story6932.xml
Title
story6932.xml
Source
born-digital
Media Type
story
Date Entered
2002-09-12
911DA Story: Story
I was sitting at home on maternity leave having just had my daughter three weeks earlier. I was rocking my beautiful baby girl and was watching the Today Show on NBC. They were showing the WTC and one of the towers was smoking. Katie Couric was saying that there was a fire of some kind at the World Trade Center. I called my friend Mary and told her to turn on the television because something horrible was going on...all of those people above the fire floors were trapped. We were asking each other how those people would get out when the announcers said that it was believed that a plane flew into the building! "How off must that pilot have been to fly into a building! There must have been a malfunction!" As we are saying this - live on television - a second plane flies into the second tower. This is no accident! I was not comprehending that it was a second plane. I thought that maybe they had some footage of what had happened to the first tower and they were showing it in replay...but no...this is not that tower, it's the other one...what is going on??? I didn't get it at first. Then, "Oh my God! Mary, what just happened here?" We both started to cry. We had just witnessed hundreds of people die. We didn't see their faces, we didn't know there names, we didn't see their physical demise...but we felt it! We felt the pain and the shock and the horror and the disbelief.
My father was in high school the day that JFK was assassinated. He wrote about the kids, the mood, the astonishment at the realization that their world had just changed. He remembers that day and exactly where he was. I remember exactly what I was doing and where I was when the Federal Building in Oklahoma City, OK was bombed. I will remember that day. And, I will remember this one as well. My son was 9 when his world changed from an impenetrable nation to a vulnerable one. He will remember. My daughter was 3 weeks old, she will never know the world of "no fear." I pray that they will always know a world of hope.
My father was in high school the day that JFK was assassinated. He wrote about the kids, the mood, the astonishment at the realization that their world had just changed. He remembers that day and exactly where he was. I remember exactly what I was doing and where I was when the Federal Building in Oklahoma City, OK was bombed. I will remember that day. And, I will remember this one as well. My son was 9 when his world changed from an impenetrable nation to a vulnerable one. He will remember. My daughter was 3 weeks old, she will never know the world of "no fear." I pray that they will always know a world of hope.
Collection
Citation
“story6932.xml,” September 11 Digital Archive, accessed December 17, 2025, https://911digitalarchive.org/items/show/11074.