nmah3846.xml

nmah3846.xml

born-digital

story

yes

no

2002-09-11

On the morning of 9/11/2001, my two-year-old son had just spent his first night away from his parents. He was unconscious, lying in a pediatric intensive care unit following a 12-hour surgery to reconstruct his right foot which had, a month earlier, been shattered by a falling garage door. The doctors had said there was no reason for us to stay at the hospital after the surgery was successfully completed, and that, if anything, we would need what was left of the night of September 10 to rest up before a predicted long week in PICU.

We live in the Central timezone. At 7:30 AM our time, I awoke and rolled over to phone the PICU nurse, who gave me a positive report on my son's condition. Breathing a sigh of relief, I fell back asleep. When my husband and I opened our eyes again around 8:15 AM, I turned on the TV to see the media replays of what we will all remember forever. By that time, both towers had been struck and had not yet fallen.

We watched our television in horrified silence. At that moment, not knowing whether this was just the first of a possible series of attacks on our country's locales of great importance, I feared for my son's life as he lay in one of the world's preeminent children's hospitals near the center of the undisputed capital of petroleum-based energy.

After frantically phoning the PICU again to assure ourselves of my son's safety, we arrived at the hospital where security was heightened, and there laid my slumbering boy, tubes, wires, and all. In the PICU waiting room where families gathered in limbo as their children teetered in various states between life and death, the television droned the horror on and on and on. I recall it now as the most difficult and lengthy day of my life.

In the end, my son was fully recuperated. Whether or not I have remains to be seen.

The day had very clear ripple affects on my life.

In the days immediately following, I was preoccupied with caring for my son's medical and related emotional needs. The trauma of 9/11 echoed in the back of my mind, begging for attention, but I had no time to cry.

The following months of recuperation and rehabilitation for my son were costly and hard, financially and psychologically, for all of us. Only two months after 9/11, my husband and I separated and are now divorcing. While our marital problems leading up to the dissolution began long before that date, there was something about the combination of my son's accident a month before in August, all of the resulting hospitalizations, and the horror of the attacks.

The 9/11 attacks made me feel as though I needed and still need to move more consciously through my life, to make even more of an effort to live each day, each moment as if it could be my last. Dissolving a marriage that had been troubled for years felt and still feels like the only right thing to do in light of those impressions.

I felt a similar impact from 9/11 in relation to my profession as an Internet writer. I had for 4 years served as an online community guide and "guru" to people who were struggling with infertility. After 9/11, I found it difficult to minister to their needs, which now seemed to me so incredibly pale in light of what the attack victims and their loved ones were experiencing. That sense of disconnection from the community I served, combined with the increase in marital problems and the tasks of caring for my son, led to my eventually leaving that position.

From there, my life has evolved out of necessity into something a bit different than before 9/11. After losing my primary job, financial issues became more pressing. I no longer am a homeowner. We are besieged with hospital unpaid bills from my son's hospitalizations. I am a single mother.

But my son is healthy and happy. We have something to eat every day. We exist in relative peace and freedom. We try to live each day as if it were a gift.

To me, the most important thing is the clear message this event sends on the impermanence of life, of what we perceive to be our reality. That all we have is right now.

I truly believe that if we all carried that message away from 9/11, there would be no need for "war" on terrorism.

No, I did not fly the American flag. Except for displaying it outside my front porch on July 2 of this year, I have not joined with the many, many people who have taken to flying flags from their homes, businesses, and cars.

While I know that the attacks were based on religious fanaticism and disturbed nationalism, and that the attacks were aimed specifically at symbols of the United States, I do not feel that meeting such insanity with a sense of fervor of any kind is constructive.

I do not look unkindly on those who display flags, but I feel that for most of them, it is merely a reflex, a reaction against the affront. Feeling strongly that reactions are usually not nearly as positively effective as responses, I do not feel the need to fly a flag.