9/11

Reading through everyone's 9/11 recollections on Facebook made me think of this...  

     There are moments in your life that change you forever.  I remember the first time I went shopping by myself after my daughter was born thinking, "Wow.  These people have no idea of this HUGE event that has happened to me."  As I continued shopping I remembered how, when I was young, we would do timelines in school.  Sometimes we did a timeline of our own lives. I thought of my life timeline and how a huge line had just divided it.  There was now before and after I became a mother.  How everything had changed for me.  In ways both wonderful and scary...

     Nine months later, I was riding home in silence with my brother from St. Vincent's hospital where we had just watched my sweet, gentle mother take her last breath.  I was looking out the car window at the pretty, sunny day.  Everywhere I looked people were going about their regular lives.  In my head, I was SCREAMING, "You have no fucking idea what just happened to me!  How can you all just be walking around when my mother is dead?!"  I suddenly thought again of the timeline.  This time I felt like someone had taken a giant, ugly black marker and scribbled this horrid, jagged line right down the middle.  Dividing my life into the before and after in a shocking and mutative way.  

     A little less than three years later was September 11, 2001.  I won't go into the details of that morning.  When I think of or talk about that morning, I get caught up in the minutiae.  For many of us, it was a morning like many other mornings.  Like a thousand other mornings we have forgotten.  Until we heard the news.  Until we saw the pictures.  Now every average moment we had before we heard the news is seared into our memories.  

   On 9/11, my brother was at his new job in the WTC.  My husband worked across the street and WTC was his subway stop.  My brother-in-law was a police officer responding to the emergency.  It was a long agonizing day.  Calling cell phones that weren't picking up.  Waiting.  But they all came home.  We were soooo incredibly lucky.   

     While nursing my 3-week-old son in the middle of the nights that followed,  I would flip on the TV.  Always scared that something else had happened during those few hours of sleep. I watched the recovery efforts, floodlights illuminating the scene, as hope waned that a pocket of survivors would be found.  I sat in my rocking chair in the quiet of night thinking and praying.  I thought about the baby in my arms and wondered what kind of world he would grow up in.  I thought of my mother and the value of one life.  How many lives a person can affect and how many lives are forever changed by that one person's death.

     Again, I thought of my timeline.  Of the country's timeline.  Of so many people's personal timelines and the ugly black lines changing their lives forever.  And, of the timelines that stopped way before they should have...

     Today, I remember the 2,977 and the people who still love and miss them every moment of every day.