Remembering…and Wondering

One day my children will ask me: “Mom?  Where were you on September 11th?”  This  might be the (long) version I tell them…

I was a mere 19 years old when I hired on at my airline.  A scant 18 months later, I transferred to the Inflight Division.  I had my wings!  For the last (nearly) fifteen years I have been a Flight Attendant at a major U.S. airline.

On Sept. 11, 2001, I was based in the Newark/NY area, and lived in an apartment with a view of the Twin Towers.

I took off from Newark Liberty Airport 30 minutes before Flight 93 took off from the same place.

My flight was a short one that day; we landed in Raleigh/Durham early and were taking a nice break, sitting in First Class, chatting to get to know each other (crewmembers often meet at the beginning of the flight), when the news came of the attacks.  Since we didn’t know him, we just assumed our Captain was a jokester…who on earth would attack NYC?

There wasn’t a single live-feed TV anywhere in RDU!  We were taken to an employee lounge outside of security in order to see what was going on in NYC.

It was there, crowded in with almost every airline employee from the station and several other flight crews, that we saw the towers fall, saw the people jumping from the burning wreckage behind them.

I became numb.

I had friends in the area; I had lived there for over two years, after all.  My good friend and neighbor worked in the Towers.  An ex-boyfriend that was a pilot for United was scheduled to fly from Boston to LA that morning.  I lived in an apartment building chock-full of flight crews from several different airlines.  Before remembering that I was supposed to work that morning, I had made plans to spend the day in Manhattan with a friend of mine – we always took the PATH train to the World Trade Center station when we went.  I didn’t know if he had gone without me.

The world shifted underneath me in every fundamental way one can imagine.

We spent four days stuck in RDU, in a hotel with bad cell phone reception in the best of times.  By the time my NYC area code cell phone could get a signal in RDU, I had over 45 messages waiting to find out if I was alive or dead.

It was only supposed to be a 2 day trip with a short layover.  I only had pajamas with me.  So did the rest of the crew.  Once we managed to find a hotel in the area that would take us, we all went to the mall in our uniforms to buy some clothes.

The hotel experience was surreal.  Every room was occupied – most by stranded airline personnel.  The lounge TV was the gathering point; I saw the bartender change the channel once to get a sports game score and he almost got lynched by the 40 or so Pilots and Flight Attendants standing around.

Every morning we would get a call from scheduling saying we were going to be flying back that day.  We would pack, get dressed, head downstairs, only to find out we weren’t leaving yet, it would be another few hours…another twelve hours…the next day.

In the end, our Captain made the call that we were leaving without our aircraft.  People don’t remember, but there was a hurricane heading towards Florida that week.  Our Captain and one of our Flight Attendants lived in Florida and needed to be home to board up their houses.

So the Captain rented a car and then literally stood in the lounge and shouted “I’ve got a car and am driving to Florida!  Anyone that lives there and wants a ride, be downstairs in one hour!”  His car was full.

Our First Officer lived in Rhode Island, and his fiancee was in South Carolina for a training event.  He rented a car, drove to get her, then came back to the hotel for the remaining crew.

One of our Flight Attendants lived in Baltimore, so we drove back that way.  He made a point of driving on a road that would give us a view of the Pentagon as we headed to her house.  Horrifying.

A few hours later, we were dropped off at the employee parking lot.  Less than 5 miles away (I’m guessing) was the cloud of death that hovered over the Tower location for months following the attacks.  My crewmember and I just stood and stared in shock and horror for a few moments before getting in our cars and heading to our respective homes.

At my apartment, I picked up my cat and hugged her before walking to the window and opening the blinds.  There I saw the view that would greet me every day for the next few months: a black cloud, taller than the skyscrapers, testifying to the destruction brought on by hate.

Shortly after the attack, the anthrax scare started up.  One of the post offices that had directly handled several of the pieces of mail that proved to be poisoned was the post office my mail came from.  I checked my mail with rubber gloves and a face mask for months after that, per the post office letter advising us to do so.

I broke up with the first decent boyfriend I ever had after going to see him in LA and eating dinner at the Santa Monica Pier.  Everyone around us was laughing and enjoying life, and I felt like I was walking in a fog.  He tried, but he couldn’t understand how I had changed.  I didn’t understand it enough at the time to talk to him about it.  It seemed easier to just cut him loose.

In January, I had a total breakdown.  I was shaken by what I’d learned about life; rattled by the fact that I was all alone in the world and that at any moment, everything could end for me.

I moved home to Houston.  I never liked Houston, never felt at home there despite having been raised there, but I had family and friends who had known me a long time, and felt more secure in my foundations being that much closer to my roots.

I still flew and worked out of Newark/NYC airports, though, and still had to board airplanes every day, so while in some cases people seemed to forget about 9/11…I never did.  And I never will.

I don’t attend memorial services for Sept. 11th.  I have gone to the site twice; once right after, and once about a year later.  Personally, I can’t handle it.  I break down into a puddle of mush on the floor when I think about it too much.

In fact, I don’t talk about it much at all, except with very close friends and family.  It’s too personal, too…much.  This is the first time I’ve discussed it in any forum remotely public.

I chose to do so only because I now have small children; children born in a world where the attacks of Sept. 11th will be ancient history.  This will be, to them, what the JFK assassination or Pearl Harbor was for me, though to my parents and grandparents, it was a moment in history that changed their worldview forever.

One day, my children will ask me about September 11th.  How can I ever talk to my kids about this event?  My world was so rocked by this that I made several very bad choices out of fear in the following years.  It took about 5 years before I was able to stop living as though Sept. 11th would happen again any day.  How do you convey that feeling to your kids?  How do you explain how fundamentally altered you were by the experience?  How do you explain why it happened without spreading the fear to them?

How will my children ever understand why September 11th is a bad day for me, and always will be?

In the end, I was not one of the Sept. 11th widows, my children were not orphaned by the events of that day, and all of my friends somehow escaped alive, though my neighbor was on the last train that arrived at the Towers that morning and barely escaped the falling buildings, covered in dust.  My friends escaped alive, but my acquaintances did not.  Turns out, I had done laundry with CeeCee Lyles a few times and we had chatted about her husband and son.  She died on Flight 93.

In so many ways, I was lucky.  I know that there are those who were affected in more fundamental ways than I was.  Still, I am not now the person I was on September 10, 2001, and never will be again.  I still work in an industry that has attempts made on its’ safety.  I still see the places and people of that day every time I go to work.

It will never leave me.  It is me.

There are no good answers to any of my wonderings.  There is no way to make that day less momentous.  Every person in America has their own feelings and experiences of 9/11, and it’s all just too much to reduce to a simple sound byte.

If I can, though, I will use my experiences and memories of that day to say one thing to my children when they ask: always hug and kiss your family when you leave them, and never let them doubt that you love them.  It’s the one regret I hope they never have.