Twenty years on

It was a weird time in my life, anyway.

My mother had died on August 14th after a brief illness. That brief illness took place over a two-week, rollercoaster period in the ICU. After those two intense weeks, then the wake, the funeral, the closing down of her apartment - her first single gal digs: she'd moved into a great congregate living situation just 8 months earlier - the sorting through of her things. We were all beat. 

When my grandmother died, my mother was 59. After Grandma's funeral, my mother told me sadly, "I feel like an orphan."

She was, of course, an orphan. Now I was one, too. 

I would catch myself, when I had a few moments, thinking that I should call Ma and listen to her natter on about how much iceberg lettuce was going for at Price Chopper, about the guy who cut her off and gave her the finger, about the film she'd seen on movie night.

The weekend after Labor Day, my sisters and I went out to Chicago (where my mother had grown up) for my Aunt Kay's wedding. Kay was the baby - 24 years younger than my mother - more like an older cousin to us growing up. She'd married young - just 19 - to someone who could charitably be characterized as a jerk. My mother, who never said a bad word about anyone, let alone a family member, disliked him intensely. Divorce wasn't my mother's thing. She was way too Catholic for that. But when Kay got divorced my mother was relieved. Everyone was happy she had found new love.

The wedding was at "the country house." That sounds all sorts of grand and glorious, but it was just a nice comfy summer house on a small, mucky lake about 50 miles outside of Chicago that my grandparents had purchased in the late 1930's. During our every-other-year vacations to Chicago, we spent a few days at the bungalow in the city, and then headed out to the country house, a.k.a., the lake, where we had a grand old time with our Dineen cousins (a 3 girl, 2 boy matchup to the Rogers clan) and various other relatives, included Aunt Kay and Uncle Bob (another more-like-a-cousin who was 20 years my mother's junior).

At some point in her first marriage, Kay had moved into the country house. Her second wedding took place in the backyard.

Being at the lake, my mother's still new death: it was a sentimental weekend.

We flew home on Sunday.

Monday morning, I flew to Orlando for a business conference I was speaking at. 

On Tuesday morning, when I walked out of my presentation, conference attendees were gathered around a few TV's that had been hastily set up in the mingle-space outside the hotel's meeting room. No one could make heads or tails out of what they were seeing. A plane had flown into one of the World Trade Towers? Another plane had flown into the other one? What?

I went to my room, turned on the TV, and called my husband. 

Was I watching when one or both of the Towers pancaked? I don't remember.

The rest of the day is a blur. TV. Phone calls. Trying to figure out how to get home. Because all anyone at the conference wanted to do was get home. 

I was traveling with a colleague and we met to weigh our options. A couple of guys we were talking to had rented a car and were driving to Baltimore. We were welcome to join them, which would get us two-thirds of the way home. Then I heard from my brother-in-law, who worked for Amtrak, that he had been able to get me and Tom two tickets on the train heading north. Leaving Orlando at 8 p.m. that night. We had two seats, and a tiny little sleeping room with bunks for two. We took it.

All we knew was that the train was heading north, and that it was going as far as Richmond, Virginia. All aboard, Amtrak.

I'd traveled light for the conference: one suit, three blouses, undies for a few days. I needed something more comfy for the train trip back home. In the lobby shop - it was a resort hotel - I bought a pair of black capri pants, a white sleeveless ribbed tee, a hideous blue golf sweater. Fortunately, my shoes were flats, so didn't look all that awful with my golf outfit. 

All the way north, we tried to piece together what was happening.

Yes, there was Internet. But this was pre-smartphone. 

The conductors were a good source of info. My colleague, Tom, is African American, and he'd periodically huddle with the conductors - African Americans, all - who were very open to sharing what they were hearing with him.

Overnight, we made our way up through the South.

We knew that Washington, DC had been attacked, too. We didn't know whether we were at war or not.

We lunched on nice, salty chicken noodle soup. 

We learned that the train would be going through to DC, where - if we were lucky - we could catch the Amtrak to Boston.

The silence when we pulled into DC was eerie. 

Because they held the train for us, we were able to make the train.

Thanks to my brother-in-law, we had nice comfy seats in business class. And had a nice dinner with a glass of wine. Carol Burnett was in our car. 

When the train pulled out of Newark, we could see the black cloud that was running the length of Manhattan. We saw smoke. We were not yet thinking ruins, remains. But there was dead silence in that car. Dead silence.

We hit Boston around midnight, Jim waiting for me at Back Bay Station.

Of course I hugged and kissed him. But I almost kissed the ground.

Back home, we watched the news for a while. Every time I saw the rerun of one of the Towers collapsing, I would shake my head in disbelief.

I got up late the next morning and went out to Logan to retrieve my car. It was a ghost town. They didn't collect the fee for parking. It didn't occur to me that Logan was a crime scene.

At work, no one did any work. They set up TVs in the cafeteria and we all ratcheted back and forth between checking the news on the 'net in our offices and gathering with colleagues in the caf to watch together and compare notes on what we were hearing.

A lot of us traveled a lot.

Who was where?

Karl was in New Orleans. A bunch of folks at his conference had chartered a bus to get back north. My boss was in Phoenix. He rented a car and drove to St. Louis and hung out there until planes started flying again. (When was that? I can't recall.) Scott was in lower Manhattan where we had offices right across from the WTC. He'd seen the first plane hit and made a bee-line to Hertz to rent a car to drive back to Boston. Mary, who ran our NY office, lived in Battery Park. Her neighborhood was closed down for weeks. Or was it months?

No one in my company had been on either of those terror planes out of Boston. But a lot of us had been on that American Airlines morning flight to Los Angeles - AA11 - at one point or another. I had taken it a couple of times.

My company had a network operations center on one of the top floors of one of the Towers, and some guys I know were talking to our guys down there when their Tower collapsed. They died having been told that if they made it to the roof, they'd be rescued by helicopter. So until they heard the rumbling, they had some hope. The guys I know heard the rumblings, too, and watched the Tower collapse as they were speaking with the guys in NY.

I don't know anyone who died on 9/11. But I know people who knew people. For a big metro area, Boston's pretty small. 

For weeks after, we watched the firefighters and others work the pile. We hoped against hope that they'd find survivors. We ached for the families hoping for news of their loved ones. We grieved as we read the stories in the NY Times about those who were killed. I wondered whether NYC had any firefighters who weren't good looking.

Gradually, business went back to normal. We started traveling again, flying. Colleagues (male) told me that when they took their seat on the plane, if they were seated next to another man they would talk about who would do what if there were terrorists on board. By that time, we knew the story about those who had diverted a plane aiming for more death and destruction in DC to a field in rural Pennsylvania. Let's roll. 

In bed, I tossed and turned. Never able to shake the images of the planes, the collapsing buildings, the jumpers, those fleeing uptown covered in soot, the smoldering ruins. The jumpers. The worst were the jumpers. That and wondering about how awful it was to be on one of those planes. Or in one of those buildings. Or someone not knowing what had happened to their husband, their wife, their son, their daughter, the father, their mother, their brother, their sister, their friend...

My sister Trish had lived in NYC for a number of years, and had worked in the financial district. Her daughter, then nearly five, asked her parents why they were crying. Trish explained that something bad had happened in their town. "Was it my town, too?" she asked. Yes, Molly, it was. It was everyone's town.

I didn't get to New York until spring, 

It was still awful: the chain link fences still covered with "Missing" signs. Hoping against hope... You couldn't get near the ruins, but that was probably for the best.

Shortly before my husband died - in September 2013 - Jim and I visited the then just-opened memorial on the World Trade Center site.

There's a memorial to Boston's 9/11 victims in the Public Garden, and most days I walk by it. It's quiet and lovely. Sometimes I stop to read some of the names engraved on the monument. Each year, there's a ceremony on 9/11, floral wreaths on stands, bunches of flowers, speeches, prayers, remembrances. I don't go. I see a bit about it on TV. During the year, other bunches of flowers occasionally appear around birthdays and anniversaries, I suspect. Weddings. Babies. Graduations. The stuff of life.

This year, they've put out flags for those killed. 

I'll probably swing by tomorrow at some point. 

Twenty years on.

Blink of an eye...