Front Porch: Remembering 9/11

September 11, 2001.

On the morning of 9/11, I was at work on the campus of Eastern Washington University, where I served as the university’s public information officer. I had a small TV in my office and was monitoring the events that were unfolding in Manhattan.

I was born in New York City and have many family members who live and work there, including one cousin who, at the time, was a firefighter, though working in a suburban Westchester County fire department. Still, I had personal concerns along with the generalized horror I was seeing unfold on my TV screen, from my vantage point safely across the country.

My phone rang. It was my cousin Belinda, who worked for an investment firm on Wall Street. Could I tell her what was going on?

There she was in the midst of the terrorist attack that was happening in one of the world’s largest centers of communication, finance and commerce, but where communication systems were down, and she had no way of finding out what was happening, other than what she could see with her own eyes. And those eyes were seeing things that no eyes ever should.

Because I had been a journalist in my prior work life and because I was outside New York City, she called me in Cheney, Washington, to find out what was happening in New York City, where she was, and asked if I could help her find some way to get off Manhattan island.

She lived in Brooklyn and had taken the subway to work, having first gone to vote. The subway had a stop at the World Trade Center, but hers was the stop after that, Wall Street, as that’s where her offices were. When her train made its scheduled stop at the Twin Towers, scores of people poured into the cars, all talking about what was going on above street level. That was the last car to leave the station before the subways were halted – and before the towers fell.

I’m still not sure where she found a land line to call me from – perhaps her own office – but she said she’d call me back in a half hour. Meantime I reached out to whoever I could in the media, plus I kept monitoring the news.

When she did call back – longer than a half hour later – I updated her with the information I had, plus I told her about a service I’d just heard about, someone ferrying people across the Hudson River to New Jersey. She’d just have to get over to the west side to access that.

I didn’t hear from her again for three days.

She had been one of those people you saw in pictures at the piles of rubble, trying to pull away debris. She was also one of those people you saw walking across the Manhattan Bridge to Brooklyn, all dusty and shell shocked, still wearing what had been their fine work clothes when they left for the office that morning.

She lost a lot of friends and co-workers that day. And a large part of herself.

Belinda did work for another year or so, but she was never the same again. She retired to Florida. I’ve visited her there twice since then, but, frankly, I haven’t heard from her for years now. Christmas cards and notes go unanswered.

On 9/11, a man I worked with at EWU was busy trying to get into contact with his son, who lived in Manhattan and who cut hair at a shop located near the Twin Towers. Often the young man would go to peoples’ offices at the towers and give them haircuts on-site. He had an appointment that morning to do just that.

As it turned out, his refrigerator had been malfunctioning, and he’d arranged for a repairman to come to his apartment to fix it – on Sept. 11. So he canceled the haircut and stayed home to let the serviceman in.

Belinda and my friend Dan’s son both survived that day. One was at the scene and has suffered from PTSD ever since. The other’s life was spared because he had a faulty appliance.

And so here we are, remembering the 20th anniversary of 9/11. Speeches and untold losses, lingering illnesses for many who were on-site, a nation whose sense of invincibility remains severely shaken, lessons supposedly learned.

We say we’ll never forget, but we will. We already are forgetting. We just dust off some memories on anniversary occasions and then move on. That’s part of healing, I guess, but I am most concerned that we have learned the wrong lessons, that we have become more divided, that we don’t need an outside enemy because we are making one another into “the other,” that our accelerating tribalism is doing the work our real enemies set out to do on 9/11.

Even so, I have so much gratitude, admiration and respect for all who were on-site that day, and in the following days, at the Twin Towers – and at the field in Pennsylvania where Flight 93 went down and at the Pentagon when the plane flew into it – and who fought to save lives and recover bodies. And for the walking wounded emerging in the aftermath, I hold you in my heart as long as I draw breath.

And to those who died, may God hold you all.

Voices correspondent Stefanie Pettit can be reached by email at upwindsailor@comcast.net.