Remembering 9/11

I’ve been up late, recently, between meetings and work, so I haven’t had a chance to sit down and write up my memories of September 11, 2001. For me, Kim was at the obstetrician’s office. She was having one of those final checkups a few weeks before her due date. Fiona was kicking around inside of Kim’s tummy, and Mairead and Miranda were off at school.

Kim called from the ob/gyn office. As she was setting up her next appointment, she glanced at the television in the waiting room, and saw that a plane had crashed into the World Trade Centers. She called me, and I turned on the TV and watched as a second place hit the towers, as I talked with Kim on the phone. What was going on? What did it mean?

I logged into a text based virtual world that I had been active with. I talked with friends there. Some were from Washington, DC and were talking about events there. We gathered, as family, my wife and I on the phone, my friends online, and all tried to make sense out of it.

Now, seven years later, many of us are telling our stories online. Cromely’s World has a blog post up, pointing to a post on Flyer Talk about one passenger’s experience. He also has a post about his experience flying a few years later as well as his mother’s experience in New York City on 9/11.

Yet the story that jumped out most at me to day was, Soap Sushi’s story. She was in the hospital after having a c-section a few days before when her first daughter was born. Her first daughter is about a month older than Fiona. She talked about seeing the images of the planes hitting the World Trade Centers being repeatedly shown on television. She talked about going into bankruptcy and the darkness that surrounded her.

It is a powerful blog post that I urge everyone to read.

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