Always Remember/The Gift of Survival
It feels way less than 20 years ago I was in my apartment in lower manhattan when the first plane hit. My boyfriend at the time had the local news on in the background and he called to me in the other room, “Hey a plane crashed into one of the twin towers.”
I said, “Really? What an idiot, I gotta get to work.”
He said, “I don’t know, I’m not sure that was an accident.”
“What? Are you kidding? Who’d do something like that on purpose?”
It was a different time. I was a different person. I left the room, took a shower, made breakfast, started checking email to see what was coming. I didn’t see what was coming.
The second plane hit, and my boyfriend called me to look at the live news coverage, the images we won’t forget. “It wasn’t an accident.” He said.
I still had no idea what was really happening just a mile from me, a few blocks from the office I was so hot to get to. It seemed unreal, far away, even while my colleagues were texting me about police shutting us down and going into bunkers and don’t come in and chaos chaos chaos. I had my internet connection. I got back to work from home.
And so, there was the news story part of it, the deaths, the war, the politics, but so much, for me, the personal impact part of it. In the coming months and years the realization that my job did not love me back, that life is precious and unpredictable, that a fairly big gap existed between what was important to me, what really mattered in my heart, and what I was spending my days doing.
And then there was the PTSD and fear of loud noises and the smell of burning and the collective fear — and worse, the collective denial and stiff upper lip type vibe — and then the artificial but still welcome collective banding together to get through it and the growing stronger in some ways as a result of it, and then of course the grieving, the awful grief of and for those left behind and the emergency workers and law enforcement and those working the pile and then the soldiers working to mete out justice or revenge or offense defense or whatever you want to call it. Just all of it, all those people.
And so twenty years later I find myself living a life I never would have dreamed of that day. It seems unimaginable how I could have gotten here, from there. But that day in not a small way seems pivotal for me, looking back, and for that I’m grateful.
Even as I honor and grieve for the losses of that day and it’s aftermath I celebrate the fact that I’m still here and I get to enjoy the gift of having weathered, survived, and been changed by past experiences, even tough ones. I’m gonna keep going.
www.livingeveryminuteofit.com
www.combatcovidstress.com
