story11443.xml

story11443.xml

born-digital

story

yes

no

2005-06-10

I was born and raised in New York, originally in the Bronx. On September 11th I had been living in Miami, Florida for 2 months and was seven months pregnant with my first child. My sister and I work carpooling to work and we heard a special announcement on the news that a plane crashed into one of the twin towers. Anyone from New York knows that that used to be nothing to be scared about since planes often went too low and barely missed the needle of one of the towers. We ignored it until they made the second annoucement a few mintes later and that's wehn we started getting nervous. By the time I dropped her off in front of her job, they had already announced the Pentagon's attack. I work only three miles from her so as soon as I got into my job, it was complete chaos. The television sets were on and we were watching the live footage. All phone lines were busy or down. No cell phones were working. You could see the people jumping from the towers. When the first tower fell, we lost all communication my sister and I even had with each other because of the volume of calls passing inside the U.S. When we got through, we were able to reach our mother who works by the Empire State Building still. We could hear the sheer terror and chaos in the background as her co-workers watched the people jumping from the windows. When the second tower fell, my mother's job finally evacuated her. After our call got cut off, we didn't speak to my mother or hear from her again until eight o'clock that night after she walked 200 block uptown to get to her Bronx apartment. All day we waited to hear from our friends because of the telephone problems. I left my job before noon because I began to experience an anxiety attack when we couldn't find anyone and we didn't know which of our friends had been there, or had been hurt. My husband's brother worked at the SouthStreet Seaport and was also unable to communicate with anyone. We watched the footage from home, and it was surreal. Like a bad car accident. You don't want to look, but you can't tear yourself away. At the end of the day, all of our close freinds and relatives had thankfully been either far away, or just plain lucky. My husband lost a close friend, one of the firefighters, a hero who went in when everyone else was running out. Another friend lost her fiance. Three days later I celebrated what I'll remember as literally the worst birthday I've ever had. We wre still miserable and depressed and it was the first news that we'd heard that my husband's friend was missing.
It's been four years almost. I still have a hard time even talking about that day. I record the annual specials and tributes because I want this memory to be etched into the minds of my kids when they're older. But I don't watch them. It's still way too emotional, too close to home. Whenever I start to regret the fact that I was thousands of miles away when it happened, instead of being in the city that I had been born and raised in, I'm reminded that everything has it's rhyme and reason. Tragic and heartbreaking as it is, 9/11 had to happen to remind us of our fragility and frailty. We had to lose those lives to remember and appreciate the ones we still have. I pray for the families, friends and loved ones of those lost. I pray for the children and wives and husbands the brave heroes left behind. And I hope that twenty years from now, when two new larger towers have been standing in place of the ones we lost, that my kids and other children not yet born or too young to know the disaster we've endured may be humbled by the memory of that day.