And we reviewed our own personal stories, because once the door was opened, how could it be helped, each of us in the tri-state area having our own arsenal of them: the fact that her grandmother had to run 30 blocks north after being evacuated from her Wall Street office after the north tower fell, a wet paper towel slapped over her face, and that my father having just dropped her off at the office was stuck with debris and bodies falling in front of his car, finally veering the wrong way down a one way street to finally get up and over the George Washington Bridge just as the barricades were going up, all the while not knowing what chaos he had just left his wife in. Her aunt, who, arriving by bus at her office at 7 World Trade, stepped off to gaze directly up at the 1st plane crashing into the tower, and ran by sheer instinct to try and find her sister, working a few blocks away, running east over the Brooklyn Bridge to safety, still to this day fearing bridges and having panic attacks at the sound of low flying planes. Her grandfather, a retired NYFD attending dozens of funerals of his former colleagues and colleagues sons in the weeks following. The cousin killed in Cantor Fitzgerald, and closest to home, the Brookfield friend who could not face coming home to her 5 boys for four days following the attacks because she had been invited to attend a breakfast meeting at Windows-On-the-World the morning of 9/11, but at the last minute sent 2 co-workers to attend because her work load was too heavy that morning to attend herself.
These stories sat with us. They festered. We tried over the next few years to make sense of the nonsensical and to explain them to our children.
So really, my answers had little relevance. How our physical world has changed, our new found vigilance; sure, the story ‘s been told time and time again. It only occurred to me this morning as we watched the never ending reading of the names what I should have said, assignment be damned. What really changed in the last 10 years, post 9/11 for us and I think for so many, is my sense of resolve to live every day to its fullest, because you just don’t know. Sometimes successfully and other times not so much, but as anniversaries like these loom large and media-ized, it jolts me back to that determination again.
Like so many, I used to think that as Americans we were invulnerable. Like teenagers (and lets face it, that’s what our nation is, comparatively speaking to the rest of the world) who grew up too fast with a chest heavy sense of pride, protection and super power strength, the U.S. has been known to outsiders as well as to ourselves as the safe haven, where all who have come to its grounds have found solace, freedom and peace. Nothing external could hurt us here.
Not that we haven’t experienced tragedy en masse. World Wars, a horrific holocaust, Pearl Harbor, a civil rights movement that took many many lives, and Vietnam. The difference this time was the impact of this extreme personal attack which hit home, on our turf from an outside vendor- so quickly and violently that it shook our very core. Other than the civil rights era, those atrocities occurred overseas and were slow burning. We here in the states were left with the remnants, the survivors, the PTSD, the VA hospitals, the commemorative anniversaries, the lessons learned, the loved ones lost and those we spent the past 50 years trying to incorporate back into everyday life, largely unsuccessfully.
For so many of us however, 9/11 proved to be the paradigm shift. As anyone who has faced cancer or lost a loved one in an accident can attest, one of the most common reactions is “I never thought it would happen to me. To them, yes, but not to me.”
As we’ve sadly witnessed 10 years ago today, the worst can happen to us. The most unfathomable acts on our holy soil built in the name of freedom and justice for all, of second chances and everything our country has proudly stood for can and was misinterpreted and reviled and then blown up, taking down thousands of mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, aunts, uncles and best friends.
Things can happen, even if they are incomprehensible. So today, I challenge you all to live your lives fully, to play with your children instead of doing the dishes, to love your friends and family wholly and generously, to truly appreciate what you have, and to live your lives as though it were your last day here because you never know. I know it sounds hokey, so sue me. But seriously, go kiss someone right now. This is how 9/11 changed our lives and the answer I should have given the first time when my daughter asked.