You see, I was there. I remember. I saw it happen with my own two eyes. I woke up that morning in a Holiday Inn, tired and slightly grumpy. We had been on a plane the night before, sitting on the tarmack for two hours, unable to move because of the ligtening hitting the runway. They had allowed us to de-plane, putting us up in a hotel for the night and rescheduling us to fly the next morning. All of my luggage was on the plane and the only clothes I had were the highly inappropriate skin tight jeans, a-symetrical halter top and clunky heels I’d been wearing the night before. My mother got up and got in the shower and I turned on the tv. At first I couldn’t tell what was happening. All I saw was smoke and a banner running below the image telling everyone that all New York area airports were closed. I knocked on the bathroom door and told my mother that there was a fire at the World Trade Center and that the airport was closed. When we came back into the room, we saw the second plane fly into the second tower and we watched the whole world change in an instant.
We watched in horror as the first building crumbled. It was like it wasn’t possible. It was like we were watching hell creep and crawl onto the earth and we could do nothing to stop it. We ran to our window and though it was a few miles away, we saw that second tower fall. It was there and then suddenly, it wasn’t. All of it, all of them, were just gone. We knew that nothing would ever be the same again. I froze. My mother, my savior, called Avis and got us a car to get the hell off the island. We drove out onto Long Island in a cardboard box of a car, silent, terrified, in awe of the moment. Without her strength, without her faith, I would have been lost. Through many twists and turns, we finally ended up staying with family out on the island. For the next week, we watched the news, we wept, we prayed, we held on for dear life, unsure what each coming moment held. Friends had been lost. New York had been knocked down and was reaching into the deepest recesses of her bowels to rise up again, with fists. The world was watching and no one knew what would happen next.
The details of my experience that day and in the week that followed, are trivial in comparison to what happened on a global scale. They are however, the details shared by so many of us who were there that day. The details that united us in a way that nothing other than complete human tragedy ever could. Take away the politics and the hoopla. Take away liberal verses conservative. Take away the factors that lead up to that tragedy. Just for a moment. It isn’t about those things today. It’s about the man who jumped from the high floors, rather than be burned alive. It’s about the people who woke up that morning, kissed their husbands or wives goodbye, expecting to return home to another routine evening with the kids, never to be seen again. It’s about the people left behind, never truly able to heal the wound left by losing a loved one, like losing a limb.
For the week that I was “stranded” in New York in the aftermath, I saw a united humanity the likes of which I may never have the privilge to experience again in my life. The boundaries which typically divided us: race, age, gender, social status, economy, sexual orientation, religion…all of those differences faded instantly, but for a moment. They faded and melded into our one commonality. We are all human. We share the same air, the same earth, the same origin. We were all born from a man and woman. We will all die. We will all love. We were all the same because we were all suffering the same pain. I think that sometimes the commonality of pain can be more powerful that the commonality of love. The love and compassion that were formed from that pain allowed us to see each other with new eyes.
Of course it didn’t last. We have regained our equilibrium and are now able to focus on what divides us again. The cheesy slogan asks us to “Never Forget” and that means something different to me that it does to you or to a NY City Firefighter, or a World Trade Center widow or to a Muslim-American. What I will never forget is the swelling of goodness that followed such evil. I will never forget the face of my couisn, who lost a friend that day. I will never forget the little old lady who held a door for me while I held one for her, each of us “arguing” about who should go first. She laughed at me and said, “I guess that’s the kind of kindness that comes after people bomb us.” I will never forget my mother, fierecly fighting to protect me, her only child, pushing aside her own fear and her own pain to ensure that I was ok. I will never forget that from such pain can come such blessings. I will fight to never forget that we are all one.
Today, it is seven years later. My father told me that it takes the body seven years to regenerate all of it’s cells. So, every seven years, we experience a sort of rebirth, on a molecular level. Let us hope that seven years later, we are on a path to healing, rebuilding and recharging ourselves. Not just as a country, but as individual people. Let us hope that we each can look back and say with confidence that we are better than we were. That we not only remember, but we have learned from what history has shown us.
Peace to the families who are still suffering. Peace to the men and women fighting a war that has nothing to do with what happened seven years ago today. Peace to the world. Even if it’s just for today.
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