My 9/11 Blog

This post was originally written on 9/11/2012

  I wasn't going to write about the anniversary of 9/11 today.  As a general rule, I don't hold much with anniversaries in general.  Something worth celebrating or remembering, to me, deserves to come into a person's mind naturally, whenever it chooses to, and be honored at all times equally rather than having special importance invested in it just one day a year.  I am horrible about remembering birthdays, wedding anniversaries, and to visit the graves of my loved ones a year after they died for exactly that reason.

     Despite the fact that all the tributes and stuff about 9/11 kind of bug me, I am sitting here with time to kill before the kids go to bed, and recent events have had that period in history on my mind anyways, so I'll go ahead and write about it a little.  I don't feel the need to inspire anyone, or chastise them to never forget, or any of that nonsense, I'm just going to spend a little time reflecting on what those weeks and months surrounding 9/11/01 meant to me and my loved ones, and think about how much our lives have changed over the last 11 years.

      September 11, 01 happened to fall within the week leading up to my 21st birthday.  The year before that had seen my mother and siblings move in with my fiancee and I, and the six months following that experience had left my relationships with mom and the fiancee rather strained.  I escaped back to the place that had always felt safe to spend some time deciding what I wanted MY life to look like, without the influence of anyone else's needs and dreams for the future dictating the terms- I was living with my great grandmother.  All I had figured out by that week was how to stop saying yes to everybody all the time, but I hadn't gotten much beyond that.  I was stuck knowing that I didn't want to get back on the track I'd been on, but unsure of what other track to take.

     The night before the planes hit, I had been out late at a party.  I was working in a group home 3rd shift then, and I didn't have any plans to get out of bed until late afternoon.  My plans changed when the phone rang and Crazy Gramma came into my room at the same time.  The phone was my ex-fiancee, gramma had just turned on the television to get the weather and seen the news coverage.  I spent the next 8 hours staring at the TV with the phone pressed to my ear.  My ex-fiancee was waiting for news about his father, who lived in NYC and had a meeting scheduled in one of the towers for that morning.  I could not tell you what I thought during those hours, waiting to hear whether someone I still cared about had lost his father to that tragedy.  I don't remember.  I just recall sitting there next to my gramma, filled with a sick sense of dread.  Even the relief that I know I felt when his father was finally reached by telephone was dulled.  I do remember experiencing an eerie kind of deja vu, sitting there glued to the screen next to gramma, in almost the exact same positions that we had spent the summer of 94 watching the OJ Simpson trial.  Eventually it was time to get up and leave for work, and time started to move again.

     I didn't learn any life lessons from 9/11.  I wasn't inspired to be a better person, or join the military, or even to buy an NYFD t-shirt with the proceeds to benefit victims of the attacks.  I continued to be the confused 21 year old girl that I had almost been on September 10th.  There was a brief, ill-advised attempt at reconciliation with the ex-fiancee that came out of our shared feelings of fear and relief that day, but it didn't even last until Halloween.  My life moved on, maybe kick started by the events of that day, but probably much like it would have anyways.  What that day did give me, that I will never forget, it one last day of real togetherness with my gramma.  That was the first time since my childhood, and the last time that I can recall as an adult, that we just sat together- for hours, with neither of us talking or questioning whether the other one had done this or remembered that.  Not too long after I moved out into a place of my own (following a fight with her about me killing the dog that was hers but not hers, remind me to tell you about that some time- it's funny.) and I met and began my life with Thing One's father that got me to where I am today.

     I've never forgotten 9/11.  I probably never will.  It takes very little to bring it to mind for me because my memories of that day, and those events, are wrapped up tightly with the memories I have of the people I experienced that with.  Whenever I see a news crawl across the bottom of the screen, and I'm sitting with my head tilted a certain way, I can see gramma out of the corner of my eye, and I smile.  When I saw on Facebook that ex-fiancee and his wife just had their first child last week, I was reminded of that day, and I got a good feeling from remembering that his father is still here to meet his little namesake.  I suppose if it comforts others to post pictures and reminders on the anniversary every year then they should go ahead and do that, but I don't really need that to remember the important things about that day.