This paper interrogates the intersection of memory, grief, and cleansing at the National 9/11 Memorial in Manhattan. I examine how memories of the past interject the memorial's present and its vision of the future through two cases that illustrate the exclusion of Islam and the inclusion of the Middle East in narrative sites of the memorial. The first case recites the exclusion of Pakistani-American Mohammad Salman Hamdani from the National 9/11 Memorial's list of deceased first responders. Instead, his name was included in a panel commemorating those who have a "loose connection, or none" to the WTC. A Muslim American, Hamdani was mistakenly thought to be involved in the attacks and not, as was later discovered, a hero who responded to victims at the site. The memorial not only failed to acknowledge Hamdani's heroism fittingly, but this omission denied his family, and the greater Muslim American community, the act of grieving for this man as an American hero. This denial resembles the particular kind of grieving that Lori Peek describes in Behind the Backlash: Muslim Americans After 9/11 (2011), where Muslim Americans were denied participation in the same kinds of grieving processes as the rest of the population in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. In the second case, a 2014 article by Lebanese novelist Elias Khoury describes a visit to the memorial. The author considers what a memorial to martyrs of the Lebanese Civil War would look like. As Khoury gazes at the memorial waterfalls, his imaginative act extends to a tribute to the entire region of the Middle East, thus joining the losses of 9/11 to ongoing losses in the Middle East. Whereas Hamdani's case illustrates the exclusion of Muslim identity from an American memorial, Khoury presents a continuum from New York to the Middle East, extending a line of memory from the American mainland to consequences of U.S. imperialism in the Middle East. The National 9/11 Memorial thus appears as a site of paradoxes; of memories that cannot be memorialized, of narratives that are both limited and limitless. I argue that the National 9/11 Memorial complicates the role of Islam and the Middle East in narratives of American public life. Both cases represent kinds of cleansing - a cleansing of Muslim life from the site of tragedy, and a temporal cleansing for both America and the Middle East, to a time "before pain and blood" (Khoury).