10 Years

Strength does not come from physical capacity. It comes from an indomitable will.

- Mohandas Gandhi (Mahatma Gandhi)

I remember being in the parking lot of the WHB Nursery School that morning. It was our youngest daughter’s first day and it was only an hour so the mom’s all got coffee and hung out to chat. For some reason we had the radio on and all of the sudden it sounded like War of the Worlds. The announcer was yelling and confused and scared. I called my friend who is married to my husband’s cousin. (Before 9/11 we didn’t really know where our family and friends worked, it was always just “He’s downtown.” Now you sort of know where everyone works and its information we tuck away but hang onto just in case.) She was crying when she answered and said “Michael is gone. Pray Michelle gets home safely.” I sank to my knees in the parking lot and cried. Her brother in law, my husband’s other cousin and our daughter MJ’s godfather worked at Cantor and was killed along with all of his co-workers. His wife worked at Amex and she eventually made it home to their baby son Matthew. Life as we knew it was over. As the day went on more and more of our friend’s names were added to the list of the dead or still missing at that point. But they were all gone.

I remember the clearest blue skies I had ever seen in the days that followed. I remember a monarch butterfly migration that happened that September. Thousands of butterflies were everywhere. It was amazing. Around that time I read an article in Vanity Fair that said after WWII was over the people who liberated the concentration camps in Europe reported that all over the barracks in several different countries carvings of butterflies were found. Those who were about to transition had instinctively carved them in Russia, Germany and Poland.

I remember driving on the LIE in October and someone beeped his or her horn and my husband looked at me and said, “It’s over.” Meaning that feeling of being united and standing together stronger than we were before against a common enemy was ending and people were already going back to the old ways. Road rage still existed. We just forgot about it for a little while.

We have watched a lot of children grow up without their father’s. A lot of widows try, and hopefully succeed in moving on with their lives.

Nothing will ever be the same after that day. We think of it in terms of before and after. We were the generation that didn’t grow up with any real threat. The Berlin wall went down in the 80’s. Who besides the Russian’s could ever hurt us?

We mourn the loss of dear friends when we see their children and grandchildren and know they are watching from somewhere. Just not physically here with us. My husband just said to me the other day, I still try not to cry everyday thinking about the boys. Ten years later, the heartbreak is still just below the surface.

The thing I learned the most was even when the scariest thing we can possibly imagine happens, life goes on. Tremendous joy is somehow able to simultaneously live beside extreme heartbreak. The sun still rises and sets no matter what. People still beep their horns, babies are born, people find out they have cancer and get married and divorced. Life continues on. But we are stronger than we think and we already have everything we need within us. Just when the caterpillar thought it’s life was over, it turned into a butterfly.