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Thoughts on last year at this time for me (big whup!):
No big personal experience narrative here--I very luckily didn't lose anyone I knew last year--just a few near misses. And there's a hell of a lot of other huge tragedies filling the world.
The part of Sept 11th that most directly affected me, besides worrying that my dad got home safely in the traffic pouring out of New York from a meeting in Trenton to the family home in South Jersey, was perhaps the sky that evening and all the evenings to follow for a few days when the planes were grounded. I live outside of DC, about a 30 minutes drive from the Pentagon, and stayed up late each evening watching the military planes circling eerily overhead, keeping vigil, keeping wary.
Less than two weeks later a freak tornado hit the university where I work killing two young girls and doing lots of damage. And I saw the funnel tearing its way through town out my rear view mirror as I was driving home. I was never so terrified in my life as I raced home to make sure my cats were alright (and whom I promptly freaked out), and I think it was just the closing touch for me to release the shell-shocked feeling of the whole period of time. But I was able to find something useful to do in getting other graduate students covered by disaster relief funds that the university might have otherwise ignored, so it gave me something to restore my strength as well. And perhaps it helped ease me in contextualizing the 9-11 events with all the other overwhelming catastrophes the world contends with, as unique as this one feels to so many Americans who didn't directly suffer the loss of loved ones. I'm sorry for people the world over who did lose loved ones that day and in the events that followed. And so it goes.
No big personal experience narrative here--I very luckily didn't lose anyone I knew last year--just a few near misses. And there's a hell of a lot of other huge tragedies filling the world.
The part of Sept 11th that most directly affected me, besides worrying that my dad got home safely in the traffic pouring out of New York from a meeting in Trenton to the family home in South Jersey, was perhaps the sky that evening and all the evenings to follow for a few days when the planes were grounded. I live outside of DC, about a 30 minutes drive from the Pentagon, and stayed up late each evening watching the military planes circling eerily overhead, keeping vigil, keeping wary.
Less than two weeks later a freak tornado hit the university where I work killing two young girls and doing lots of damage. And I saw the funnel tearing its way through town out my rear view mirror as I was driving home. I was never so terrified in my life as I raced home to make sure my cats were alright (and whom I promptly freaked out), and I think it was just the closing touch for me to release the shell-shocked feeling of the whole period of time. But I was able to find something useful to do in getting other graduate students covered by disaster relief funds that the university might have otherwise ignored, so it gave me something to restore my strength as well. And perhaps it helped ease me in contextualizing the 9-11 events with all the other overwhelming catastrophes the world contends with, as unique as this one feels to so many Americans who didn't directly suffer the loss of loved ones. I'm sorry for people the world over who did lose loved ones that day and in the events that followed. And so it goes.