Witness to History: 9/11

I'm participating in the 2024 "52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks" Writing Challenge - Week 4 Theme: Witness to History

Everyone who was alive during the 9/11 terrorist attacks has their own experience of being a witness to that history. Here's mine.

The day was terrifying even for someone who lived far away from New York, Washington, or Pennsylvania. There is a certain kind of fear that goes beyond what you feel for yourself and extends to those you love. As a wife and mother of two—we had a seven-year-old and an 18-month-old—the uncertainty and fear of the days after the attack are etched in my mind; I feared for the world and our family in it. 

And second, while I didn't see the attacks in person, I was familiar with Lower Manhattan and had memories of colleagues and friends whom I worked with between 1988-1991 at Kidder Peabody, an investment bank. Kidder's offices at 10 Hanover Square in downtown Manhattan were less than a mile's walk from the World Trade Center. I wondered if any of my old workmates might have still worked in the towers or nearby and perished in the attack.

The day began like most others. I drove our daughter to school in Denton, Texas, and was on my way back home with her baby brother when the first reports were broadcast on the radio. I remember the exact intersection I was at: Highway 77/Dallas Drive and Teasley Lane, at a traffic light. I called my husband, if memory serves, but he didn't know much more than I did. I went home.

I turned on the TV immediately when I got home, and watched in horror with the rest of the world as first one then the other tower fell. Having stood at the foot of those towers more than once, as well as having been on the observation deck, my mind reeled in the knowledge that they could possibly crumble. They had seemed so permanent, so immovable.

My anxiety grew as the situation seemed to spiral out of control. The Pentagon. Then the plane crash in Pennsylvania. By then, all I wanted was our children with me. I decided to go get our daughter from school. I expected that many parents would have done the same, but I was the first to pick up a student. I felt a little silly, but I needed eyes on both our children, and I couldn't wait for my husband to get home.

Later that afternoon, when the government had grounded all air travel, the silence in our neighborhood—directly under the DFW airport flight path—was ghostly and unnerving. I walked into the front yard, and no one was outside. No children. No traffic. No sound. I went back inside.

Not long after, I heard a familiar sound, then terrifying. I heard an airplane, and not just any airplane, but a fighter jet. I knew the sound from my childhood days of seeing the Blue Angels and Thunderbirds who performed yearly in Cleveland. I used to love to hear the roar of their engines and spy them in the sky as a child. When I worked downtown after college and they were out practicing before their Labor Day shows, the sound reverberating off the buildings was thrilling. But now the sound was out of place and frightening. Why was there a plane flying?

I ran to our back bedroom to look out the window, and crossing my field of vision from left to right, the fighter jet passed practically over our house. I was terrified. We later learned that some private pilot, not knowing about the grounding, mistakenly took off from some small nearby airport. The jet was scrambled from a nearby air base to intercept this plane. Every part of the country was on high alert.

As the days after the attack passed and the scope of the destruction become clearer, my thoughts turned to those men and women I used to work with. Granted, it was some twenty years since I had worked in New York, but chances were that some of my colleagues could still be working in the offices near or in the towers. As the missing or dead began to be listed on the internet, I spent time looking for those I recognized. I was relieved when I didn't see any. Still there could have been any number of people with whom I had crossed paths during those years who did perish, those whose names I might not have known: store clerks, lobby guards, cab drivers, restaurant workers, hot dog vendors. The weight of that knowledge, the sheer loss of life, was humbling.

I have never been back to New York since I left in 1991 to be married and move to Pennsylvania. The one time I got close was on a flight layover in Newark, New Jersey. On approach, our side of the plane had a view across the Hudson River to Lower Manhattan. That empty skyline where the Twin Towers once stood is something I'll never forget. 

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Until next time... 

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