During September 2001 I was living at home with my parents. On September 10th my mother had gone into the hospital to have part of her lung removed due to cancer. The morning of the 11th I had just put my seven month old son and my eighteen month old son down for their nap when a neighbor called me and told me to turn on the television. In those moments and the days that followed my divorce didn’t matter, my mother’s cancer didn’t matter, any of my personal problems didn’t matter. I was, my children were, my family was part of something larger. It was and has been the only time I felt connected as an American to my country. We were united in our grief and I found it sad that unity was warped into starting another war.
Where I was living at in Indianapolis, the house was very close to the airport. The feeling of emptiness was compounded by the lack of sound. I began to feel hollow and alone. Powerless to help with other people’s grief. I couldn’t be angry or get angry. I began to feel isolated because of my inability to be angry.
This isolation only increased when news started to come out about the men who did this. As their pictures flashed across the screen my first thought was “my god they are so young’. I began to feel that those young men were as much victims as the passengers on the planes or in the towers.
It still stuns me the evil in the world that would pervert both the beliefs of those men into thinking such an action would be a good thing and pervert our country’s grief into waging a war against an uninvolved country.