In Memoriam

 

Twelve years ago yesterday, as the clock was approaching 9:00, I was wrapping up remarks at a conference of corporate communications professionals in Toronto, Canada.   One of the conference organizers walked up to the podium and whispered in my ear about passenger jets flying into the World Trade Center and suggested that my husband wanted me to call him as soon as I could.

“Should we continue this?” I asked quietly.  She nodded yes, so I took a question from a member of the audience, until my colleague (who was the next scheduled speaker) appeared at the back of the room, breathless from the news coming out of New York and Washington, D.C.  He quickly announced the events that were underway in the U.S. to all in attendance; he had managed the National Transportation and Safety Board during TWA 800, so he briefly commented about the closing of U.S. airspace and the challenges ahead before bringing the conference to a speedy close.

I ran upstairs to my hotel room to call my husband.  I couldn’t reach him on a landline but somehow managed to get through by mobile.  His workplace is an agency of the federal government, and it was being closed for the day because of the uncertainties associated with the Pentagon attack and other possible attacks in D.C.

Only moments later, staring at the television, I watched the towers seemingly melt down to the ground. Closer to home, my husband decided that it was safer to walk the 7 miles to our house because of concerns about car bombs in the city.  As he crossed the Roosevelt Bridge by foot into Northern Virginia, he watched dark plumes of smoke in the sky, coming from the direction of the Pentagon.

Later that night I learned from my dearest friend that a mutual acquaintance was among the dead at the World Trade Center. 

When I got back to the office that week – fortunate to have scored one of the last rental cars in Toronto for a 10-hour drive home -- I learned that a colleague was supposed to be on the flight that rammed into the Pentagon.  In one of those fateful decisions one never knows they are making at the time, my colleague had decided to take a later flight to LA because it was his birthday and he felt like sleeping in.

From time to time, I think back on that day and the days that followed.  I remember vividly where my husband and I were on the day we bombed Afghanistan.  And every year at this time, I think about the boy I knew so long ago when we both were young, whose richly rewarding life would end at the top of the World Trade Center, as well as those who have been lost to us along the way because of that day 12 years ago.