I still startle easily. But I’m okay flying in airplanes again. Recently my son asked me to remember the name of a tutor he had in high school. I didn’t even remember he had one. 9/11 happened his first year. I was kind of a zombie for those first few years, I told him. 

My mother died in November 2001. She had the only TV on her floor at Hebrew Home in Riverdale, so everyone piled into her room to watch the towers fall, a continuous loop of terror on TV. She was suffering from Alzheimer’s and couldn’t communicate to her caregivers her concern that we lived so close to the Trade Center. She stopped eating that day. 

Our car was missing for weeks after because it had been parked next to the school where our daughter was that day, her first day of middle school. The police towed it to an empty street a few blocks away. A month or so later, a policeman came to tell us where it was. People left flowers on the windshield, assuming we were dead.

The events of that day left a mark on all of us. Ours are not special or unique even. The husband of a friend who sheltered with us that day came back covered in white dust, the same white dust that obscured our windows for weeks. He died of cancer some years later. Another friend got a rare cancer but survived.

Our neighborhood smoldered for what seemed like months. Slowly, trucks removed debris and the semblance of streets and buildings returned, many obliterated forever. The last building still standing on the west side of Greenwich Street was our elementary school. 

The mayor became a hero in his own eyes and a villain in ours. It was his hubris, we believed, that brought down Building 7, because he hoarded oil inside it. Conspiracy theories rose up like gutter water in a hurricane. 

I remember thinking early after the attacks that things would have to change now. That thoughtful people would recognize the desperation felt by much of the world and the blame they placed, rightly or wrongly, on the United States for some of the gross inequalities in the world. How wrong I was. That feeling did not absolve anyone for the terror wrought and the destruction of lives that day. I just thought it might have been a wake-up call. It was only a call to arms. And an excuse to wipe out another enemy in Iraq.

I remember the day bin Laden was killed, after years of war. People cheered his death and the death of his family members. Looking at the photo of the president and cabinet members in the Situation Room (what a great Orwellian term!) I most identified with Hillary’s horror. Her reaction to watching our country kill him seemed to me to be the only human response. Horror begets horror.