“…for those of us who lived through these events..."

the only marker we’ll ever need is the tick of a clock at the 46th minute of the eighth hour of the 11th day." - George W. Bush, President of the United States.

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I have been looking at pictures and reading transcripts from September 11. The New York Times sued the city of New York to have records made public, and CNN has pretty in-depth coverage. What shakes me up all over again, what makes me remember the horror of that day, my own personal little bit of hell that day, is that in every single shot of the towers – before, during, and after the day – you can clearly see the building where my brother worked, 3 World Financial Center.

I was at work that morning, working on some manual for MRI software. I remember one of the company’s owners sending out a company-wide email saying that one of the towers had been hit with an airplane. At that point we all thought it was an accident – a pilot having a heart attack or something like that. Tragic but not terrifying. Within minutes we heard about the second plane and slowly it dawned on us that this was no accident. Someone ran home and brought back their TV and set it up in the reception area.

I knew my brother worked in Manhattan, and the name of his building, but until I Mapquested it I had no idea where exactly he was…less than a tenth of a mile from the World Trade Center – just across the West Side Highway, a road I had driven on, a multi-lane highway to be sure but just a road. I found out later that the WTC subway stop was where he got off every morning to go to his office. His fiancée worked in the same building, about ten floors up.

I remember clearly sending him an email: “Are you ok?” I never got a reply – he never got the email – his company’s backup servers were in one of the towers. I called his cell phone; I called his apartment; I called his fiancee’s apartment. I couldn’t get through. I called my husband at work – he knew exactly where Drew’s office was but hadn’t wanted to tell me during our first phone conversation, when every thing was just happening. I didn’t have Rebecca’s parents’ phone number; I couldn’t get through to my other brother in New Jersey.

I stood in the office and watched the entire thing – the networks showed, over and over again, the planes flying into the towers. I remember vividly when the first tower began to crumble, and the panic in the newscaster’s voice. I stood there, my knuckles pressed to my lips, tears streaming silently down my face. I was sick to my stomach, I couldn’t think straight, I had no idea what else was going to happen. I do remember people going on about their business – proposals had to go out, there were deadlines to be met. I was the only person in that small office who had any sort of personal connection to the tragedy, as far as relatives or friends on site. I remember being angry that people were not more upset, more horrified. I did no work; I stood in front of the TVs and cried and speed-dialed my brother’s cell over and over again.

At some point, I called my babysitter. Simon was about nine months old, and was watched by a friend in our neighborhood, across the city, through tunnels and across a bridge. Downtown was evacuated and shut down; to this day my brother-in-law swears they saw the plane that crashed in Somerset fly over downtown. At that point, flights had been grounded, it would have been one of few planes still in the air. I knew it would take hours to get home, and Mrs. B. told me Si was fine, I should stay put. Her husband was a city firefighter; arguably Si was safer with her at their house anyway. Dan decided to stay at his office as well, for much the same reasons – it would take hours to get home.

Finally, around noon or so, maybe a little earlier, my older brother called me from South Jersey. He had had a phone call from a friend of Rebecca’s who lived in Philly. Drew had managed to get a phone call through to her somehow, after trying us and Rebecca’s family with no luck, and told her to call everyone to let them know he and Rebecca were safe. He had been in his office when the first plane hit. They were told it was safe to stay. Rebecca actually saw the second plane hit, out of her office window. She and Drew met down in the lobby and headed out toward the river, and uptown to their apartment on 14th St. Drew said he just headed to the river and kept moving; many people stayed and watched, and he was sure that wasn’t safe. He thought the towers were going to come down, but sideways rather than pancaking, and he wanted to be long gone by then. The air was full of smoke and dust, he could see people falling, and there were helicopters everywhere. He had no idea if they were police helicopters, or more terrorists, or what; he just wanted to be away from there. They were safely home before the first tower collapsed but it was hours before he could get a phone call through to anyone.

I finally left work around 4, managed to get home – I don’t even remember the drive home. I picked up my boy. The sky was blue, blue, blue---the day was gorgeous. There were no visible airplanes overhead, just the drone of Army planes. I got home, turned on the TV, and clutched my boy. I cried and watched the television coverage long into the night, switching back and forth between CNN and Fox (which had surprisingly good, non-sensationalistic coverage). The lack of airplanes that night and the next day or so was eerie. We lived under a flight path for the airport and were used to having airplanes fly over a lot, sometimes every 45 seconds for an hour or so. I was used to hearing planes that sounded like they were going to land on my roof, and being able to look up from my front yard and identify the airline of the plane. I *never* thought I’d be happy to hear an airplane fly over my house again, but when finally they were back up in the air, I was.

My brother doesn’t talk much about that day. His now-wife will get up and leave the room if you even approach the subject. I never asked and never found out exactly what they saw and smelled and heard; I don’t think I want to know. Drew worked in Jersey for awhile and then his company moved to Midtown. Rebecca’s new job took her past Ground Zero every day for the next couple years. I know she was relieved when finally the company she worked for closed their Manhattan office and she could work from home.

It turns out that my husband’s college roommate (the one who is coming to visit us this week) was scheduled for a meeting in the WTC that morning, but he had to skip it for some reason. His two co-workers who attended the meeting died. It took him hours to get back home to Connecticut; he was one of those businessmen we saw all over the news, covered in grey dust, walking through Manhattan in their shirt sleeves, trying to get home to their families. He doesn’t talk about that day either. My best friend from college had to walk from her Manhattan office to New Jersey before she could finally get the rest of the way home on public transportation.

Several weeks later an office friend and I were out for lunch and I mentioned something about the WTC. She laughed and nonchalantly said, “Wow, I guess I don’t even really think about it anymore.” Maybe she was just young and stupid, or innocent beyond belief. No one she knew personally had been affected by the events of that day. But I could not wrap my brain around the fact that she could forget about it. I still thought of it every single day. I still think of it often, although the horror has been dulled by time, and by subsequent events like the war on Iraq and the financial tussles of the victims’ families, and the design competition for the new buildings. The events of that day have been sanitized and media-ized for the comfort of the American public. The bombings in London brought back some of that horror and fear and heart-lurching sickness. I can still see those posters of the “missing” plastered all over walls and telephone poles and every available surface. I can still remember waiting for my phone to ring. I am so glad, every single time I talk to my brother or his wife, that it did. Thank God he didn’t actually work in the towers, or I’d probably have had a heart attack waiting for news. Until I had my children, my little brother was the only person I could imagine dying for.

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Me, me, me -- and thousands dead. But that is what happened today. Now it is about us, and not just about them.
- Roger Ebert [whose wife and stepdaughter were in New York at the time at the attacks -- September 12, 2001]