September 11, 2001: Stories of a Few Young Americans

On September 11, 2001, I was on my way home from my friend's house and had just parked the car when the NPR news anchor said that a plane had just crashed into one of the Twin Towers. "Poor pilot," I thought as I turned off the car, imagining some small, private plane making a minor dent in the side of an enormous Twin Tower.

On September 11, 2001, I had just moved to New Haven, Conn. I was looking for work and had submitted my name with several temp agencies in town. On this particular Tuesday morning, I was hoping at least one of them would call back.

Around 10 a.m., I was about to pick up the phone to call one of the temp agencies, but before I could dial the number, the phone started ringing in my hand. It was my mom.

"A plane crashed into Twin Towers!" she said, a little frantically.

"Yeah," I said, remembering the little plane I had heard about. "That's what they said on NPR."

"But another one has hit the other Tower!" she insisted. "And I heard that a third plane hit the Pentagon!"

"Really...?" I headed towards the TV in the other room, picking up the remote and flipping onto CNN. And what I saw there...

"Oh my GOD! Mom, one of the Twin Towers is falling down! It's falling down!" For the next few minutes, I watched in horror as first one, then the second Twin Tower collapsed, reporting over the phone what I was seeing to my mother, who was at work and not near a TV screen.

"All those people..." I murmured. "Oh, God... All those people... Mom, I've got to go."

I scrambled to find my address book. Where I went to college, many of the people I knew were either from New York or headed there shortly after graduation. I started mentally ticking off names of people I needed to call right away, to make sure they were OK. But I quickly discovered all the lines were busy. Resignedly, knowing that I would not be hearing from a temp agency that day or perhaps all week, I sat down on the couch and became glued to the television screen for the next 72 hours. I had never cried watching the news before, but now I found myself weeping.

As it happened, most of the people I had known from college had escaped the tragedy of the two towers collapsing on September 11. One guy who had lived in my freshman dorm had jumped down an elevator shaft in one of the towers to get away, and even though he free-fell for three stories, he walked away from the Tower with a broken collar bone and a few broken ribs, but was otherwise OK. Other friends knew people who had died that day or who had been injured; fortunately for me and my friends, everyone we knew was OK.

One friend told me that he was supposed to have been in one of the Twin Towers that day, like he was every Tuesday. It just so happened that he had a business meeting in another tower that day, so he watched his beloved Twin Towers collapse through the plate glass window of one of the buildings that was later torn down. Like many New Yorkers that day, he felt Armageddon had arrived, and fled the city with many others on foot across a bridge and out of Manhattan.

I asked him what he did once he finally returned.

"I sold or gave away everything in my apartment," he said, "bought a car, and left New York." A successful Wall Street broker who had worked in the business district for close to five years, he had lost many friends and colleagues that day. After September 11, he didn't know what to do with himself, and his old life seemed pointless. When I saw him again in 2002, he was planning a year-long spiritual trek through Thailand, Japan and Hawaii. "September 11 made me reevaluate what I wanted my life to be about," he told me.

I haven't seen him since 2002. I hope he found what he was looking for.

I also knew a friend of a friend who worked in the South Tower for a small insurance company for two years in 1999 and 2000, before going to back to school in 2001. All but one of the seventy people she had worked with lost their lives on September 11.

The sole survivor was her direct supervisor, and even she would not have survived except for the kindness of a stranger. Evacuating with the rest of her company, she was headed for a stairwell when a man from one of the offices across the hall told her firmly, "We're going to use the elevator, it's faster."

"No," said the insurance supervisor. "During emergencies, you're supposed to use the stairs."

"No," he told her, "ride the elevator with us."

"No!" she shot back angrily, and headed for the stairs with the rest of her colleagues. The man physically grabbed her and pulled her into the elevator with him.

She survived. Her colleagues all perished in that stairwell on Tuesday, September 11, 2001. I am sure she has wondered every day since, "Why me, and not them?"

Eventually, after life started to get back to normal in New Haven, one of the temp agencies placed me as a secretary in a hospital. While working there, I met a nurse whose husband worked for a police department in Connecticut, and his crew had volunteered in the rescue efforts after September 11. While he was there, he had taken many photographs of the rubble. When he developed the film, he discovered odd, round, white circles of light a few feet above the ashes in photo after photo. After puzzling over them, he showed them to his wife, who told me, "It still gives me gooseflesh to think about those photos. Those circles of light... you know what I think? I think those are the souls of all those people, rising up from the ashes."

The conclusions I've drawn from September 11?

Yes, it has changed our political landscape dramatically - perhaps permanently. It has changed the geo-political atmosphere. It has polarized Americans as the debate over security concerns continues, seven years later. But for me, these are not the lessons that interest me.

The lesson I take away from September 11, 2001, is that this human life of ours is important - too important to waste over a pursuit of wealth, too important to waste over trivial arguments with our loved ones. September 11 inspired our country to pull together and care for one another with sincerity and love. My question is: will it take another tragedy to bring us together like that again, or can we learn to care for one another with the kind of mutual respect, affection, and humility in the way we all did in the hours, days, and weeks after September 11, 2001?