Where were you 10 years ago?

September 11, 2011 by Julia
Filed under Featured

How can ten years have already passed? My children will never know September 11, 2001 as I know it. They will study this in their history classes probably in another ten years. They will sympathize with those figures in times past who experienced the terror first hand, analyze the politics before and after the terror acts, but they will close their textbooks. Life will go on without a second thought. For me, ten years later, I still remember that day as vividly as if it happened yesterday, and all it takes is a replay of the Towers crumbling to dust to bring fresh tears to the surface. I am forever changed.

My husband and I flew to New York City to visit family one week before September 11th. After dinner one evening, my brother-in-law gave us a tour of the buildings in the World Trade Center where he worked, showing us the invitation for a work event at Windows On The World, a restaurant in the North Tower that he was to attend the following week. It’s disconcerting still for me to look at the photos I snapped that day of Lower Manhattan; the most eery of all is a photo I took of the Millenium Hilton Hotel reflecting the Twin Towers at night.

A week later on September 11th, I went to work early. I remember my hands had a few purple stains on them from mixing up a solution of potassium permanganate for my students’ lab. I remember trying to get the purple stains off my fingers when a student Michael came bursting in to my classroom before school started. It was just before 8 am. ”A plane just flew into one of the Towers in New York! I heard it in the car.” He fumbled with my radio until he found NPR, and we both listened as reports came in of a second plane crashing into another building.

I remember my heart pounding, but I needed to keep my composure. Kids were starting to come into the classroom, and not everyone had heard the news yet. Some of them could see the distress on my face, and I explained to them what it was that I heard on the radio. The little tv I had in the upper corner of the classroom couldn’t pick up a signal so while my students settled to work on the lab, I climbed up on an empty lab table with a paper clip to jury-rig an antenna. I remember the signal coming in just enough where we all watched with bated breath as a building came crashing down.

I remember how suddenly quiet and still my classroom became. These were my advanced students, and they were mature enough to understand. I told them that they could continue to work on the lab if they wanted to, or if they felt the need to stop and watch the news, they could. Most of them stopped titrating and crowded around the tv with me.

During my conference period, I frantically sent emails to friends working in Manhattan. I desperately made phone calls to find out about the whereabouts of my husband’s family in New York, who thankfully were not in Lower Manhattan at the time. I remember a friend’s email telling me that she was all right, but her words haunted me that day: descriptions of office paper flying and raining down like white birds where she worked near the UN, descriptions of people wandering the streets not knowing what to do, where to go, how to help, or how to escape. I desperately needed a private place to scream or to cry, but I couldn’t. I held in my fears, and when the bell rang at the end of the school day, I packed up my papers and drove straight home, numb.

I burst into uncontrolled tears. I have never cried like that before, or since, the absolute shock that humans could do this to other humans. The sadness and anger I felt at the absolute senselessness of it all is indescribable. I remember watching in horror the footage of people jumping out of the buildings, how terrified those people must have been to weigh the options of either burning to death or plummeting to their death. I remember.

I grasped at any bit of hope that day, thinking of all the heroic acts from emergency personnel to the men and women on the Pennsylvania flight, wanting desperately to cling to my belief that people are inherently good. I remember saying aloud to myself in a private moment that I won’t let my fear taint my view of humanity. I couldn’t allow that to happen. I wouldn’t.

My children cannot remember. They were not yet born. All they will know is that every September 11, Mommy and Daddy turned on the tv and held their breath as they watched tributes. They’ll remember that they received a few extra hugs that day. They can’t remember the horrors. I don’t want them to know that terror.

I will always remember. What do you remember?