Sunday, September 11, 2011

September 11th...never forget

What do I write that hasn't been said yet? 

The year 2001 was by and far one of the most challenging years I have ever experienced.  In January, during my twenty-seventh week of pregnancy, I almost lost my then twenty-nine year old husband to illness.  In May, my beautiful daughter Angelina was born, bringing all the joys and challenges of a new baby.  My mother was in her final months of her long battle with cancer.  Life was crazy to say the least.

And then the towers fell...changing everything and everyone forever.  It was our generation's Pearl Harbor.

September 11th was like any other day.  Matthew had just begun fifth grade.  Angelina was a happy three month old.  Felix was working as a car salesman.  Our life was about as back to "normal" as we get.  I was a nursery school assistant teacher with my friends Dean and Debbie.  It was a normal day.  I keep using that word normal.  It was a perfect, cloudless late summer day.  The one's that you live for after a muggy summer.  It was perfectly...normal.

Dean had left the building for a few minutes before school started at nine.  He came back in, shocked, trying to explain to us what happened without alarming the kids.  At first we thought it was an accident, maybe a small plane went off course and hit the North Tower.  Then on live television, the South Tower was hit, and we knew it was no accident.  The Pentagon was hit and then the plane crashed in Pennsylvania.  At that point, all I could do was hold my daughter, wait for my son to be let out of school, and pray nothing more would happen to our nation.

I called Felix.  He saw it as it happened.  He told me to go home for lunch, but to call him first.  He didn't want me to watch it for the first time alone.  I got home, went into my bedroom called Fee and turned on the TV.  I watched in horror as they replayed the events of the morning.  I placed my hand on the screen and sobbed.  I cried in fear.  I cried for the people who went to work, never to go home again.  I cried for us.  I cried...because that was all I could do.

And now ten years have passed.  I lost my mother that December.  My daughter was diagnosed with a congenital heart defect in October and had surgery the following April.  She's now a happy, healthy fifth grader.  My nursery schooler's are in high school.  We have healed.  We have moved on.  Every September 11th we remember the lives lost and how our lives changed.  I could write pages on this...but I won't.  I only ask you this my friends...

Never forget.