9 11 2001. A Tuesday. 21 years ago. Michaela, my youngest child was just 7 months old. My three other children where in school. I was working for a hospice as the Chaplain.
We just finished a team meeting. Walking into the lobby the news was playing and a crowd of employees had gathered around intensely watching. The first plane had already hit the north tower. It still seemed like it was a horrible accident. Like a small plane had crashed. Then out of nowhere the second plane slammed into the south tower, There was an audible gasp in the room as we all realized, without saying it, that this was a terrorist attack. I instinctively said allowed "Osama Bi Laden." We remained glued to the TV as the towers burned, as individuals jumped to their death. I stood shocked, in a state of suspended animation. I felt as if I was in a dream, in an alternate reality. I really couldn't process the enormity of what was happening. I watched in terror as the south tower collapsed and then the north. The world changed before my eyes.
What happened immediately after this is blank to me. Looking back now I hear that most people left their jobs, rushed to their children's schools and took them home. I didn't know what to do. There was no directive from our leadership. At least not that I was aware of. So I stayed at work. I had patients to visit but I was in a state of confusion, my mind was in a mental fog. I drove to the nursing home where a patient of mine, an elderly man, was living. He had dementia and mostly slept. I sat at his bedside and watched his TV for the next several hours in a state of shock.
So much of what happened that day is a blank. As if I was going about my routines on auto piliot, moving and acting but not thinking, not feeling, stunned, all emotions blunted.
In the next days the silence was deafening. I lived just a few miles from Detroit Metro Airport and the sound of jets overhead was a part the daily landscape. With all the aircraft grounded it was like living in a post apopolytic world.
Life for me would return to normal over the weeks and months but in a strange way the world would never be the same.
