On September 11, 2001, I was just barely 8 years old. As hard as I try, I can’t tell you much from that day.
- I can remember sitting in the back seat of my mom’s Honda Accord next to my brother, legs and back pressed up against the scratchy, mystery man-made material, which somehow was always crusted with who knows what. (I’d go on to drive this car until the brakes nearly gave out, more than a decade later.)
- I can remember being let out of school early, although not my teacher, not my principal, not my mother would tell us what was going on.
- I can remember sitting behind the sofa in the living room, stealing glances at the television where my mom and sister were glued, trying to piece what was happening together.
Eventually, my mom explained that something bad had happened and we were going home, but we were going to be safe. We were going to be just fine.
In the years that followed, obviously, I learned more and more about what happened on that fall day in 2001. For a few years from high school and into college, it became a sort of obsession, trying to piece together all of the facts and accounts of history I had hypothetically witnessed, even though I was 8, and living in Wisconsin, and didn’t in fact witness a thing.
When I was a junior in high school, I was taking a history class on the 1960s (a separate, but equally captivating obsession of mine) and was assigned the task to talk to someone who was alive when John F. Kennedy was assassinated. I sat across the kitchen table from my Nani and barraged her with questions on where she was, what she was doing, what she remembered.
Her answers were short and I found them so frustrating — what do you mean you can’t remember every second of that day? — but now, thinking back, I am struck with the realization that someday, I will be seated across the table from my child (or grandchild) asking me the same questions about 9/11. And I won’t have anything but the cloudy memories above. After all, I was eight.
Today, I am in Lexington, Kentucky. My heart is heavy with the weight of those who lost their lives almost 20 years ago, and also heavy with the reality that so many more have lost their lives in the nearly 20 years since.
I’m not sure if I can actually fathom the amount of loss or fully appreciate how people came together and rebuilt. I’m not sure if I have a clear answer on where we’re supposed to go from here, beyond honoring their lives on this day and every day moving forward. I’m not sure if I’m even supposed to have those answers.
But I am sure that we owe a large thank you, such a large thank you that words seem unable to actually do it justice, to all of the police, firefighters, first responders who risked their lives that day and every day, in face of emergencies small and cataclysmically large. I am continually inspired by their stories, honored by those who speak with me, and determined to move forward and continue my own small piece of this unification puzzle.
Onward.
