9/11 Redux
I can’t seem to tear myself away from it.
Again and again I returned to those awful days of Sept 11 th .

It was déjà vu for me as it was for countless others who lived through it and shared the anxieties and the fears and the unknown.

Those who belittle what happened either are insensitive to terror simply don’t know what happened or are just callus people; there is no shortage of people who will be more concerned about their own cut fingers than anything that could happen to anyone else.

But in some respects, it was the finest hour for our public servants and first responders. They gave selflessly without regard to their own needs or their safety. Clearly, it was a time of heroes; people who gave their lives hoping to help others.

Where do such selfless people come from? What makes them do what they do?

I thought these things as we went through the process on the various channels that beamed retrospectives on that awful day and I was spellbound.

You see, I saw the whole thing from my window. No, I didn’t see the painful close ups of people falling.

I didn’t see some of the details although I could see everything clearly from my apartment. I could see the planes hit, the buildings enveloped in flames, and the crowds trying to escape the rushing crowds of smoke and debris.

Later, I went out and reached up and picked email messages and memos out of the air and felt the gelatinous remains of vaporized people landing on my skin, soft and yielding and moist, a feeling that you tend never to forget. The storm that had come up from out of nowhere and changed the brightest day of early fall into a stormy, dark night carried with it the detritus of a city, a city in free fall….

I still get nightmares from the little exposure I did have. I didn’t go digging for friends. I didn’t get to the Pile but I could smell the fires that burned for weeks afterwards.

I will tell you only three of my experiences. One was that of a little girl and her mother who lived in my building. She was a single parent who worked on Wall Street. I used to see little girl all of the time downstairs in the lobby or the front of the building. She was always waiting for her mom. She was a precocious child and great fun. I used to tell her stories until her mother came down.

The other was a neighbor, too, who lived upstairs from me, who impressed me with her luxurious clothes and the finest furs. She obviously held a very high level job at an investment company in one of the Towers.

The third was a woman who my wife used to go to work with.


After the twin towers, I learned that the little girl’s mother died in the building’s collapse.
I never saw the little girl again. She just disappeared.

The second, the woman executive did not die in the building’s crash, but she came home that day, packed her bags and left just like that. A friend told me that she could never stay in New York again.

The third, the woman on the bus. Rose ran into her a week after business started to slowly return. The woman told her that her only heir and family, her daughter had left the building when the management told her to return to her desk. She never came out again! They never found her body and I volunteered to go with her to the Mayor’s office to fill out the requisite death certificates in the absence of any real proof.

Just three stories that exemplified what happened that day and I think representative of the horror that changed people’s lives for good.

Les Aaron