[Ed. note: These two columns by Cass Collins, who writes the River Muse column for the River Reporter, were received after the section commemorating the attacks of September 11, 2001. They are absolutely worth reading, even a month after the ceremonies have ended.]

I still startle easily. But I’m OK 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 disease 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.

25 years later

The first plane is already ash. You sit outside the school, gathering your wits, your breath, your heartbeat, to present yourself to your daughter, who is being beckoned right now by her teachers to gather her things and meet you downstairs in the playground.

History will not let you be the calm mother today. As you sit cradling yourself in your arms, a second plane enters from the West and plows into the other tower, throwing a piece of landing gear into an alley on Murray Street, where your children go to tumbling class in an old artist loft on Wednesday afternoons. The landing gear—never mentioned in news reports of the day—is found years later, confirming your eyewitness.

Your daughter, her first day of middle school punctuated by an unimaginable act, is now in your arms, her red curls tight and coiled as when she left you on the corner of Greenwich Street and Chambers 30 minutes ago. As you escape the schoolyard onto the highway, your heads turn and look back. Bodies fall like planks from the South Tower. Immediately you wish you could unsee it.

“What would I do? Would I have held hands with a colleague and jumped? Was that the brave thing? Was I brave?” You will perseverate on this every day, even 25 years later.