I wake up on September 11, a Tuesday, thinking of my friend Billy, beginning his first round of chemotherapy that morning. Since we found out about Billy’s cancer on July 26, there have been good days and bad days. On bad days, like when the blood clot in Billy’s leg travels to his lung, I hang up the phone, go lie face down on the bed, and cry. But Monday, September 10, was a good day; the oncologist said Billy didn’t have lymphoma in addition to his primary cancer, and that four rounds of intense chemo might beat it.
It was a year of losses. My husband and I left our house, jobs, and friends behind in a cross-country move, my dad entered rehab yet again, and a close friend died of a heroin overdose, alone on the floor of her small apartment. No one knew whether it was accident or suicide. On the same day Billy was diagnosed with cancer, I was fired. As I happened across Hamlet on PBS that summer, Shakespeare’s words cut me to the quick: “When sorrows come, they come not single spies, but in battalions.”
My husband calls from his office in a Philadelphia high-rise. He never calls this early. “Turn on the TV,” is all he says, and I stand in the middle of the living room with the phone in my hand trying to make sense of the inconceivable image of a jet slicing into the World Trade Center. On a smaller inset screen, the Pentagon is in flames. In my mind I’m crooning “Nooooo.”
My mother calls, my brother calls. The first tower collapses and I reach for my throat. I reflexively ache for the building itself, the powerful beauty it represents. I don’t yet register that there are people inside. I know the Twin Towers more as architectural symbols than offices.
And then a man leaps from one of the top floors, his dark jacket flapping in the wind as his body tumbles through the air with a certain resigned grace. I back up and sink into the couch as it hits me. There are thousands of people in those buildings. They are trapped.
I sit for hours that will turn into days, watching Dan Rather fixed indefinitely in the center of the TV screen while the great media machine feeds him facts. (Remember facts? How reassuring they were?) Dan Rather mustn’t go anywhere. He and his facts must stay here in my living room outside of Philadelphia. He must eat takeout during commercial breaks and keep reporting until there is nothing left to report.
He says that the FAA has grounded all planes and that the president is safe inside Air Force One. I don’t like the president one bit, but safe inside Air Force One is exactly where I want him. The government I normally take for granted reveals itself to be an invisible bedrock making my modern life possible—controlling air traffic, communications, infrastructure, the economy. My personal identity slides away like a mask at one of those dress-up balls, and I am simply one more American. As a liberal usually focused on what should be changed, how to progress beyond current restrictive traditions, I’ve found patriotism unnecessary, even corny. My brand of patriotism has consisted of critique and new ideas instead of appreciation and unity. I’m suddenly aware of my arrogance, afforded only by the safety I’ve enjoyed thanks to my more realistic fellow citizens and the institutions they work to uphold.
What is this cold comfort? Mixed in among the moments when I bury my head in tears as families describe last-minute phone calls from doomed airliners is a sense of connection I’ve never known. Loud news blares from my neighbor’s open window. I stand for a long time at my window so that we keep hearing the same thing. The local radio station plays Peter Gabriel’s “Don’t Give Up” and Paul McCartney does a live rendition of “Let It Be.” For a solid week, I focus solely on basic activities—cooking, cleaning, getting fresh air. My personal ambitions shrink to ethereal, nonessential details. The flags lining my street signify the solidity running beneath my small, tenuous life and personal losses.
I want to be around others. I go to a prayer service down the street where the whole town seems to have crowded into the little stone church. I want to sit in the church with the neighbors I don’t know for as long as possible. I don’t want the networks to return to their regularly scheduled programming. I don’t want us to seal ourselves off again behind our rolled-up car windows, honking as we pass the slower drivers, so full of ourselves, so alone.
War is a big price to pay for community. So is disaster. I want neither. But I want something to wake us up and keep us awake, focused on what we share instead of only on how we disagree. Until those buildings fell, I never realized how lonely my American life was. Eventually we retreated, of course, back behind our personal egos, our labels, our iPhones, our intersectional identities, our differences. We emerge every now and then after a big storm, but not like we did in those few weeks of September, 2001.
And this is to say: I miss you. I miss us.