Reflecting on a fateful day
“Tell me about 9/11,” my daughter said. She and her husband were visiting from Georgia last weekend, and as she’s wont to do, she asked me to tell her about her childhood.
Grace has no memory of her own about the terrorist attacks because she was just short of 2 years old that day.
“We were living in Connecticut. As usual you were having trouble sleeping that night before,” I said. “I got you up and we were sitting on the sofa together, watching some old movie on TV.”
I went on to tell her that “something just felt wrong, a bit off” as we sat together.
“You know I’m not one to believe weird, ESP kinds of things, but something felt wrong,” I said.
I went on to tell her how the following morning went: Maritza, the lady who took care of Grace a few mornings a week, arrived. I took Cooper to school and then came home and went to my bedroom to catch up on some of the sleep I’d lost.
At some point, Maritza knocked softly on the bedroom door.
“Beth,” she said. “Turn on the TV. Something bad happened.”
Just then I watched as the second plane hit the tower. And then things became an anxious blur. I watched the news coverage until I couldn’t stand it anymore. Friends from everywhere started calling; they knew we near New York, and asked if we were safe.
Parents of Cooper’s first-grade classmates started calling. We decided to go and get our kids. As I walked toward the door, Cooper came running to me as he did every afternoon at pick-up, smiling and carefree in a way the rest of us never would be again.
It was a perfect, blue-sky day. Cooper asked to go to the beach and so we drove to Todd’s Point. Across Long Island Sound I could see the smoke rising from Lower Manhattan’s Ground Zero. I dropped Cooper at home and drove to my church, where I sat in the quiet for a while.
“Were you scared?” Grace asked. She’d watched a documentary about some of the survivors, and was piecing together the story of that day, building an understanding that is mercifully devoid of emotional attachment.
“We were terrified,” I said. “We didn’t know what would happen next, whether more planes were coming.”
My earliest tragedy memory was the Kennedy assassination. I was 4 years old and remember only the sad quiet in the house, how the adults were different, and it scared me. My parents bought a book of photos about that historic week, and in the years following I would leaf through it, trying to absorb and understand. I wasn’t around for the Pearl Harbor attack, of course, but watching documentaries and reading books about it have brought me up to speed some. It feels like a patriotic duty to do so.
In the years after 9/11, we would take Cooper and Grace to the Flight 93 site in Shanksville, PA. The first visit it was a makeshift memorial of photos and some homemade tokens of appreciation. The memorial that replaced it does right by the brave people on the plane.
“That was so sad,” Grace said.
“I think that’s why they built it,” I said. “So people who were too young to feel it when it happened can create their own understanding.”
Hard to believe it’s been 25 years. So much has happened since then — to us as Americans and also to us families. Grace will soon turn 27, and she’s ready to learn and to get caught up.
And she started by asking, what was it like?