KENT COUNTY, Mich. — A Kentwood man is hoping his 9/11 artifacts and artwork — a collection of 1,392 items — can find a permanent, public home.
The product of patriotism, travel and trauma ought to be displayed on a grander stage than his garage, he says, so older generations may remember the lives lost in the terrorist attack and younger generations may understand the impact the tragedy had on every day Americans, even those like him who were miles away from ground zero.
"I just want a spot where my story can be told," James Kristan said to FOX 17 on Thursday.
Specifically, Kristan wants his collection on display in New York at 4 World Trade Center or the 9/11 Memorial & Museum.
"What's a guy like me to do?"
On the morning of September 11, 2001, Kristan was getting ready to paint his garage. While setting up sawhorses, he heard an announcement on the radio. A plane had just flew into the North Tower of the World Trade Center. He ran into the house and turned on the television.
"That was when it got bad," he said.
Kristan, a U.S. Army veteran who served in the military for 20 years, says his previously undetected PTSD was triggered when the second plane hit the South Tower, turning into a fireball that billowed into a cloud of black smoke.
"It was game over for me," he said.
He had been trained to run into combat but, on that day, could only watch from a distance.
"You don't want them to know," Kristan said about people too young to remember 9/11. "You don't want them to see what we saw. It was all live on TV."
As a country and its people rose from the dust, Kristan went to work. He constructed replicas of the towers, adorned them with American flags and placed them in his front yard. He made a "pilgrimage" to the sites of the terrorist attacks and filmed a documentary on his travels.
In a field in Pennsylvania, he met with families who lost loved ones on Flight 93. In Virginia, he cried with a Pentagon employee as they stood outside a memorial chapel.
"I did everything myself. I drove, I flew, everything was by me, on me, was on me," Kristan said.
During this time, the veteran also discovered art as an outlet for his PTSD.
"You hear people say, out of darkness comes light," he said. "It's true, you can find light out of darkness."
In his garage, a series of pop culture-style sculptures — created as a trauma response to the terrorist attack — stand alongside shelves filled with footlockers. Labeled and carefully packaged, the storage containers carry the bulk of Kristan's 9/11 collection.
Perhaps the most important piece is a wooden urn, one of four larger urns created alongside thousands of smaller ones that were given to families of the victims in a private ceremony.
Finely made from polished cherry mahogany and filled with debris from the towers, the urn is "deep in American history."
"This urn is 9/11," Kristan said. "This needs a home. Not in my home."
If the 9/11 Memorial & Museum and its chairmain, Mike Bloomberg, or 4 World Trade Center and its developer, Larry Silverstein, would be generous enough to give his artifacts and artwork a space in their properties, Kristan says their public display would come as a "nice ending for my journey of healing."
"I need your help," he said.
