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REMEMBERING 9/11
All of this, this being the column that I have been writing
for
www.haleisner.com, started as an e-mail I sent to friends
at the end of week
of 9/11. It was my answer to all those who wanted to know
how I was doing
that week.
I wrote that first e-mail the night of 9/14, the night I was
supposed to have
been on an Olympic Airlines flight to Athens with connections
on to
Santorini, one of my favorite places on earth. Of course,
we didn’t go. We
couldn’t fly out of New York; we couldn’t fly into
Athens. The world was…in
the thrall of 9/11. A major event had happened to all of us
but we had no
way, yet, of assimilating it all. We had no idea how we were
going to move
forward, physically or psychologically.
My god, but the wounds were fresh!
Somehow, that e-mail found its way to Hal Eisner, who then,
God love him,
asked me if I would do this on a regular basis for www.haleisner.com
about
what it was like to be a New Yorker living through all of
this.
And I am a New Yorker, living through all of this. My brother,
whom I love
deeply, phoned me and expressed his sorrow that I was in New
York when this
happened.
I shocked him by letting him know that if I had to be ANYWHERE,
I would have
wanted to be here. I would have wanted to be where it was
all happening.
I was.
My life is shaped, going forward, by having been in New York
that day. All
of our lives are that way. But those of us who were in New
York, well, our
lives have the particular flavor of having been at the epicenter.
There is
no one in America that is immune from that day but it is special,
unique,
desperately so, for those who were in New York and who experienced
that day.
I will, until the day I die, know what it was like to struggle
to get back
downtown to my own apartment the night of 9/11. Because to
get home I had to
go through three separate police lines on my slow way back
downtown, through
crowds of frightened, curious people while sirens screamed
and hundreds of
trucks began, that night, to haul away the debris. I will
always remember
the slow surrendering of hope that came in that week that
anyone else was
going to emerge alive from the rubble.
I will, until the day I die, still smell the acrid, dark,
burning smell of
Manhattan that day and the weeks following. Until I die, certain
things will
suddenly cause tears to come to my eyes. A part of me will
live forever,
frozen in the moment, on the corner of West Broadway and Spring,
seeing the
first Tower burn while sobbing, shocked people streamed north
to safety.
A part of me will never walk down Sixth Avenue without seeing
the thousands
of flyers for missing persons that were never going to be
found.
That I would be a New Yorker is strange to me. I had never
really planned on
living here. But here I am. And because of 9/11, there is
no one in the
country who is not, in some way, a New Yorker.
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