Letter to my Toddler Daughter After September 11

I wrote this letter on September 17, 2001 to my first daughter who was 14 months old at the time. 

Someday I will tell you about the day you became my bulwark against the madness. Someday you will hear about the day I raced to pick you up from daycare -- never having made it to the office -- even though I knew you were safe. Someday you will surely ask me about this day, and the ensuing ones, after a history lesson in school. And I will tell you as best I can -- when time and distance will endow me with the words that I have yet to find -- about the day when humanity found itself staring into an abyss it could never imagine.

How your Grandma sounded like she was making a superhuman effort to keep herself together when she finally heard my voice on the phone, and ticked off the whereabouts of family members in Manhattan taking refuge in various spots. How, on a crystal blue day, Mommy stayed home from work and took you to the playground because a band of monsters slammed airplanes full of people and fuel into our city -- into the very spot where you had been just two weeks earlier in your stroller. That day at the playground, and the days after that when Mommy stayed home from work, were memorable for their sparkling sunshine that mocked our misery, for their cloudless skies marred only by the smudge at the city’s edge that stayed and stayed and stayed. 

They were memorable for the city’s quiet that magnified the fighter jets overhead, and the constant sirens all heading downtown. You saw convoys of trucks carrying supplies, and cranes with police escorts and, as the days passed, all waving American flags. Those days were memorable for the crammed buses that we all rode for free, in silence, in the hours after the attack. And for the shuttered stores, whose owners found that their emotions engulfed their desire to conduct commerce. 

You will ask me what I did to help the victims and aid the rescue workers. I signed up at the hospital to give blood, expecting to be called. But there was no one left alive to need the blood. Those survivors who did need it were helped by the donations of my fellow New Yorkers who stood on line -- New Yorkers stand on line, not in line -- for hours to give a pint. With you in tow, I stopped by a Red Cross satellite center to volunteer -- guided by handwritten signs all over the sidewalks -- but they were busy beyond belief and told me to come back. So I bought a small American flag -- my first ever -- and let you wave it as you sat in the stroller. I invited a temporarily homeless friend, devastated by the proximity of her apartment to the Twin Towers, to Shabbat dinner, hoping to offer even weak comfort. But I was not trained to dig my hands raw looking for survivors, to clear tons of debris, or minister to the wounded. And I felt shamed in my helplessness. 

When I walked home Friday evening from Shabbat services, you in my arms, the sidewalks teemed with people holding candles in the dusk. And I began to bawl at the beauty of it, because these killers did not know that they would bring out the very best in this city and this country. When they steered their captive jets toward the inferno to come, they did not know that a humanity, the likes of which I have never seen, would literally rise from the ashes. I cried openly, shamelessly, and in camaraderie. When someone offered me a candle, I shook my head and rested it against yours, saying, “She’s my candle.” 

Six days later, I am still watching the images on television, and six days later, they are as unbelievable as they were on Tuesday. But what is more unbelievable is that your future will be irrevocably altered from what we had envisioned by the upcoming military response and sustained campaign to follow. I hope that it ultimately brings you a better world.

Love, your mother

Written Erev Rosh Hashanah 5762, September 17, 2001