He gave me a chunk¹ of glass.

他给我一块玻璃。

My husband was killed on 9/11; he worked in 1 WTC, well above the impact floors. On his birthday in March, 2002, I went to the site that used to be the WTC. It wasn’t cleaned up yet, in fact it was ugly as hell² and smelled about the same, and access was still pretty chaotic³. I got to the Century 21 department store across the street, and stood against the wall - and just crumbled⁴. Broke down.

我丈夫死于911事件，他在世贸中心一号楼工作，就在被撞击楼层上面。2002年3月他生日时，我去了世贸中心旧址，那里还没有被清理干净，看起来闻起来就像地狱一般，通往那儿的道路也一片混乱，我去了马路对面的21世纪百货商店，靠墙站着，心都要碎了，我要崩溃了。

A guy who was working across the street at the site - which was still a full-on disaster area - saw me and came across. “Who did you lose?” he asked. “My husband,” I said, through ugly tears, and I told the guy what firm my husband had worked for, and that it was his birthday.

马路对面当时完全就是灾难现场，一个工作人员看见我了就走过来问我：“你失去什么亲人了？”我说：“我丈夫”，我哭得很难看，跟他说我丈夫之前在哪个公司工作，那天是他的生日。

Guy turned out to be a firefighter. Reached into his front pocket. “This is actually really rare. Not a lot of glass survived; it just vaporized.” And he pressed it into my hand.

那个人是消防员，他把手伸进衣服前面口袋里，把一块玻璃放进我手里说：“这块真的很少见，大部分玻璃都没了，熔化掉了。”

I still have it. It’s not that the guy was giving up a valuable souvenir. It was that he was acknowledging⁵ my connection to that little piece of glass, and putting it where he thought it belonged - that, and he needed to give me something that in some small way I could hold onto and focus on, instead of the hurt. This was how he could do that in that one moment.

我现在仍然留着它，不是因为那个男人放弃了一个有价值的纪念品，而是因为他明白我和这一小块玻璃之间的联系，把它放到一个他认为这块玻璃该去的地方。他需要把这个东西给我，让我能握在手里或多或少把注意力转移到这上面，而不是整日悲伤。这就是当时他所能做的。

I was so bound⁶ up in my own head I never even asked his name; he didn’t ask mine either. If he’s out there now, I want to tell him that the little piece of glass made me start to think that maybe everything wasn’t transient⁷, ephemeral - that maybe there were things, little things, short moments, small pieces, that last no matter what.

我当时思想都集中在这个东西上，甚至都没问他的名字，他也没问我的名字。如果他现在还在那儿，我想告诉他这一小块玻璃使我开始思考，可能不是所有东西都是转瞬即逝的，可能还有一些东西虽小虽短暂，但不管在什么情况下都能延续下去。

I want to say to him: thanks for that.

我想对他说：谢谢他的赠品。