September 11, 2001
James was working second shift. As usual, he hadn’t gotten home from work until around 11:30PM on September 10.
Our oldest sons, James and John, were 6 months old. September 11, I got up early with them to feed them, then put them down for a nap and went back to bed. It was around 7AM our time.
A little later, we woke to the sound of the phone ringing. My dad called to tell us an airplane had flown into the side of one of the twin towers. We both thought he meant a small, twin engine plane and went back to sleep.
A few minutes after that, my father-in-law, Jim, called to tell us another plane had flown into the other tower.
This time, we understood it was serious. These were airliners full of people and fuel.
Our TV was ancient. We kept it in the basement and used it for playing videos and DVDs. We didn’t even have it hooked up to an antenna, even though we had the antenna wires available. James hurried downstairs while he was on the phone with his dad. He hooked the TV up to the antenna and turned it on. He yelled for me to come see what was happening.
What we saw looked like a terrible nightmare. Both towers were burning. We saw people hurl themselves out of the building to the ground, lives doomed one way or the other. (We later learned they may have been forced out by the heat of the fire burning inside the buildings.)
Moments after we turned on the TV the first tower collapsed.
We stayed glued to the television all day, along with the rest of the United States. Our emotions vacillated between horror, grief, anger, and disbelief as we watched the drama unfold. These things didn’t happen inside the US. Murder, on that scale, had seemed impossible on American soil. Yet there it was, the nightmare of those terrorist attacks, unfolding before our very eyes.
The skies were silent as all the planes were grounded, the silence eery, a constant reminder of the tragedy we’d witnessed. Little by little we learned what had happened that day. By those same, gradual discoveries, we realized our children, these innocent babies, would grow up in a world that was After and resembled nothing of the world Before.
In 2006 we took our children to Ground Zero and saw the beginnings of what would become the Freedom Tower.
You could still see damage on the surrounding buildings, even 5 years later.
When the children were older, we told them about Before. Then we showed them documentaries, news clips, and told them stories of 9/11. They cried, just like we did on that day, 15 years ago. They shared our horror, our loss.
Today, we remember those who died. We remember those to gave their lives to try to save others. We remember the sacrifice, the bravery, the pain, the loss, the grief.
We remember, because we do not want to forget.
