September 18, 2001

12:19am

Suburbs of Chicago

24 years old.

“Yet why not say what happened?”

– Dr. Kay Redfield Jamison, An Unquiet Mind

“You’ll be fine. I know you don’t believe it now, but you will be well again.”

– Dr. Kay Redfield Jamison, An Unquiet Mind

For days I have been numb. For days I have been scared. For days I have been jumping at the thought of what is going to happen next and wondering if it is going to happen over my head, in my city, or to someone I love. I am in shock. As realism sets in, I can feel my body tensing to an alarming degree. I am shaking in tiny sections all over my body, to such an amazing and rapid rate that I can’t tell I am quivering. My back is tense. My stomach is in knots. My teeth are grinding against each other heavily. Tears have not been able to come. My heart feels as though it is in my stomach and leaping out of my chest at the same time. Living seems questionable right now. What are we supposed to do? Things seem so trivial. We are supposed to go on. We are supposed to pick up and go on. And for many of us, it is hard. It is excruciating. It is unbelievably and overwhelming and depressing. Horribly depressing.

Last week, one week ago, the first words that I heard spoken were simple. They came from my father over a thousand miles away. “Have you been bombed?” The words weren’t startling. They weren’t chilling. I did not raise my eyebrows because I did not know what he was talking about. The date was September 11, 2001. 911. I would soon find out.

I will admit I had slept late that day. I had slept into the afternoon. I was having nightmares and had gone back to sleep repeatedly that morning. I did not want to face the day. I’m not saying this is unusual for me, but I will say that I particularly did not want to get up that day. I did not realize it, but the phone is probably what had caused me to wake up. At 1pm I finally rolled out of bed. I immediately checked the caller ID. <The man who would be my husband> had called. I didn’t wonder why. Maybe he had called just to say hello or to ask me what I wanted to do for dinner. The call that had raised me from my sleep aroused my supicions, however. At 12:56 the caller ID showed my parents in Texas. My anxiety raised. My stomach dropped. In all seriousness, it is very strange for them to call during the day. The reason is simple: the rates are high. The thought entered my head that my older brother was dead. Oh my God. He was either very sick or he was dead. I picked up the phone and dialed their number. Then the words came: “Have you been bombed?” He said it a few times because my only responses were “What?” and “No.” Then the avalanche on my mind began. He told me that my mother had been trying to reach me all morning. He told me that the World Trade towers were gone. He told me that planes, normal commercial paying passenger planes, had been hijacked and had taken them out. In the background, I heard my younger brother say, “The Pentagon is on fahr.” “The Pentagon is on fahr,” my dad repeated into the phone. He said something about a plane crashing in Pennsylvania. My eyes opened wide. My mouth dropped. My head started going form side to side, shaking no, no, no. And my free hand was waving violently in the air. I didn’t understand what he was talking about. I didn’t believe him. If he was making this up, then he was cruel. When I realized that he wasn’t, I told him to stop, stop, stop talking to me. I had to go. I had to go. I had to go. My first reaction was to call <the man who would be my husband> at work. I hadn’t seen the news and didn’t know if cities all over the country were being bombed. I didn’t know if it was all over. It seemed so overwhelming and so unimaginably hard to process. They often send <the man who would be my husband> into Chicago to make deliveries, and I was so worried that he was in some kind of danger I didn’t know about because I had been sleeping. When I reached him, he too told me that he had been calling me all morning and assured me that he was fine. He repeated the same news that my father had reported, and then, for a split second, I realized that it was true. All of it was horribly, excruciatingly true. It had not been a horrible joke. The person that I trusted most in the world had made it all come true. At this point, we hung up and I left my love for the television set. As you can imagine, the news flooded the air waves. I sat down and became lost in it for days. The images that I saw were amazing. They had actual video of it all. The planes crashing into the World Trade Center — two office buildings where thousands of people went to work every day. The two buildings, after weathering more than they could stand, crumbling to the ground like giant sandcastles in the sky. The clouds of smoke and rubble that rumbled through the suddenly tiny streets of Manhattan. The plumes of smoke that were emanating from downtown Manhattan. And part of the Pentagon in Washington D.C. A huge hole in the ground, where a plane had crashed somewhere in rural Pennsylvania. The most shocking words I heard at first talked about the World Trade Center in the past tense. Oh my God, I thought. They’re really not there. They don’t exist anymore. The stories that I heard were completely unbelievable, the details almost impossible for anyone to wrap their minds around. In all of my days, with all of the horrible things that I have created to scare myself with in my mind, I had never imagined anything as horrible as this. This was a war, but this hadn’t involved our military. This was an attack on our soil. Against us, but this was no Pearl Harbor. This was something that I didn’t expect in the least. The day before I had spent canning tomatoes for the first time. I was so excited and happy. I was learning, even if slowly, how to make a house a home. And then, in less than 24 hours, it all seemed pointless. It didn’t seem to matter if I had been learning to cook or clean or do these things that all of a sudden seemed trivial. Something happened that never happened before. It was something that would take me days to believe had happened. The numbers were astronomical. They said that maybe up to 20,000 had been lost in the World Trade Center. Maybe 800 had been lost in the Pentagon. Almost 300 had been killed on the hijacked planes alone. There were so many more questions than answers. I spent the day on the phone talking to people in the town that I live in, just making sure that they were okay. In a moment of concern, I called home to Texas to see if my friend Kevin was okay. He had graduated from NYU just last spring, had spent the summer in Texas, and was planning to go back to the city that he loved in the fall. For reasons that I still don’t know, for reasons that I will not question, by the grace of God, he was still in Texas when I called. I spoke to his mother and found myself calling back all week in hopes of hearing his voice and assuring myself that my friend was alive and unharmed. I wanted to know if he was dealing with it okay. He had dreamed of moving there for as long as I had known him and he had gotten the chance to live there for quite a while. I had always related to him, as we both felt somehow connected to this city that was so big and marvelous to us. It was nothing like where we had come from and I think that is one reason we loved it so much.

I have to go to bed now, or at least stop writing. It is 2am and I can’t sleep but at the same time I am emotionally exhausted. It has to get better from here. It has to. I refuse to believe that it won’t. Goodnight and God Bless.

September 19, 2001

1:51am

It was the craziest thing I have ever seen in my life. I can’t imagine anything more horrific, more disturbing, more difficult to understand. After I first tuned into the news on that first day, that fateful day, it took a while before the footage of the second building being hit by the plane came on the television. As I watched it, my heart sank, my stomach tensed, and my throat swelled. I was numb. That feeling would continue for days — it shows no signs of leaving me yet. It was true. It was real. I would stay there, in front of the tv, for almost three days straight. I felt that I needed to know every detail of what had gone on in those horrible moments that had taken our security away and left us feeling vulnerable and confused. I wanted to know how these people could have done what they did, what their reasons behind it were, and most importantly, their identities. We were told they were terrorists, but it didn’t make any sense. It still doesn’t make any sense. They took our planes full of our people and crashed them into our big, beautiful buildings. What I didn’t realize at first was that the buildings didn’t fall immediately. I know that when the planes crashed into them that they were damaged extensively, but I heard some people say that they were still surprised that the World Trade Center fell in on top of itself. When the first tower was hit, many people thought it could have been an accident — a horrible and unimaginable accident — but an accident nonetheless. No one sitting at home watching it on their television set had reason to think differently. Several of the morning news programs said that must have been the case. <The man who would be my husband>, who was now watching the news unfold at his job, said that he immediately guessed it was terrorism. They say that in New York people in the tower that had been hit were desperately trying to evacuate. Meanwhile, however, the people in the tower that had not been hit yet were told to return to their offices. Nothing, they were assured, was wrong with their building. How, I wondered, could security have let that happen? How could they have sent people back up to their doom when they had already walked down the length of their tower? Didn’t they know that they, too, were going to be hit by another plane in just a matter of minutes? Didn’t they know that their tower would be the first to crumble to the ground and that thousands of people would ultimately die? It makes me so angry and frustrated and hurt that they didn’t know — how could they have known? They had no idea what was going to happen or where the fates of the people would rest that they worked so hard to protect. It wasn’t their fault. This is something that nobody could have guessed. After the two towers were struck, the next casualty was the Pentagon. They say now that they think that the Pentagon was not their original target. It is believed to have been the White House, but the White House turned out to be a harder target than they had bargained for. On board the plane that crashed into the Pentagon was the Solicitor General’s wife, Barbara Olson. She was a political commentator and a lawyer and her story struck me especially hard. News broke on Tuesday that she had called from the air after the plane had been hijacked. This amazed me as this was the first account of anything like this happening that I had heard. She was originally quoted as saying, “Ted, we’ve been hijacked. Can you believe it?” I don’t know if this is what she actually said or not, as I’ve heard different versions since, but this original account left me chilled to the bone. Technology had allowed us during this tragedy to understand, to a much lesser degree, what was going on in the minds of those who would eventually become casualties of a war seconds from being waged. It helped us to understand a bit more what happened in the skies over Pennsylvania that day, too. Originally the story of the plane that crashed in a Pennsylvania rural area occupied my mind the least. It made no sense to me and the chaos that filled the streets of Manhattan absolutely saturated my mind. Why, after all, would a group of terrorists go to the trouble to hijack a plane and die in an empty field? Had it even been connected with the attack or just a gross coincidence? The questions that flooded my mind and the minds of so many others were too much to calculate. They were overwhelming. I was screaming them into the phone to other people who had no answers either. It was still early in the first day, however, that someone suggested something that made me feel a little bit better about what might have happened on that fateful Pennsylvania flight. Someone suggested that maybe the passengers on that plane may have overthrown the hijackers, and that is why they did not strike a more prominent target. As the days pass, it seems more and more likely that this must have been the case. Family members of these ordinary men, who have rightfully been dubbed heroes, started appearing on the news with their individual stories. The first was a woman named Alice Hoglan. She was in distress, but she told the country that her son, Mark Bingham, had called her from the air. He told her of his situation after formally introducing himself: “Hi Mom. This is Mark Bingham,” he is reported to have said. He then told her that he loved her and that he feared the flight was doomed. He and some other men, he said, were going to do something about it. Over the passing days, similar miraculous stories have been trickling in. Women report of their husbands having called from the plane, and saying words that can only be described as heroic. One man was told of the fate of the twin towers. He asked then if they had been hit by commercial airliners, seeming to have guessed their doomed mission, but not knowing where they were headed. The men reported that one of the hijackers had a bomb strapped to his chest. This was the first man, it was reported, that said they were going to try to overtake the plane. The last person to hear any of these men say anything was an operator on the ground who was being notified of the attack. The words were simple, but spirited. “Are you ready?” She heard him ask. And then: “Let’s roll.” She said she stayed on the phone, where she could hear the passengers screaming through the duration of the call, until news came that the plane had crashed — the only one of the four that had no casualties on the ground that day. The stories continued to come. They were mindblowing. They were heartbreaking. I felt that I needed to hear every one. Little by little, as time wore on, the stories shifted from hard facts to the people whose lives had been harshly affected. You saw the people of New York City roaming the streets with quickly printed missing posters of their loved ones. They shook them into the lenses of the news cameras, with tears streaming down their faces. Please, please, please, they would beg, please help them find him or her or them. There were mothers looking for their sons, daughters looking for their fathers, brothers looking for their sisters, and husbands looking for their wives. One man searched for his fiance. “I have the ring,” he desperately told America. “I’m going to give it to her this month.” Each story was more painful than the next, yet the hope that these people kept alive was unbelievable. They walked the streets for days, the first night going from hospital to hospital, hoping their loved ones were among the injured, and not among those trapped in the rubble. So many described the person that they were searching for as the type who would come out of a situation like this. They were strong, and then they would correct themselves and begin to speak in the present tense. It was excruciating to see. There were so many people who were hoping against the impossible. To me, watching at home, I couldn’t believe that many people had survived the crumbling of those towers. I did believe that some people must have survived, but I just couldn’t imagine that it was many. And yet, there they were, describing down to the last detail what their loved one was or might have been wearing that day. Jewelry. Casual wear. The color of their dress. I understand why they did it, though. In those horrible moments of pure and utter helplessness, they did the only thing that they could. They kept hope alive and they searched. They shared with America the pictures and personality descriptions of the people they loved. They allowed millions to mourn with them. And we did. Never has an emotion been so vividly conveyed across the television screen. You felt inklings of their panic, their sense of hope, their pain. Never could I have felt all the things that they felt or to the degree that they felt them, but oh how my heart ached for these people. I think of how so many of them will be going to bed alone — a thought that I can’t bear — especially in these times.

September 20, 2001

12:23am

Watching the news for these three days straight could not have been good for me. <The man who would be my husband> would suggest that we turn it off and listen to the Beatles instead. Something happy. I wish that I had listened to him, but for some reason I could not be torn away. Each story that we heard was shocking and horrifying. So many of them were so similar, but that didn’t seem to make them any less disturbing. Just tonight we heard yet another account of a call made from one of the planes, this time from a flight attendant on the first plane to hit the World Trade Center. She reported being hijacked and that two flight attendants had been stabbed. Another man in business class, she said, had also been stabbed and she wasn’t sure if he was still alive. The operator asked her if she knew her location, and she reported that out of the window she could see water and buildings. Shortly thereafter came her last words: “Oh no! Oh no!” Ted Koppel then said what everyone had already assumed — that the water was Hudson Bay and the buildings had been the World Trade Center. After this <the man who would be my husband> turned to me. “Will you please turn it off?” He asked. I more than happily obliged. The news, it seems, is getting to be too much for me. After the first three days of not taking my eyes off of it, I can honestly say that I felt physically ill. I felt completely saddened and overwhelmingly depressed. The banner on the screen the first couple of days read “America Under Attack”…then it read “America United”…and then finally, “America Rising.” Those last words were so comforting to me. I was so glad to see the focus switch from chaos to a sense of healing. People across our country were urged to pick up and go about their normal lives. They said that this would help us to get better faster. They said that this would help us show the terrorists that we would not be destroyed, that they did not win. After being exposed to this concept for such a long time now through my battle with depression, it is still almost impossible to wrap my mind around, especially in a time like this. How, I asked, can you return to normal, when thousands of people were killed? How can you return to normal when every time you turn on the television you see passenger planes slamming into skyscrapers? How can you return to normal when grown men are crying in the streets? How can you return to normal when you don’t know what normal is anymore? And yet, I think it’s time. It is time for me to go on and stop devoting every second of my every day to this tragedy. It is time for me to survive. When you live in fear, the bad guys win. They want to change our lives. I don’t want to give in to that. I don’t have to give in to that. It is time for me to start taking care of myself again and putting my faith in God. It is time for me to smile and enjoy all of the good things in my life. I truly believe that I have had a sufficient amount of time to mourn. This whole time since this happened I have wanted desperately to be strong and be someone others could depend on. I was quite far from that. I have felt vulnerable, scared, and angry. Some days, quite honestly, I have felt that the world was going to come to an end. I didn’t know, and still don’t know, how to act when something like this happens. I don’t think that anyone knows. Nothing like this has ever happened before. I have heard so many people say that you just have to feel your way through a time like this, and try to do the right thing. It makes sense. I feel so blind right now going form day to day, but slowly the clarity is coming back. I think that all over this country people are feeling the same way that I do. It’s hard and it’s confusing. Sometimes I wonder when and if something is going to happen next. I am beginning to realize I can’t focus on that, though, or I will drive myself absolutely crazy.

September 26, 2001

8:09am

The first few days after the attack I was extremely jumpy, especially when I heard any planes. When the attack happened, planes were immediately grounded. Tuesday and Wednesday there was very little noise coming form the skies. Because O’Hare is only across the highway, less than a mile away, this was an obvious change. If there was any roaring at all, I would rush outside to see what it was. One time I spotted two military jets flying parallel to one another leaving white trails of smoke behind them. This was expected, as they were flying over 41 major US cities in the days following the attacks. And little by little, commercial jets began to fly again. At first, I think, on Thursday, planes were allowed to leave that had never reached their final destinations. So many had landed at other airports, the nearest airports, when the skies had been cleared on Tuesday. I remember one of the first planes I heard going over because I ran out to see it. This time it was a commercial airliner. My neighbor had run out of her house, too. “Look!” We said, pointing up at the sky like children. “Look! It’s an airplane!” The fear that was washed over her face made mine seem justified. I was not the only one who had been affected by this, in my comfortable spot in the middle of the country. There were so many others who were scared and shocked. That was a really hard week to get through (and the next week wasn’t so easy, either.) Everyone seemed to be upset and everyone else understood why. Sometimes tragedies happen that don’t affect me personally, but emotionally I blow them completely out of proportion. That didn’t seem to be the case this time. Not to say that I wasn’t emotionally ransacked, because I was. But in this case, everyone else was, too. The whole country was, and still is, in mourning. Millions of people, including myself, experienced the stages of grief. Countless television shows are being devoted to that topic — helping us cope through this time. Countless more are being devoted to helping children cope. And everybody cried. The Tuesday after the tragedy, I finally broke down. I cried and cried and cried. I stamped my feet and said it wasn’t fair. I admitted that I was scared to death. It felt good to let it out. It was easier to go on after that. I have stopped jumping at every little thing. The first couple of weeks I was a wreck. Two days after the attack I was in the store when I heard a loud and sudden roar. I leapt into <the man who would be my husband> and asked him for what seemed like the millionth time, “What was that noise?” After he told me it was the air conditioner switching on, I decided it was probably time to go home. Too much anxiety for me. Nights were hard, too. I couldn’t sleep for weeks and every little noise made me paranoid. Planes, trains, automobiles. I am sure that <the man who would be my husband> was appreciative when I stopped waking him and asking him to pinpoint every sound. And truthfully, I am appreciative that I no longer question every noise anymore. The planes have been back up in the skies for a while now and though they say there are not as many as there used to be, it still seems like a lot to me. Life is, through the great resistance of some of us, slowly getting back to normal.