Ten Years Later

My dear friend Steve wrote this essay two years ago on the ten year anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attack.

 Read, read...

  "It's gone" my boss said.  I was on the phone with my mother, trying to help her understand what was going on.  It was one of those days common in her last years when her mind was cloudy.  I was kind of annoyed that Bob was interrupting me, especially to report what we had just been talking about.  This fire was so out of control, the damage so great, there would be no way of fixing the twin towers.  What a demolition job that would be.

     "I know, I know", I shrugged him off and turned away to focus on my mother.  "No, you don't understand" he insisted, moving to face me again.  He made eye contact, then said "One of the towers is gone.  It's not there anymore."

     And with that, the horrible day changed for the worse.  Certainly, hundreds of people were already dead from the impact, the explosions and the blazing inferno.  But now everybody who was in the south tower was dead.  Everybody.  And it was obvious that the north tower wasn't going to stand alone.

     My sister Sally, a burn nurse, was organizing her troops to do whatever needed to be done to help the injured.  She was in contact with hospitals in New York City, asking if her team should head to NY or if the survivors should be sent to Bridgeport.  "Sally, there are no survivors" she was told.

     As the afternoon went on, I needed a break and headed to the beach in Fairfield.  It never crossed my mind that on a clear day you could see the World Trade Center from the beach.  I noticed that there was a large crowd on this beautiful day that would have had many beach goers anyway.  But everybody was standing near the shore, staring at the plumes of smoke rising from the horizon and floating out to sea.  This was all real, it wasn't just something on the TV.

     I stood with the crowd and thought about the many times I had been in those towers.  I thought about the time in the 80's when I was in town for a trade show at the Javits Center and met an old friend there for lunch.  She worked upstairs in one of the towers at the time, but I knew she had moved on from that job and should be safe.  I thought about my cousin, who used to work there and was really happy she had changed jobs.  I thought about my cousin John, NYPD for nearly 20 years and always in the middle of the action.  Was he there?

At home, early that evening, wandering in my garden, the quiet was broken by the sound of low-flying aircraft.  Nothing ever scared me more.  I knew there was a total ban on all flights, so it wasn't someone flying into Sikorsky airport.  Could it be more attacks?  It turned out to be 3 military helicopters, flying low over the area.  Still left a deep feeling of unease in my stomach.

     As time went on, it became clear no one I knew died that day.  Several people I knew lost their lives, though.  One of our customers at the copy shop, a frail woman who always seemed overwhelmed by even the smallest challenges, had gotten to work in Fairfield that morning around nine.

She checked her voicemail and heard her husband telling her not to worry, he was fine.  The other tower had been hit, but his office near the top of the south tower was safe.  She turned on her TV just in time to see the 2nd plane crash into the building.  I never saw her again, but heard that she had moved back to Colorado where she had family.

     My cousin John was lucky that day.  He had been sent uptown to work on a special computer related project for the NYPD.  But his regular unit was in the middle of the rescue efforts and many of them, the people he worked alongside every day, died when the towers came down.  John spent the next several months helping to go through the wreckage, trying to save anything he could find that used to be somebody.  When the cleanup was over, he couldn't do the job anymore, undoubtedly wracked by survivor's guilt.  Still short of 20 years, he put in his papers and left the job he had wanted since we were little kids.

     Many of my friends angrily tune out any remembrance of what happened that day.  Mostly they are friends who live far enough away that they felt no personal impact.  I fully understand that the attacks were used for political gain, they were used by the media for commercial gain.  I do wish that the spirit of 9/12/01 had lived.  That day, most of the world stood together, willing to do whatever could be done to lessen the hurt caused by 9/11 and to prevent it from ever happening again. My naive self believed there could actually be world peace, a world united in one community.   But that spirit didn't last, self-interest ruled the day and the entire world is worse off because of it.

     I don't feel the need to watch the wall-to-wall coverage today.  But I do remember what happened 10 years ago.  I'll always remember it.