My 9/11

I was getting my seven year old daughter ready for school when the phone rang.
"America's being attacked!" cried my best friend Kim.

"What? What are you talking about? Who's getting attacked? " My barely caffienated brain couldn't register what she was saying.

"Just turn the tv on!"

Moments later I watched with stunned disbelief as the second plane hit the second tower.  Fire and smoke billowed from the Twin Towers like erupting volcanoes.

I debated what to tell Rose, a mere second grader. She was eating her breakfast, oblivious that life in her country had just been altered. But I realized that I had best tell her something lest she hear scary rumors at on the school playground. Breathing deep and centering myself to be calm, cool and collected, I told Rose about the attacks. By then the Pentagon in Washington D.C. had been hit and the plane in Pennsylvania had gone down. She listened with all the earnestness a little girl  of tender wisdom could possess.

"Are we safe, Mom?" she wanted to know. "Is Portland safe?"  Yes, I reassured her, Portland is safe. Nothing will happen here.

"What about the president?" she asked next, which surprised me. "Is he safe?"  I told her that he was being taken to a safe place until he could return to the White House.

"Maybe he should come to Portland. He'd be safe here," she said. Her blue eyes, deep with wonder and childlike simplicity, made me smile for a moment.

For the rest of the day, while Rose was at school and I occupied Jeremy who was only four at the time with as many videos as he could watch, I viewed with the rest of America the devastation in New York, Washington D.C. and a Pennsylvania field where the third plane had crashed. Sporadic phone calls to friends and family, anxious feelings for my husband to come home from work. He had left early while the rest of us were still asleep. I couldn't call him at the factory where he works so I just had to wait until his shift ended and he came home. Yes, he had heard about it but not much. He didn't really know what was going on. "Every news channel is covering it," I told him.


In the days and weeks that followed, normal life was punctuated with gestures of solidarity with the lost and wounded Americans of that fateful day. One evening we sat in the yard with candles as did thousands of other Americans, a kind of collective moment of silence in the front yards of the nation to share out sorrow together. But I didn't really feel anything. I was mechanical. Going through the motions. I was shocked, yes, shocked along with the rest of the world, but my emotions seemed stuck. I cried a bit that first day, more out of fear than grief. But now as the country began moving forward with naming the dead, funerals and grieving, I felt hollow. My emotional innerscape seemed frozen over with an unusual degree of stoic steadiness. I thought long and hard about the events of 9/11. But I barely shed a tear other than the few that fell the morning I watched the Twin Towers collapse.

Many days later my city's paper published the names of the passengers of all the planes. I read the rosters, one by one, name by name. I pictured each one in my mind as name and age blurred together line upon line.  Then I got to the passenger list for United Airlines flight #175 from Boston, bound for Los Angelas which crashed into the south tower of the World Trade Center. Each name blurring into the next, my chest growing tighter from the implications of how many people were murdered that day.  And then I came to this listing:

Peter Hanson, 32, Sue Hanson, 35, Christine Hanson, 2...

Click here to go to the Hanson Family remembrance page

My eyes froze on this. A family. It must be a family. Christine, just two years old...a mom and dad...someone in America on 9/11 lost a son and daughter and grandchild, a sister, a cousin...in one fell swoop an entire family was annihilated. I could not bear it. The frozen river inside of burst with fissures as grief pressured it's way to the surface. Tears of quiet weeping fell like raindrops upon the newspaper, wetting the printed names of the dead. A family gone. I could not imagine.

My Rose was just seven years old when 9/11 happened. My son was four. Today they are 17 and 14. Christine Hanson would be 12, perhaps starting her second year of middle school. Maybe she would have had siblings by now. We'll never know.

Some will tire today of the tenth anniversary commemoration of this national tragedy. Some will wish for regular programming and for it to be over already.  But there are many more, many others who need to air out another round of sorrow and loss for loved ones who left too soon and unexpectedly.

I will never forget 9/11/2001. It is my generation's JFK.  

So where were you that fateful day? How did you first hear of the Twin Towers, the Pentagon and the Pennsylvania field crash?


Some 9/11 resources and remembrances for today:

• A site that lists all the names of those lost on 9/11

• Youtube has created a channel of 9/11 reflections. Here's one by graphic novelist Alissa Torres

• And here is a photo gallery provided by CNN that captures some of the images and memories of September 11, 2001. 

photo by Thomas E. Franklin