Saturday, September 10, 2011

Remembering 9/11 - Love is the Way

Ten years ago, my then boyfriend, Brent Britton, took me to Hawaii for my 34th birthday and asked me to marry him.  The date was August 25, 2001.  Brent moved later that week from San Francisco to New York to live with me in my loft apartment in DUMBO, (Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass) in Brooklyn just across the Brooklyn Bridge from the World Trade Center

Brent had been living with me in New York for about a week when we woke up on the morning of September 9, and I suggested that we walk over the Brooklyn Bridge and go to the top of the World Trade Center.  I had been living in New York for 9 years at that time, but had not done that since I was a kid.  Brent had never been to the top of the World Trade Center, and being Brent, he greeted that suggestion with all the verve and excitement for life with which he greets everything.  Within a short time we were off.



Here is a picture of us at The World Trade Center on September 9, 2001, roughly 36 hours before it would be attacked and destroyed by terrorists.  We waited on long lines to get on the oversized elevators to go to the top of the building.  We bought popcorn and took in the amazing views. After a time, as we would have to wait on another long line to get on the elevators to leave the building, I told Brent that I was beginning to feel claustrophobic, and wanted to get going.  He said he felt the same way, and so we went and waited in the line for a down elevator.  



Less than two days later, on the morning of September 11, Brent got up early to go to LaGuardia Airport to take the 8:30 a.m. shuttle to Boston for a meeting.  That morning as I lay in bed sleeping, I heard someone walking on the roof, something I noted as odd, because except for someone smoking an occasional cigarette, there was rarely anyone walking on the roof, and certainly not early in the morning.  Our loft was on the top floor of 81 Washington Street, and from the roof you could see Manhattan

I now know that I left for work right around the time that the first plane hit.  When I exited our building and made my made way up the street, had I glanced to the right, I would likely have seen the WTC in flames.  However, in a hurry to get to my midtown office by 9:00 a.m., I turned quickly to the left out of my building and headed to the F train.  That was sometime around 8:45 a.m. 

As I was walking to the subway down the cobbled Brooklyn street, a man who had that CIA agent look crossed diagonally in front of me very purposely heading in the other direction.  I took note of him because it was unusual, in that most people in my neighborhood would be heading towards the train at the time, not the other direction.  Also, DUMBO was an artists’ colony and there was not a lot of 9 to 5 foot traffic in the morning.  In retrospect, he may have been a government agent checking the skies for the hijacked planes.  I also suspect that someone from law enforcement was on the roof of my and probably other buildings that morning checking the skies for the planes that had been hijacked.

My subway must have been the last or one of the last ones that ran from Brooklyn to Manhattan that day.  While I was on the train, a garbled message was playing, but all that the passengers could make out was something to the effect of “there has been an incident at the World Trade Center.”  We had no idea what was going on.

When I got to work, I went straight to my office and began listening to my voicemail messages, like I would on any other day.  The first message was from my secretary, Maria.  Her voice was frantic and she said that a plane from Boston had crashed into the World Trade Center and that my mom had called wanting to know if Brent and I were alright.  My heart started beating a million miles a minute. My mind was racing, thinking, was the plane coming from Boston or going to Boston

I tried to reach Brent on his cell phone, but the lines were jammed.  I ran to my secretary and asked her if the plane was coming from Boston or going to Boston.  She said she did not know.  I ran back to my office and continued listening to voicemail messages.  The next message was from Brent.  He had gotten one call out to me to tell me that his plane was headed back to the airport because a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center.

I was momentarily relieved although there was still confusion as to whether Brent’s plane was in the air or was grounded.  I later learned that his plane never took off, and that he and the other passengers on his plane watched the towers burn from the tarmac. 

I went to the conference room where my co-workers were watching the towers burn on television. I had watched the World Trade Center aflame from this same office with many of these same colleagues in 1993 when terrorists had planted a bomb in a van and parked it in the parking garage of the building.  I worked at that law firm from 1992 through 2003, and when you work someplace that long and have so many experiences together, your coworkers become in many ways like a family to you. 

Since the two planes had hit, we knew that this was not an accident.  This was another terrorist attack.  We all stood in the conference room and watched in shock and disbelief as both towers burned.  If people were talking, I don’t remember it.  No one was sitting.  We all stood.

I was watching the towers burn, and in the instant before the first tower fell, I saw something, and I thought in complete horror, something is happening.  I perceived that I saw a kind of clear bubbling moments before the first tower actually began to collapse.  I would swear to you that I knew the tower was going to fall a second before it actually began to implode.  It is weird because I have since watched television specials about 9/11 and I realize that you can not actually see anything, no clear-colored bubble sensation in the seconds before the tower fell, but on that day, I saw it.  Perhaps that is the way my brain translated it, giving me a few seconds to psychologically prepare for something so unthinkable.

At that moment, I knew all of those people trapped inside had died. The faces of the people I had seen two days earlier flashed in my head – the man working at the elevator, the woman who sold us the popcorn.  Were they inside?  Had they died? I ran into  another room to be alone, and I cried uncontrollably. 

My disbelief deepened as I thought, it’s just a matter of time until the other tower falls, and then all of those people will be dead. 

And that is exactly what happened.  Nothing could make it better.  You could not say to yourself, this is just a movie or this is just a dream.

At that point, there was a shift in people’s thinking from shock and horror to personal survival.  New York was being attacked.  D.C. was being attacked.  Cell phone service was out.  The subways were not running.  We had heard that there were other planes.  People were talking about whether more high rises would be hit.  Would bridges be hit?  We did not know what else was going to happen. 

People needed to get home, and that meant walking.  Thousands upon thousands of people began the trek to get home.  Those of us who lived in Brooklyn and Queens walked over the 59th Street Bridge in a mass exodus shoulder to shoulder with literally thousands of others. 

We kept hearing and seeing fighter jets, and every time we would hear one, people would flinch.  We did not know if those were enemy planes heading for New York’s bridges.  We would later learn that those were U.S. fighter jets ordered to scramble to protect us from further attacks, but on that day, we had no way of knowing. 

I walked for more than three hours over the bridge, through Queens and down to Brooklyn.  In Brooklyn, some local subways were running free of charge.  I took a train part of the way.  There were people everywhere.  Americans are survivors and fighters, and New Yorkers are a special breed of Americans.  We were stunned.  But we were all determined to get where we were going.  To get home, to process what was happening to us, and to regroup.

When I finally made it to Brooklyn, the view of lower Manhattan from DUMBO was staggering—it was covered in a cloud of billowing smoke, and the most prominent features of the downtown skyline, the twin towers, were gone. People were already wearing face masks, and I remember wondering where had people gotten those masks?   Here is some footage Brent took that morning before I returned home.

Inside our loft, Brent met me at the door. I cried and we embraced for several minutes.  Brent was there with several other passengers from his flight to Boston who lived in lower Manhattan, but could not reenter the City.

In one of those six-degrees of separation moments, Brent and I had planned to attend a wedding the following week at which we would have met Mark Bingham, one of the best friends of one of Brent’s best friends.  That wedding had to be postponed, and we were never to meet Mark.  He was one of 9/11’s most brave and amazing heroes as part of the “Let’s Roll” team that crashed Flight 93 before it hit its intended target and as a result undoubtedly saved many lives that day.

* * *

The stark contrast between the happy picture of Brent and me as a newly engaged, madly in love couple at the top of the World Trade Center on September 9, 2001, and the footage of lower Manhattan drenched in death-filled smoke two days later represents a full spectrum from good to evil in my mind.  How do you make sense of it all?

I remember speaking to one of my best friends who had a baby shortly after 9/11 and asking her if she was scared to bring a baby into this world.  Her words struck me.  She told me no, she emphatically believed it was necessary to bring more good souls into this world.

In the months following 9/11, there were many times when unmarked packages or bomb scares closed the subways and rendered New Yorkers unable to go to work.  Brent and I spent many days together inside our loft, stunned by what had happened, still madly in love nonetheless and determined like many other New Yorkers and Americans not to let evil win.

As I am fond of telling anyone who will listen, Brent and I married three months later in a beach on Hawaii with one of those additional good souls on board.  Our super scion son was born September 6, 2002.

This year we celebrate our tenth wedding anniversary, the ninth birthday of our son and the fifth birthday of our fiery-red-headed daughter.  We will also remember the 10th anniversary of September 11th. 

This is what I tell myself: no one of us knows where we came from or why we are here.  We have our faiths, our hopes and our beliefs, but no one of us knows what tomorrow will bring.  There is evil in the world.  There is also magic, in that people can love each other, and people in love can come together and create life. 

So, love the people in your life every day with the same fierce bravery that the heroes in New York, in D.C. and on Flight 93 displayed on 9/11 no matter what, and love is sure to win.






1 comment:

  1. Wow, brings it all running back. 17 years and I can still smell it.

    ReplyDelete