nmah4921.xml

nmah4921.xml

born-digital

story

yes

no

2002-09-13

I wrote the following account on the anniversary of September 11 as a record for my children when they get old enough to start asking questions about what happened that day. We live in Falls Church, Virginia.

09/11/02
to Isaac

Today you are 17 months old, a clever, friendly, good-natured boy. Your little brother is not yet born; I am 31 weeks pregnant and can feel his strong kicks as he begins to feel cramped in his tight quarters. We are a happy little family. But today is the first anniversary of a terrible day, one that changed forever the world that you and your little brother will be growing up in. Since you were such a tiny baby when it happened I thought I would take a moment to write down what happened that day.

Last September 11 began as all of our days here at home did -- you woke up around 8:30 and played quietly in your crib until I came and got you. You were 5 months old, and were going bald because you insisted on rubbing your head against the crib bumper. Your eyes were still dark blue, and we kept waiting for them to turn brown like your Mommy and Daddy's eyes... but they never did. After our morning routine I put you down in the playpen in my office, where you kept yourself occupied while I got to work.

At 9:50 I got an email from Sa'id, our trusty coding supervisor. "Has the world gone mad?" he asked. I didn't know what he was talking about, so I tried to access the Washington Post online to see what was going on. Three minutes later I got an email from Denise in Indianapolis asking if we DC folks were ok, at which point I stopped trying to get to the swamped Post website. I picked you up and went into the living room of our Pinecastle house and turned on CNN. I held you tightly on my lap, watching in horror.

The Twin Towers of the World Trade Center were hit, and we watched live pictures of the smoke pouring out from them into the sky. And then the first tower fell. I held you tightly and cried; all I could think about was how huge that building was and how many people must have been inside. As I listened to the commentators I heard that a third plane had hit the Pentagon, just a few miles from our house. Rumors were running wild, no one knew how many planes were still in the air and if any of them were potential threats. There was talk of one plane above Pennsylvania that appeared to be headed for DC.

That's when I started trying to get your father on the phone. His office was at 15th & I streets in NW DC, just a couple of blocks from the White House. I just knew in my heart that that plane over Pennsylvania was headed for one of our DC landmarks -- either the Capitol, or the Mall, or, as I most feared, the White House.

I tried for several minutes before I could get a line through to downtown DC. Daddy had been watching the news on his little TV set in his office. The phone lines had been jammed, so he had not been able to call us. He was not yet certain how he could get home, since the Metro was temporarily shut down. I was nervous about him being downtown, and I was equally nervous about him riding the vulnerable Metro, but I really, really wanted him home with us.

Just then, we received word that the fourth plane had crashed in Pennsylvania. The TV was full of rumors about other planes in the air, about terrorists on the loose, about bombs here and bombs there... I just wanted our family to be all together in one place.

Your Daddy made it home sometime before noon. All of downtown DC was evacuating, so it took some time for him to get home on the Metro. By then, of course, the damage had all been done -- the two towers had collapsed, the Pentagon was burning, and Flight 93 had disintegrated into a Pennsylvania meadow. All planes had been cleared from US airspace and the sky was clear, empty, and quiet.

With your Daddy home and you down for a nap, I headed to the local blood bank at Inova Fairfax Hospital. I (like you) am type O-, the "universal donor", and at that time we had hopes that there would be many survivors who would be arriving at NY and DC hospitals for treatment and in need of blood. When I got there, there was already a line well out the door and a 6-hour wait. Spontaneous volunteers had organized themselves into little helper brigades, passing out water and snacks to those waiting in line and handling paperwork. I could see that they already had more people in line than they could possibly process by the end of the day, so after an hour or so I took the paperwork and left for home, intending to return the next day. Of course by then we knew that there would be no influx of wounded survivors, no need for extra units of blood... no one to help.

That afternoon was spent in our living room, watching the uninterrupted coverage on the news channels. Those channels not carrying news coverage simply ceased their usual broadcasts and instead displayed messages of sympathy. It all seemed so surreal, so impossible on a clear September day. We watched endless replays of the towers falling, falling -- eventually, near the end of the day, the news channels all seemed to agree that enough was enough, and they stopped showing footage of the burning, collapsing towers. After that first horrible day, the images of the falling towers had been burned in everyone's memory and it was pointless to show them on the television any longer; we almost never saw them after that.

We went for a walk around the neighborhood early that evening, while the sun was still up. We pushed you around in your stroller and talked about the events of the day, and what it all meant for the world, for our country, for our little family. I distinctly remember that an airplane suddenly appeared low in the sky -- a large, loud, unmarked official aircraft of some kind. It seemed so wrong that a plane should be flying that low over DC, not on that day. We lived on the flight path for both National and Dulles so planes were an everyday, even everyhour, occurrence above our neighborhood. But on that day, that plane was just so entirely out of place that I kept my eyes on it until it disappeared from sight.


Neither your father nor I had any feelings of rage or had any thoughts of retaliation that day or in the days to come, we were just filled with shock and sorrow. I didn't feel any kind of new vulnerability, or lose some kind of false sense of security, or any of those things that people talked about following the attacks. All I felt was pure grief. For days thereafter I would wander into the living room and hold you tightly as I watched the latest news, and the tears would begin all over again. All those people, gone. Gone, just like that, on a clear September morning.

One of my employees, Mary Ann Prokop, lost her brother Terry Lynch at the Pentagon. On the 12th she sent the following message to all of her co-workers:

I keep hearing about retaliation, etc. against the people who did this, and I
am so saddened by this. Our world needs to soften. Please pray that God finds
a way to soften the hearts of the people responsible.
Pray that there is no more bloodshed.

And, on the first anniversary of that terrible day, this is what your Daddy and Mommy wish for you and your brother -- a world at peace.