Earlier this week, my daughter Miranda wrote a reflection on 9/11. In it, she wrote,

I don’t know how I avoided it, but I’ve realized in the years since that I never saw the news footage from the tragedy, at least not directly. Despite living in Stamford, CT, a mere fifty miles from the city, the event was distant and removed. My parents, my friends, my teachers, they all knew people in New York that day, but no one I was close to had lost anyone.

It is interesting the read the reflections of someone who was eight years old when it happened, especially when you helped shape their experience. I promised her that I would write my own reflections, so here they are.

Her mother Amy and I had been divorced for a year or two when the attack happened. I had remarried and my new wife, Kim, was eight months pregnant. I had lost my full time job at a hedge fund and was doing various consulting on Wall Street. On September 11th, I was at home. I was reading things online and participating in a text based virtual world called LambdaMOO. There was a typical group of people hanging out in one of the chat rooms.

Kim had just finished her obstetrician’s appointment and was in the waiting room, making her next appointment and saw on the television in the waiting room the CNN coverage from when the first plane hit the twin towers. She called me up and told me to turn on the television. At the time, much of the commentary was about the size of the plane and questioning how this could have happened, some sort of accident or equipment malfunction. A similar discussion emerged in the chat room.

We stayed on the phone with one another, watching, as the second plane hit the twin towers. This time, it seemed clear that it was a commercial airliner and this was a deliberate attack. Online, people started talking about the Pentagon and about the military taking to the streets of Washington DC. There was a lot of fear and confusion. Kim came home and we watched the story unfold. We talked about what we should do.

I reached out to friends in New York to make sure they were alright. We all have those stories of friends who were running late for work or had an appointment elsewhere and were not at the twin towers when the attack happened. An old boss of mine was supposed to be there but he was chronically late for everything and so he was standing at the bus stop when the attack happened.

We received an email from the schools our daughters were at. They were continuing through the school day with a normal dismissal. They were not telling the children. They wanted to leave that discussion up to the parents. We spoke with my Amy. She taught at a school that went up through twelfth grade and there, the kids knew. Parents came throughout the day to pick up their kids. She agreed that she would pick up the kids and take them to my house, the hunting lodge. We would all talk about it then.

The email from the school had recommendations about how to minimize the trauma of 9/11 for the children. Remain as calm as possible. Reassure the children they are safe and loved. Limit their time watching the television. Amy would say something as reassuring as possible in explaining why we were all meeting at the hunting lodge, something like, something very important happened this morning and we need to all get together to talk about it.

It was agreed that I would do most of the talking, since I have years of experience of not showing emotions. The kids had questions. Had something happened to one of the pets? To someone in the family? Was this good news or bad news?

I started off talking about how as we get older, things happen that stick with us forever. People will ask, do you remember where you were when Neil Armstrong first set foot on the moon? I wanted to set a positive tone to some of our memories. Or when JFK was shot? We talked a little bit about this and how today would be a day like that for them. Miranda’s post this week illustrates this. We then described the attack on the twin towers as neutrally as possible. It was a challenge to keep the language of television out of our discussion. We told them everything would be okay, even though we did not know, at the time how or lives would change as a result. We talked about it like this until they got bored and wanted to do other things.

Kim, Amy, and I had agreed not to have the television on, except for the normal sort of stuff they would watch, like PBS kid’s shows, or video tapes. We didn’t get newspapers or magazines, so it was fairly easy to keep the gory details from the kids. Other parents were all agreeing to do the same thing.

It seemed like all of us had friends or co-workers that were killed in the attack. I’m not sure how many co-workers I lost. None of them were close friends and often, I only learned they had died weeks later, so I didn’t go to any memorial services. Some of the people in Miranda’s life lost very close friends. Yet we all kept it from our children.

There are a lot of other things that I can say about Miranda’s post, about the moment, about the weeks that followed, about how the history of the attack is being remember fifteen years later, about what it means to be an adult and parent when tragedy strikes, about privilege, about empathy, about what it means to say “Never Forget” about one event, but telling others to just get over traumatic events in their cultures, but these deserve other blog posts.