John's blog
That morning is one none of us will, or should forget. So here is one remembrance:
On September 11, 2001 at 8 am I was in a clinic waiting room in the Sylvester Cancer Center of Jackson Memorial Hospital in Miami. My husband Chaim had recently been diagnosed with terminal brain cancer, and we wanted to see the doctor, first thing.
The TV was tuned to the Today show while we waited to see the oncologist, and I watched the coverage in real time, including seeing the second plane hit the second tower.
The mood in the hospital room was strange, as many of the patients watching the attack were terminally ill and did not seem shocked by it all. There was a strange tamping down of feelings, perhaps because there was already such sadness in the room.
As my husband moved throughout the clinic taking blood and being checked, the tvs were on in all the waiting rooms. In one room as we sat, the first bulding fell. In the next room, the second building fell. We watched the Pentagon burn and saw that smoldering field in Shanksville, Pa. The coverage implied that the entire country was about to be hit in some physical way by still unknown terrorists.
Many of us sitting in those clinics felt a strange kinship with those who lost their loved ones in this horrific, unfair, random way. We knew that in a few months we would lose our loved ones sitting next to us. The mood was somber and empathic even more than frightening. Darkness visible.
Both of my sons lived in downtown New York, and while I sat there in the hospital so far away I could not get through to them. It was an altogether dreadful feeling.
That’s my story. But each of us has a different one, a mosaic of the awful morning that changed America.
We have become a family on this site. Most of us didn't know each other then: Where were you on that fateful morning, what did you feel, and what was happening around you?
If we can remember and act on our own feelings as Americans that day perhaps we can move forward to a better decade.
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Comments
I was sound asleep in a medical chair for a procedure. There was a TV suspended above me. When I woke up to see the Towers ablaze, I first thought it was a rerun of the movie, "The Towering Inferno."
I happened to be in a meeting at my sons' elementary school when the first word of the breaking news story was announced by a secretary who walked into the meeting and everyone in the school office knew several students had parents who worked at the World Trade Center. Fortunately, for those students their parents came home that day.
My mother was in KU Medical Center with my father who was on the table getting a pacemaker. The doctor had to call the staff back in and tell them to turn the TV off and pay attention to the current patient.
My then-husband had the same problem with his nursing staff. He had to repremand them, telling them that we have a REAL patient on the table that we could lose right now. Turn it off and get back to the task.
The day was definitely tense, everything felt ominous, but being on the West Coast, a continent away from the most immediate tragedies, it also felt like "hurry up and wait." We were wondering if the next shoe was going to drop on us, next.
I suppose I feel worse about the way 9/11 gave George Bush far too much causus belli, licence and what have you to wage war and curtail civil liberties and torture prisoners in our name than I do about the day itself.
rate.
I haven't talked or written about my day, that day, since it happened...maybe it's time, but I just am not sure I want to go back to the details necessary to re-tell.
The one person I knew then personally affected by a family member's death was Edie Lutnick, whose brother died that day, but I didn't know her very well, we met at a gathering here in Oregon years before 2001. After that gathering she sent me a postcard of the NYC skyline with those towers front and center, I found it years later and that's when I looked her up online and learned her brother had died. I keep that postcard on my frig to this day.
I do appreciate hearing about your experience though.....what a tough one for you, I appreciate your being willing to share with us.
Thanks again, all, for your input.
I was in my house that morning with my 2-year-old son. My older son had just started kindergarten. My sister, who lives in NYCity, called, yelling into the phone that a little plane had just hit the World Trade Center. I put the TV on and watched in horror, thinking a private plane had crashed and how horrible that was. On my way to bring my car in for my service appt., I learned that they thought it was terrorists. When I overheard a man at the service station say, "They got the Pentagon too," I remember thinking, "Who could make a sick joke like that at a time like this."
Once back at my house, I realized the true horror. As I watched the traumatic news coverage, my mother-in-law called in a panic, asking about my husband, who worked next to the Twin Towers. I reassured her, telling her that he left late and he was most likely not downtown yet. Then I tried to get in touch with him and was unable to for several hours. I was numb with fear until he finally called from a friend's office. He had been in the subway under the World Trade Center when the plane hit. He had to exit and run through the streets, watching the buildings fall and fleeing for his life through the ash. He recently told me that he ran by a huge piece of the plane's engine.
Sorry this is so long! Once I started it all came pouring out of me. My thoughts are with all the people who lost loved ones that horrible day.
The above para is how that whole day felt, altogether, undirected, and definitely surreal.
Rated for a memory still sobering.
I was on a train, on my way into downtown Chicago for work. I was over halfway downtown when many cell phones on the train started ringing. People were getting the news about the plane hitting the first tower in New York. A few minutes later, we plunged into the subway. People were nervously talking about the news they've just gotten and waiting, since we had no cell service in the tunnel.
When I got into the office a little while later, everything seemed off. I walked down the hall and saw a TV on in the conference room, very unusual first thing in the morning. One by one, co-workers gathered in the conference room, and stood around the TV watching as the second plan hit, mostly silent. It did not seem like it could possibly be real.
The bosses decided by 10:30 a.m. that the best thing was to send everyone home, because Chicago was under a security alert. I walked through the Loop on my way to the train. The streets were nearly empty and eerily quiet for a weekday morning. People on the train were subdued and unusually quiet.
I tried to reach a few friends on New York, but the calls would not go through. At the time, my sister-in-law's sister was a flight attendant for United. I wondered if she was on a flight at that moment and if it had been hijacked. We did not hear from her for two days, then we learned that she had been on a London-bound flight when the hijackings were happening. Her flight reached London without incident, but she had no way to get home until the suspension of flights was lifted.
One of the things I remember noticing in those days immediately after 9/11 was the quiet of the skies. We get used to seeing all those planes overhead going to and from O'Hare and Midway. When there were no flights, we became acutely aware of how eerily quiet it was in their absence.
A few days after 9/11, I went to a concert I'd been looking forward to for weeks - David Byrne. He'd driven in from New York, and he talked a little bit between songs about the shock of the week's events. He and the band played an excellent show, both passionate and subdued. A few people called out requests for "Psycho Killer." He ignored those requests. One guy kept calling out for it. David Byrne said, "No, I will not play that song tonight."
The sister who woke me up to tell me to turn on the TV is now dead of brain cancer, but we had no foreshadowing on 9/11.
Like you, I greatly like and admire Nikki.
We seem to have much in common in our roller coaster lives.
On that day I had delivered my children to school, returned home -- for some reason; it wasn't a customary practice -- I turned on the television sometime early that morning. Then I sat frozen on the foot of my bed, with my hand over my mouth in horror for the rest of the morning. Sometimes that afternoon I walked outside and it was like we were on hurricane alert because all of the neighbors were outside as if searching for proof that the world wasn't ending and that there were other people still alive, and, really, the only other time that happens is when a hurricane is coming and we're all on high alert.
I saw my neighbor, a dear friend, across the street and I ran from my porch to hers and we hugged tightly and cried together.
we had been living with friends on long island for a few months. my husband and I had moved back to New York and that month he had found a job in CT. because he was starting his job the next day we were packing him up and he was supposed to move into a hotel room up in Hartford that night. so there were already some tears being shed. we hadn't been seperated like this before.
we had the news on, on the radio in the kitchen plus the tv is always on in their house, always silent but on, in the livingroom. we: my husband and I and my best friends john and mickie heard the report of a plane hitting the tower. we rushed into the livingroom where the tv was on abc news, to see the tower with a huge hole and smoke trailing out.
my exhusband slash best friend john said, "it's a terrorist attack!" but he would have said that if a bicycle hit the trade center. he's kind of like that.
still, I think we knew something serious was up. there was a great deal of black smoke. and too many unanswered immediate questions. peter jennings looked worried.
we kept watching intently. then we watched as the second plane banked around and hit. then we knew.
There was a lot of fear here in Chicago. My office was within 1/2 mile of the federal office buildings, the Sears Tower and Chase Bank's Chicago headquarters, all of which were considered potential targets at the time.
I'd be curious to hear more about small town perspectives from that day.