I woke to a gentle rain folded in soft grey skies this morning, the air held a hint of the coming fall. It was most proper weather, respectful even, for this day of remembrance. For the past eight years I have followed a slow ritual that traces the hours of tragedy we lived and died through in 2001. I make my coffee, offer a prayer, turn on the computer and watch it all unfold again.
I don’t want to forget, I don’t want to forget a single moment of that terrible day. I want to cry and mourn our dead. I want to be mindful of who we lost, what we lost. I choose to remember.
I was in the kitchen that day, a toddler and ten month old at my feet. Pots and pans and spoons and water, they were cooking up a mess on the floor. My mother called and said a plane had crashed into the world trade center, she sounded unhinged. I thoughtlessly made a remark about dumb pilots or something, imagining a small, two-seater aircraft had hit the building, wondering how they could have possibly run into something that large. She told me to get the tv on, now, right now. I did, just in time to see the second plane hit.
Everything stopped that day, my breath, my sense of reality, my entire country. It was too horrible to be real, this overwhelming wave of death and destruction that kept rolling in without end or reason. It made no sense. Stunned, most of us just watched, waiting for more news, absorbing the magnitude of this awful day. Some of us didn’t have that luxury. These people deserve my attention today, those who lived as well as those who died.
The video footage I watch is all too familiar, fully embedded in who I am now. The personal accounts, news reports and stock photos are all taken in slow careful pieces, most of it is committed to memory but sometimes I find something new, a piece I somehow missed before, that opens a slit of fresh grief or rage. Today it was the faces of 343 men.
I knew these men had died, but somehow seeing all of their photographs together, in one stark black and white image, just stunned me into a river of tears. Looking at the loss so of so much bravery and honor stacked row upon row in Exhibit P200084, United States v. Zacarias Moussaoui, is an abomination, an unspeakable sorrow. A mountain of grief lies behind these faces, the intimately personal nature of their family’s losses stands alongside our nation’s collective loss. These were our good men.
Look at these men and remember their deaths. Look at their faces and remember their lives. Take a good, hard look at our country’s finest sons and feel proud that we were the home of such brave and selfless men.
The rain is coming down in thick sheets now, just as it should.
So sad. They went to work that day, just like any other day, but none of them came home.
I was working that day when the news broke, and I didn’t see any video until the evening.
CBS News put out a book and DVD that retraced their coverage of the day. I haven’t watched the DVD; every time I think I might, I get too angry thinking about what happened. Just reading the transcripts gets me angry enough that my wife stays away from me for a while.
Daniel was a toddler then. That day I felt scared for us and sad for him.
Blessed rain here as well, the dry ponds are starting to fill. The cycle of life repeats.
I make my kids watch, Charles.
It is incredibly sad.
My oldest son is a firefighter and search and rescue expert who routinely risks his life for the benefit of others. He always pushes off my mutters of concern with some variation of “We’re well trained and well equipped, mom. Stop worrying.”
But of course I think of the all the firefighters who have died in the line of duty. And I think of the two people I knew who died in those towers on nine eleven, trapped high in the air with the fires of hell coming for them. Would I stop my son from climbing those stairs? No, I would claw at my face and scream, and watch him run to the rescue or to his death; because that is the man he is and must be.
This life is not meant to be easy. It is engagingly difficult and the losses blind us with agony. The only balm is to love even more, and to do what is right without any reference whatsoever to the cost.
I watched in on TV from here in Texas and had the same reaction that, I believe, most people did. Blunted sick trauma – horror – that lasted about two weeks. The only experience I can compare it to is that of a close friend dying young. I sometimes wonder what it must have been like for people who were actually in the city that day. Amba over at Ambiance was in the city and doesn’t want to talk about it. Vanderleun was, of course, nearby and has posted his account at his blog. As has Lileks (watching on tv from Minnesota). I expect having young children around at the time must’ve been doubly unnerving.
One other thing that strikes me about that autumn was the long chain of scary weirdness that followed 9/11. Anthrax. Clear envelopes. Beltway snipers. A far away place called Afghanistan that turned out to be even freakier than I (or anyone else) had imagined. It just kept coming. By November Kabul had fallen and, for me, the spell was broken.
But it doesn’t take much to remember. I hesitate to add this link to the 911 call of Kevin Cosgrove. I say I hesitate because, like the videos of Neda or Nick Berg, it records someone dying. Nothing is more horrifying and nothing should be more private. My understanding is, however, that this tape was released with the consent of his relatives with, I presume, the idea that some things, however terrible, should not be forgotten. If you ever need to remember or know what happened on 911, this will do it.
Thanks for this, Daphne. As I scrolled down over the pictures of our blessed heroes, I kept praying, “make it stop, Lord – no more.” As if somehow viewing fewer pictures would bring them back.
Ennui is very perceptive about having young children around. My oldest was three and I was pregnant with my youngest. Early pregnancy was very stressful for me anyway as I had already lost three babies in the first trimester. I watched the coverage for a while before picking my toddler up early from preschool. I just couldn’t keep the TV on the news all day while she was in the house, so I turned Barney on for her. I have this mad memory of feeling shattered while hearing that stupid purple dinosaur sing, “I love you, you love me, we’re a happy fam*i*ly…”
My other sensory memory is, for days afterward, hearing military jets circling the city, but being unable to see them. The absence of commercial jets was already freaky, but the sound of those unseen fighters was ominous rather than comforting.
Thanks for this, Daphne.
Most of the Bay Area (SFO) was still asleep or just waking up when the horror went down. But I was in my place of business, being an early guy… and watched the second plane hit in real-time. Our IT operations center was in a high-rise in SFO’s Financial District; we sent what few people that showed up for work home and implemented our disaster recovery plan… relocating mission-essential ops-types to a hardened data center. Myself and two other guys stayed in our building to monitor phones in case clients called, but we needn’t have… the ONLY calls we got all day were personal in nature. Yet still: the day was a horrific blur.
The memory that most often comes back to me is of the aftermath: watching anxious faces on crowded BART trains for the three or four minutes the train is “in the tube” under the bay while transiting from The City to the East Bay, and vice-versa. The threat of bombs, yanno? It was an edgy month or so before things got back to the new normal.
I still feel the anger.
I feel for you.
A day for the demons, of sordid utter mayhem. The day the whole world felt less safe and continues to feel less safe and will never feel safe again. Terrorism is the stuff of nightmares, touted and masked as freedom fighting and honour. Like Aileen, no stranger to such awful horrors herself, I feel for you as a country at the hands of terrorists, and for the bewildering loss – for the women and children, mothers and fathers behind each and every loss of life, which continues on even now. I don’t want any more of America’s or Britain’s sons and daughters bravely dying for this third world Islam inspired crap. I rue the day when we recover from this one and these snivelling pathetic cowards crawl back under the rocks from whence they came.
Charles from small town Texas
Are you the same person as ” Charles from Texas ” of ATW?
That’s our Charles for sure, Phantom.