Ten years ago, on September 11, 2001, my NYPD officer roommate received an emergency call early in the morning and flew out the door, yelling for me to turn on the news.
I turned on the TV to watch the just-filmed footage of the first plane hitting the World Trade Center and exploding.
I called my then-boyfriend in CA (it was REALLY early there) and told him to turn on the TV right away.
He wanted me to try to take photos; I told him I thought that was grotesque.
We had no idea of the atrocities yet to come.
Ten years ago, I was a graduate student in law and social work at Columbia University.
I had a doctor’s appointment that morning before my afternoon classes at the School of Social Work. I called the doctor and left a message, wondering whether I’d still need to get to the UWS early that day. Maybe I’d be able to sleep a little later.
Columbia never canceled classes for anything.
Ten years ago, alone in my apartment on the UES, I watched in horror over the next hour or so, as the second plane hit, and the Twin Towers collapsed, killing thousands.
Needless to say, there was no doctor’s appointment, and classes were canceled.
Ten years ago, not knowing what to do, I decided to go to Carl Schurz Park by the East River.
I wasn’t the only one with that idea; there were around 50 of us watching — in deafening silence except for the sounds of the fighter planes over Manhattan — the plumes of smoke and debris rise from Lower Manhattan.
Ten years ago, my doctor friends in Neurosurgery at NYU and the ER at St. Vincent’s, reported to work, as many medical professionals did, prepared for days of incoming severe traumas.
Only, there were none. We didn’t yet know that hardly anyone had survived.
Ten years ago, my Mom was frantic to know that I was ok, although I was not anywhere near the Twin Towers.
When we finally spoke hours later, after some phone service in New York City was restored, she reminded me of how we’d gone shopping and to TKTS under the World Trade Center in 1990 during our stay in New York before my first trip to Israel when I was 17.
Mom has been gone for five years now.
Ten years ago, my friend, J, ran — still wearing her very professional lawyer suit — from Church Street where she worked all the way up to my apartment on 86th and York.
I ordered a pizza, figuring she’d be hungry, not realizing that she had so narrowly escaped mass disaster and that food would be the last thing on her mind.
Ten years ago, I stayed by the TV for hours (and for the following days and weeks as well), morbidly transfixed by the many horrific images of people having jumped from buildings, of people running from the tornado-like funnel cloud of scattering debris, of hordes of people covered in and choking from dust, of the huge hole in the Lower Manhattan skyline.
The term “Ground Zero” was coined, and it would evoke terror and sadness in us forevermore.
Ten years ago, when I did go to bed, I remember the burning smell coming through the window air conditioner beside my bed.
I did not know that that was the beginning of weeks and months of asthma problems from the tiny particles of death and debris floating in the air even that far uptown.
Ten years ago, on September 12, I exited my apartment to see innumerable “Missing” fliers, posted everywhere by people desperately looking for news about their parents, siblings, children or other loved ones. No one knew yet that there was no hope.
Ten years ago, on September 12, as I was waited for the M15 bus on my way to my social work fieldwork at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, I watched — again with silent crowds of people — as a seemingly endless convoy of hulking camouflaged military tanks and emergency vehicles rolled down Second Avenue silently with their headlights on. It was eerily quiet as the largest funeral procession I had ever seen passed.
Ten years ago, on September 12, the M15 bus drove past the New York Blood Center. There were hundreds, if not thousands, of people lined up around the block to give blood.
We did not know yet that there was no one who needed that blood.
Ten years ago, my NYPD officer roommate returned home after days on The Pile (only to return every day for at least a month), covered in dust and smelling of death, including the human skull he’d found.
I made him strip his clothes off at the door each day, so that the smell of death would not overtake our apartment.
What he saw was etched in his brain and reoccurred nightly in his dreams; he was never the same.
Ten years ago, on the Friday after the attacks, my friend, R, and I were among thousands who lined up on Vesey Street and other nearby thoroughfares to see Ground Zero for ourselves.
We sobbed, looking at the twisted steel and the burning pit, as we realized that this was our generation’s Pearl Harbor, our generation’s Kennedy Assassination. We would all forever remember where we were on September 11, 2001.
Ten years ago, I visited my best friend in Maryland and was stunned and saddened to see a chunk missing from the very distinctive outline of the Pentagon.
Ten years ago, we read the obituaries of the 9-11 victims in the New York Times daily for months and months.
We watched grieving relatives, including pregnant wives, on TV.
We saw and contributed to makeshift shrines at police and fire precincts around the city.
We depended on Mayor Giuliani to keep our city together.
We marveled — with fear and horror — at how such a tragedy could take place on American soil, let alone in New York City, among other places.
We felt patriotic toward our city and country in a way we’d never felt before.
Five years ago, I represented some of the 9-11 First Responders — not just policemen and firemen, but also construction workers and employees of the Sanitation Department, Con Ed and the Department of Transportation, who were required to report to work as usual, under the EPA-promulgated pretense that the air at Ground Zero was safe — who were already being diagnosed with serious respiratory and gastrointestinal ailments, in their suits against New York City and a variety of other governmental agencies.
Today, although the Zadroga Bill has passed, its scope is limited, and our heroes have neither received the respect nor the financial and psychosocial support they so richly deserve.
I wonder often whether my clients are still alive or whether they have succumbed to their illnesses.
Although people in all parts of the country and, indeed, the world were affected by 9-11, we New Yorkers were at Ground Zero, and, to this day, I think 9-11 affected us in a way no one can understand unless they were here. In the days surrounding 9-11, this girl from Boston, sharing in the enormity of the tragedy and the rare triumphs, felt like a real New Yorker.
WE WILL NEVER FORGET.
