Lest We Forget……

September 11, 2001

I think most of us can remember where we were during momentous occasions.  I still remember the death of John F Kennedy.  I was a little girl, living in a city in England, and I was shocked at the sheer violence of his death.  I can still remember asking my mother why someone had killed him.

Roll the clock forward nearly 38 years and I can clearly, oh, so clearly, remember the morning of September 11, 2001.  I had just gotten back from a business trip to Chicago.  Lou was on his way out of town to Boston.  His plane was a mid-morning plane, so we went to the office first.  When we arrived at the office there was a buzz that was never normally there.  A work colleague asked if we had heard the news.  What news? we asked.  Only to be told that a plane had gone into the World Trade Center tower.  We rushed to our office and I tried to log on to the internet.  It was impossible to pick up any news on any station.  The pages would not resolve.  I reverted to the radio that I had in my bottom drawer.  We sat, transfixed, listening to the radio coverage.  It was like listening to War of the Worlds.  Disjointed.  Disconnected.  Unreal.  Made even more unreal because we could not see the imagery, just hear it being described.  

I remember sitting at my desk, appalled, unwilling to believe what I was hearing.  When the second tower collapsed I remember sitting at my desk silently,  tears streaming down my face.  It was all so truly unreal.  By then it was evident what was happening, and the world seemed to stop turning.  A moment that felt quintesentially Kafkaesque.

Finally, it was over.  All planes had been grounded.  Lou called American Airlines to cancel his flight.  Then, a frantic phonecall from Carla, Lou's daughter.  We had dropped her at school that morning.  In the midst of what was happening, I did not think, at all, about how terrified she would be;  a young girl, in a new school, in a new country, knowing only that her father was due to fly out that morning.  Scared.  Alone.  Unable to contact us.  Finally, we connected, reassured her and silently walked to the office cafeteria.  We needed to do something and we knew it wouldn't be work.  We knew that there was a TV in the canteen and, as we turned the corner  the company was projecting live news coverage onto a massive screen in the canteen.  It was then that we saw the images that we had only imagined when listening to the radio.  Horrific images, with horrific consequences.

That day, all flag sellers in our town sold out of the stars and stripes – of all sizes.  A couple of days later Lou and I bought a flag for every country in which we had lived.  Each flag represented the lives of people from those countries that had been lost in 9/11.  Flags from the USA, England, Italy, South Africa and Australia.  Those flags stayed on my desk until I moved out of the office to work from home 5 years later.  They were a daily reminder to me to never forget.

Three days after 9/11, I finally got around to trying to start writing the report for the client that I had visited on 9/10.  It was so hard to concentrate.  So hard to try to make an appearance of normality.  However, it was essential.  I opened up my document and typed in the client name.  I then went to the internet to the client's website as I wanted to get the logo for my report.  The website held a single message.  Just a couple of paragraphs advising that they were trying to locate the members of their corporation that were housed in the twin towers and to please keep all of those people in our thoughts and prayers.  It was a stunning moment for me.  

What made the whole situation more real was that I had just started writing the report on disaster recovery.  I sat at my PC and thought.. how on earth can I sit and write a report about how to ensure safey of people and continuity of systems when this corporation had just gone through this first hand? What could I do, or say?  I sat there, re-living those images of 9/11 in my head and could not continue.  It would be another couple of days before I could do anything on that report.  I finally called my contact, based in Chicago and asked him what he wanted me to do.  Complete it, he said.  Complete it, I did.  Ever single consonant, vowel and numeric character constituted one of the hardest things I have ever done for work.

Over the coming days, so many people we knew had someone they knew who had been affected.  Even my niece in England. She had been at high school with male twins.  On the morning of 9/11  those twins were on the phone to each other at the time the second plane went into the towers, killing one of them.  Work colleagues who had been on their way to a client in the towers that had been spared.  Another colleague who had a cousin who worked in the towers, who had not.  It seemed that the "seven degrees" of separation were much closer than 7 degrees.

Even though it has been a decade since that fateful day, I remember that day, and the following days, more vividly than I remember what I did in the early part of this week.  

Then, there are passings which do not have such global significance, but still hold significance.  Today marks the one year anniversary of "Trish from Wisconsin's" passing.  Trish, we still miss you and your wonderful comments and love and caring for all those you came in contact with – physically and virtually.

And… on this 10th anniversary of 9/11/2001 – let us not forget.

For those of you who have read to the end of this post… go hug someone close to you and tell them you love them.  Life is so precious and so fleeting.  

Jaydee