It doesn’t seem like 20 years ago – the horrific, unbelievable day of Sept. 11, 2001.
But, I’m sure I’m not the only one who remembers it as if it were yesterday.
I had stayed up the night before until 3 a.m., finishing a Tom Clancy book that ends with a 747 flying purposely into the Capital building during a State of the Union speech. “This will give me nightmares,” I thought before I drifted off to sleep.
My mother woke me with the news that the nightmare was real. We sat stone-still in the living room, watching the horror and terror unfold. The thing was, so much was happening, and kept happening, that we were truly fearful it might not end before America was wiped off the map. Every half-hour, something else ghastly and unimaginable occurred.
I have rather an obsession with watching 9-11 documentaries on the sad anniversary. Wednesday night, I watched “The Women of 9-11” with Robin Roberts. I didn’t know much about the women of 9-11, and didn’t think it would be all that compelling. But it was.
The women included a firefighter, a police officer, a woman who was headed just one block away and became “Jane Doe #1” in a grisly incident of a falling aircraft piece. They included a woman on her first day of work at the Marriott, nestled between the towers, and a Port Authority secretary, working on the 64th floor, who was fated to become the last person pulled from the wreckage. She lay under a huge pile of concrete and steel for 27 hours before being rescued. Also, an Army colonel who was in the worst part of the Pentagon she could have been, when the third plane hit, and a television reporter who found herself in the midst of trying to survive, and then to tell, the story of her life. There was a forensic pathologist who ran to help, and has spent the past 20 years trying to identify the remains of more than 1,100 people.
Sadly, there were no women to tell the tale of Flight 93, which passengers commandeered and then crashed into a meadow in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. No one lived to tell that tale in person; it unfolded through relatives who reported on goodbye phone calls from their loved ones.
Every time I watch one of these documentaries, and see the devastation unfold again, I end up with tears in my eyes. It was just so awful, in a way worse than anything any of us have probably ever seen. So much sadness. So much fear. So much horror.
Then again, there is so much that is uplifting, and ironic and so much that fills one with hope for humanity. So much that gives one the impetus to push through adversity and endeavor to persevere and try to be a better person to our fellow men and women.
The women Roberts interviewed were so focused, so dignified, so seemingly unaware of their bravery. Every one of them has changed her life. Or, in the case of the woman hit by flying airplane debris, had it changed for her. She spends a lot of her life in a wheelchair now, but she has twin daughters, and a husband and life she loves. The reporter still reports, but she sticks to “soft” news and happy stories. The Marriott clerk joined the Air Force. The Army colonel proudly showed off her Purple Heart, but refused to take any credit for it, or her heroic deeds that day.
They certainly all feel very, very lucky. And very, very grateful. And that’s a wonderful thing … you gotta love it.
Never forget!
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