A 9/11 Story from Georgia

Pearl Harbor was "Pre-Us." My kids say the same about 9/11. It's "Pre-Them." And yet the significance is there. It's heavy. And at some level, they know. It's hard to believe it's been that many years.

Everyone has a 9/11 story. This is mine.

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I was living in Athens, Georgia. It was my second year of graduate school. That morning I had just finished teaching my 8:00-9:15am section of Public Speaking 101 at UGA.

By 9:30, I was walking back to Terrell Hall, a beautiful, southern-looking building with pillars nestled in the heart of the lush, green campus. It was a warm, sunny fall Tuesday. "It's going to be hot again today," I thought.

Fall in Georgia is beautiful; it's more like summer - it just isn't ready to leave yet, so it lingers into September and beyond.

I went upstairs into the building to print some documents. As I walked out of the computer lab, a fellow graduate student burst out of the huge floor-to-ceiling, oak double doors of the building's main gathering room.

She had a look on her face I will not forget. Her eyes spoke of the seriousness and emergent nature of the words that followed: "They just hit the south tower!" I didn't have any idea what she meant, but I'll always remember the look of terror in her eyes.

Bewildered, we gathered in Dr. Murphy's teeny professor-y office. A small TV was on. A few hours later the administration shut down the campus. All classes were canceled. I returned to a friend's apartment; I always think of you Ashli Stokes on this day. Along with the rest of the nation and indeed the world, we were glued to the TV.

When the towers crumbled on live television, I felt my breath just... suspend.

Time seemed to halt.

... Who had ever seen anything like that?

Who had ever thought such an event was even possible?

We watched with permanently furrowed brows until well past dinner. I eventually but reluctantly went home and watched more coverage until my eyes were bloodshot, my brain weary, my heart swollen from beating so fast; it hurt with sadness and oh yes, fear.

I remember a sense of fear. What would tomorrow bring? More of this? Who was next?

The next morning I went to the coffeehouse I always did. The cute downtown streets just felt strange. Eerie. Everyone knew. And everyone knew that everyone knew. Everyone looked around, unsure how to behave. People wondered and wandered.

The clerk asked, "Everyone okay for you?"

"Yes, thankfully," I said. "My family is in Chicago. You?" And we exchanged dollars and cents, coffee and stir stick, not knowing what else to do or say.

I remember the television anchors who tried to keep it together in the days that followed. The horror of their job reporting from The Wall of The Missing outside the World Trade Center was immense and intense. Overwhelming. It was all just too much.

And yet out of a sense of fierce loyalty and responsibility to do what they could - anything they could - they stayed. They reported. They told the stories of those who were missing. Bleary eyed and confused, they read the papers, showed us the photos, and talked to the family members who held onto a thread of hope their loved one had somehow escaped. They let their sobs out. Because it was impossible to hold them in. We all did.

At the time, I lived alone in a one bedroom apartment. The first night, I talked to my then-boyfriend-now-husband on the phone. He lived in Texas near the airport. They had stopped all air traffic that day. I remember him saying how quiet the sky was, how strange the silence felt.

We fell asleep on our phones a time or two that week, seeking connection and not knowing what to think or say.

Most nights, I watched TV until I couldn't anymore.

Most days I walked and drove and taught and learned in a daze.

When we land on this day every year, I much prefer the phrase "Remember 9/11" vs. "Never Forget." It seems silly, it may even sound trivial. But I think to myself, "Never Forget." How in the world could anyone forget that day? If you were alive, you cannot possibly forget. We must remember.

Along those lines, we should all help future generations know about that day - as our grandparents did for us with Pearl Harbor and our parents did with John F. Kennedy's assassination.

We absolutely must teach them to honor 9/11, to remember it. Those of us who lived through it will always remember that day.

One year, I listened to the 911 calls from the tower. I found it on YouTube. I watched the news clips again. I heard the recordings and the voicemails people left from airplanes and the offices of the World Trade Centers.

With an empty feeling inside, I pondered what it was like to inform President George W. Bush of the events as he read to children in the Florida elementary school.

There's a book out entitled "Fall and Rise" that chronicles stories from survivors. How the tiniest decisions that might normally never matter in one's day - things like receiving a tie as a gift and going back to the hotel room to put it on, or turning left out of your office into the hall instead of right - actually meant the difference between life and death. Thinking about that, it's just crazy.

Today I heard "God Bless America" on 93.5FM. It hurled me back to mid-September 2001 in Georgia. It came on when I was with my 16-year old daughter as she backed out of the driveway on the way to basketball practice. I had forgotten how prevalent the patriotic music was during the weeks that followed, especially in the south.

"Oh kid," I told her as I remembered back to that time. "Some of those September days in 2001, I would drive around town with those songs on the radio, with tears streaming down my cheeks, paralyzed by the pain, anguish and helplessness so many families were feeling in New York, Pennsylvania and Virginia (and far beyond), even though I didn't know any of them."

How our nation did unite. It felt like a real "United States of America."

Every year I go through this week remembering that week. It has turned into a weeklong memorial, and with social media we cannot get far from the resurgence of the event and the stories.

And I'm okay with that. It feels right to do so. 9/11 was so immense, so totally unprecedented and unimaginable that it changed absolutely everything.

It was just so life altering. I cannot shake the sense that I have some kind of responsibility as an American adult (I was 25) to remember that day, to honor the fallen and the heroes who ran back up the stairs in both towers, having no way to know the towers would actually fall down. I was so distant from the raw-ness and devastation. But so many thousands were not.

May God bless the families of the fallen, and all those who performed heroic actions on that day, who served our nation on the days, months and years that followed.