Remembrance

One of the things that ties our hearts together over 9/11 is the desire to tell our part of the story, where we were, what we thought and how it made us feel. That's why blogs all over the country have the events of that day 5 years ago as their topic for the day. And I'm no different.

I was home working that day, as I am every week day. Taking care of little babies. I never have the TV on because babies don't need to have the TV on. My sweet son-in-law knew that I never knew when something was happening, so he always called me when he felt like there was breaking news that I needed to know about. That morning he called and his voice was tight and tense as he said, "Go turn on the TV." I asked him what channel and he said it didn't matter, that it was on all the channels. And there it was--fire and fire. The second plane had already hit by the time I tuned in and they were playing the film clips over and over. No one could make any sense of what was happening.

DH and I are homebodies with local jobs and local lives, but I have two brothers who travel all over the place with their jobs. And I had to know if they were safe. I called them both and was vastly relieved to learn that they were nowhere near NYC. (One was stranded in Atlanta when all the air traffic was grounded. He grabbed one of the last rental cars in the city and drove home.) And one of my daycare babies' mom worked for American Airlines and she got stranded in Ohio. Also grabbed a car and drove home.

I've read a lot of blogs of people who were nowhere near a TV and watched very little of the news because it was too difficult. I was just the opposite. Home all day, I couldn't tear myself away from the extensive coverage. I watched for 16-18 hours a day. Even when it got to be too much to bear and I would leave it for a few minutes, I would be back almost immediately. The people who lost their loved ones couldn't leave their pain. How could I just turn it off and go back to my happy life? It was days before I could stop--eleven days to be exact.

We had tickets to fly to Denver for vacation on September 22. We talked about cancelling, but we had only taken ONE other vacation in 30 years of marriage. We had free reservations at a resort in Colorado. So we went.

I really expected to see armed guards all over the airport. My parents have traveled all over the world and have talked about how weird it is to see soldiers with machine guns on duty in airports. That's sorta what I was expecting. So extra checkpoints with very little increase in waiting time was a pleasant surprise. Flying itself is something I enjoy. Flying at this particular time was not scary or alarming. But I cried anyway, thinking about what it must have been like for the passengers on those four hijacked airplanes.

When we reached the resort, I made the conscious decision to stop watching the news reports. Again with guilt. But I needed to stop. I had seen all I could handle and I was already praying. I couldn't do anything more.