September 11, 2001 - My Story

September 11, 2001, began for me with a phone call. I was still asleep when my oldest daughter, Suzanne, called from New York. She was crying. “Mom, a plane hit the World Trade Center.” I was still trying to wake up and understand what she was saying when my mind went somewhere strange, but very real.

I had just discovered the Left Behind book series and had recently read the first book. In it, at the moment of the Rapture, an airplane crashes into a tall building. So when Suzanne called me from New York that morning and told me an airplane had hit the World Trade Center, that was honestly my first thought. The Rapture. It sounds strange now, knowing everything we know about what happened on September 11, 2001. But in those first moments, none of us knew. We were trying to make sense of something that simply did not make sense. And for one brief moment, my mind reached for the only reference it had.

I immediately called my husband, Joe, who was at a client site in Sacramento. It was not even 6:00 in the morning there, and he had not woken up yet. “Turn on the television.” There really wasn’t anything else to say. None of us understood yet what we were watching.

Next, I walked down the hall to check on my babies. That whole Left Behind, Rapture thought was still circling around in my mind, and I needed to see them. I needed to know they were there. They were both snuggled down in their beds, sleeping peacefully and completely unaware of what was happening in the world outside. Safe.

I went back to my room and continued watching the coverage. At 6:03 Arizona time, the second plane hit the South Tower. And that changed everything. One plane could somehow still be an unimaginable accident. Two planes meant something entirely different. I kept watching the horror unfold on television, coverage that would become almost the only thing shown on most television channels for the next several days.

My friend Mary Jo and I managed a Mothers of Preschoolers group — MOPS — every Tuesday at church, and September 11, 2001 was a Tuesday. So technically, September 11 was no different. Except, of course, everything was different. I had already decided Kaitlin would not be going to school that day. I quickly began reaching out for additional childcare providers because I assumed I would not be the only mother making that decision. I was right. I’m not sure any of us sent our children to school that morning.

We still held our MOPS meeting, although I honestly have no memory of the meeting itself. None. I’m sure we tried to follow our normal schedule. I’m sure we tried to keep things moving and create some sense of normalcy for everyone. I doubt we were very successful. How could we have been?

The world we had gone to bed on Monday night no longer seemed to exist Tuesday morning. At some point that morning I found myself at church with our pastors, David Eckert and Byron Banta, the three of us standing in front of a television watching the unimaginable unfold. I remember watching a tower come down and simply being in shock. Twenty-five years later, I cannot tell you whether we were watching it happen live or watching one of the countless replays that began almost immediately. Memory does funny things with time. But I remember where I was standing. I remember who was standing beside me. And I remember the feeling. How could a building that enormous simply disappear before our eyes?

Meanwhile, Joe was stranded in Sacramento. He acted quickly and managed to get a rental car. He already had meetings scheduled in Los Angeles over the next few days, and with air travel shut down and no way of knowing when flights would resume, there really wasn’t another option. He drove to Los Angeles, attended his meetings, and eventually drove the rental car home to Arizona. I kept my girls home with me. And then I watched television. For days. Like millions of Americans, I watched the same horrifying images over and over, always wondering:

What happens next? Four planes had crashed. Nearly 3,000 people would ultimately be gone. Buildings that had defined the New York skyline had disappeared before our eyes. The Pentagon had been attacked. Another plane had gone down in a field in Pennsylvania. We were stunned. There had been other acts of terrorism in our lifetime, but nothing on American soil of this magnitude since Pearl Harbor — and many of us living in 2001 had not even been a glimmer in someone’s eye in 1941.

I remember sitting in front of that television completely overwhelmed by what I was seeing. And then something else started appearing. American flags. Everywhere. Where did all those flags come from? They hung from houses and businesses. They flew from cars. They appeared on shirts and signs and storefronts. Patriotism was everywhere.

For a while, there was this extraordinary feeling that we were all kindred spirits. We were Americans, and someone had hurt us. We were angry. We were heartbroken. We were frustrated. We were insulted. And somehow, through all of it, we were together.

But something else happened on September 11 that I don’t think we completely understood at the time. The sense of peace, safety and security many of us woke up with on September 10 was gone. And I don’t think we ever completely got it back. My children still living at home were almost six and four years old. Their memories of September 11 itself are thankfully vague. I thank God for that.

What they do remember is how life changed afterward. Joe traveled constantly for work, and before September 11 the girls and I would go into the airport and meet him at the gate when he came home. Most weeks, we were right there waiting for Daddy when he stepped off the airplane. Then suddenly we couldn’t do that anymore. Instead of walking into the airport, we circled it. Even all these years later, my youngest still mentions how much she missed meeting her dad at the gate.

It seems like such a small thing. It wasn’t. Because September 11 changed thousands of enormous things, but it also changed millions of tiny things like that. No matter who planned it, who carried it out, or what they hoped to accomplish, they didn’t destroy everything they wanted to destroy. But they did take something from us. They damaged our sense of safety. They changed the way we looked at strangers. They made us question things we had never thought to question before. And they opened a hole in the heart of this country that, twenty-five years later, has never completely closed.