The phone was ringing off the hook that morning. I stretched out luxuriously under the bed covers, anticipating all the birthday messages and good will coming my way. It was my special day. September 11, 2001.
I got up and listened to the first message. Turn on the TV, my mother said. By this time the first tower had fallen, its soaring presence reduced to a malevolent cloud of nothingness. I could not quite register what I was seeing. Or not seeing. I called her back. But it’s just obscured by all the smoke, I insisted. No, it wasn’t. My brain was finally catching up as the second tower collapsed, evaporating into…I really couldn’t imagine what.
My husband and I lived in Hoboken, NJ, just across the Hudson River and a few miles from where the unthinkable was playing out.
Just hours earlier we would have seen the tips of the towers poking above the skyline from our second bedroom window facing southeast from the fourth floor of our condo building. Denial runs strong. I looked out, still trying to find their spires. Just an expansive canvas of smoke and ash on an otherwise beautifully clear day.
My husband still sleeping, I dressed and went out to the common stairwell where a vertical ladder climbed straight up to the roof, two floors above. I might be able to see what was happening. Nope. Could not do that. This was no longer a spry birthday.
I then went down to the street, across several blocks, aiming to get close to the Hudson but the streets were barricaded several blocks from the shoreline as ferries frantically shuttled people away from the carnage and deposited them at Hoboken’s train station/ferry pier. Many passengers probably didn’t even live in New Jersey. It didn’t matter. Everyone was simply trying to escape the horror.
As I write this, I’m not even sure what to say about that day, about how my birthday turned into an annual remembrance of national grief. No joy that day. No opening of presents, a nice dinner out. Just shock and disbelief at what was happening in our world. I did finally meet my neighbors, a young couple who had just moved in. The downstairs buzzer rang, they asked to come in; they didn’t have their keys.
Kyle and Susan arrived at our door, covered in ash, shoeless, purseless—but armed. Turns out they were Secret Service agents whose field office was across the street from the towers. They were trained to do medical triage which they performed, until the suffocating wall of smoke and ash and debris bore down on them, forcing them to flee.
Susan, who I came to know as an ambitious, feisty young woman, was broken that day. Do you want to wash your face? I pointed the way to the bathroom. Yes, she said. She laid her gun down on the coffee table. Eyes vacant, then brimming. The things I have seen today, she said, a witness of something unbearable. All I could offer was water.
If the memories of that day are distinct, the following days are a bewildered blur. I do remember seeing the missing persons postings that covered the walls at the PATH train from Hoboken to Manhattan. Have you seen? Please contact. Many pictures. No one would be seen. No one would contact. The following Sunday, I was on altar guild at my then home church of Saint Thomas on Fifth Avenue. In my seat behind the choir of boys and men, I wept, startled by what rose up within, during the singing of the national anthem in that magnificent space. I had never cried during the national antthem before.
Now, when I’m asked in a random conversation when is my birthday, faces fill with pity. And it irritates me. First, every moment of every day holds both joy and sorrow, life and loss. We struggle to hold these opposites as we weave the experience our lives, trying to see the meaning in the resulting cloth.
I still experience joy on my birthday. I hug my husband and my friends. I feel grateful for all those years, for having a life. And I still mourn for those who lost theirs. I am still aware of the sorrow. The loss. But over time, the duality of that joy and sorrow are merged into one.
So this is what I can say. My birthday is no longer just about me. It is much bigger. It is about thousands of souls. And on September 11, I try to hold all of us close.
