and I’m still not right.
On a beautiful Tuesday morning 25 years ago, I went to work after dropping my daughter off at school.
My morning schedule was full with six patient appointments back to back. I was between patients when I went out to the staff desk to find one of the techs watching something live on the computer.
“A plane just hit one of the World Trade Towers,” he said.
“Get out! That never happens,” I responded. “The airspace around it is protected.”
I’d grown up in NYC and, as a child, had watched the construction of the towers. I’d even had my 21st birthday dinner at Windows on the World. As I started to tell him that, the second plane hit.
The rest of the staff who were free, gathered around the desk now. I remember vividly saying, without even thinking about what I was saying, “We just got into a war with someone.”
Truer words.
Three of my patients canceled that day, so upset; all they wanted to do was watch the live coverage. Then the planes at the Pentagon and then Shanksville crashed; the mood in the clinic turned from stunned to frightened. When I told my husband the North Tower had just disintegrated, he didn’t believe me, thinking I was exaggerating the situation. When the second tower fell, he turned speechless.
When I picked my daughter up from school that day and told her what happened, her first thought was of all her aunts and uncles who lived in New York.
As a family, my husband, daughter, and I went to church that evening at an impromptu Mass. The priest said something that made me so angry to this day I get pissed repeating it. He said, because we were Catholics, and forgiveness was a cornerstone of our religion, we should forgive the evil people who did this and pray for them and the survivors.
I wanted to scream so loudly that I chose to be catholic; I was not born one. But was born an AMERICAN and would not, could not forgive the people responsible for this.
I was 41 years old on 9/11/01, and my life, and everyone else’s that I knew, changed forever.
America had always been this bigger-than-life, cock-sure, entity. I’d never known a time when people weren’t proud to say they were Americans. As a country, we had a big ego, but it was richly deserved. We thought we were indomitable; indestructible; unable to be hurt.
All that changed in a matter of hours on a beautiful Tuesday morning.
Everyone I knew who still lived in New York lost someone that day. My husband lost a guy he’d gone all through school with – an NYC transit officer who’d responded to the callout. My step-mother still worked in Manhattan in Times Square. Living in New Jersey, she had no way to get home that day because all transit was shut down and the city was closed to incoming traffic.
Two of my sisters-in-law lived in Garden City, a town in Long Island where a majority of the employees of Cantor Fitzgerald lived. CF lost hundreds of employees when the plane hit the first tower.
But it didn’t matter if you knew someone who’d perished that day or not. We were all sisters, brothers, mothers, fathers that day.
And we all suffered.
The NYC firefighters and police officers who ran into those burning towers were, and still are, heroes. The hospital workers and EMS crews who flew to the area when the buildings were still burning to aid the afflicted were, and still are, heroes. The thousands of New Yorkers who helped one another that day, total strangers, all are heroes.
I watched, as did the world, when both towers came down.
I watched, as did the world, when the cleanup began, and the search for survivors turned to a retrieval of bodies.
I watched, as did the world, when funeral after funeral, tribute after tribute, and story after story of survival and loss and kinde4ss to strangers played across the media for months.
And I watched, as did the rest of the world, as these brave heroes did this:
That day, America lost so much more than two steel towers that formed the landscape of New York.
Wives lost husbands and husbands lost wives; brothers lost sisters; mothers lost children; friends were gone in an instant. Children lost parents.
And America, for just a moment, lost its indestructibility.
It’s hard to believe 25 years have gone by since that day because it is still etched so clearly in my mind. Every single moment of that day, every sound I heard broadcast on the news; the roar of the buildings coming down; the screech of the EMS vans and fire trucks. Every single sound and image is burned in my memory forever.
And I am still affected by it.
And I will be for the rest of my life.
Today, remember the fallen, pray for those who survived, and maybe do a random act of kindness for someone you don’t know, like all those New Yorkers did for strangers 25 years ago.
Peggy Jaeger, Author 