 11 when I interviewed victims' families last year and again last week. It was the kind of assignment that made me want to go home and cry.

I guess it shouldn't take a haunting picture to make me take stock. It's not that I want to be deluged with images of the towers collapsing or saturated by the spectacle of anniversary coverage.

The nation has moved on to deal with the business of war and recovery. Families gather around the television these days to watch "American Idol" instead of America in peril. Life for many of us is much the same as it was a year ago. The Manhattan skyline still feels far away.

I used to have a screensaver on my computer of the firefighters raising the American flag over the rubble of the World Trade Center. But my attachment to that image was fleeting.

The image of the Statue of Liberty and her torch against the smoke clouds sticks with me. It was a wrenching sight made personal because my sister was there behind the camera. It became my indelible reminder that I'm grateful for my family, and there's no shame in being emotional about it.

Maybe it's weird that I have a picture from Sept. 11 hanging on my bedroom wall, but I'm not ready to take it down.

Reach Tanya Bricking at tbricking@honoluluadvertiser.com or 525-8026.