Plum Crazy

What a difference two years makes. 17,520 little hours.

I still think about 9/11 every day. Maybe a day will come where I don't think about it for an entire day. I don't know, but I don't think so. It was just too big.

But I can think about it now without tears immediately springing to my eyes. I can talk about it now without my eyes welling up, without the choking lump in my throat. Usually. Well, at least sometimes.

There are still the sudden reminders. One of the guys I knew who was killed was named Joe Sisolak. Not a particularly common name, I would think. Two months ago, I get a prescription filled in a pharmacy in my new hometown of Hoboken. The pharmacist's name? Joe Sisolak. That one really caught me by surprise. It was a flashback to 9/11.

My tribute to the victims and survivors of 9/11 this year was to help Michele with the Voices project. I think it's such a good thing she is doing. It's a testimony to the impact 9/11 had on real people. 9/11 happened to America; it happened to New York; it happened to D.C.; but most of all, it happened to us. Thinking of it as something that happened to a place makes it too abstract. But I dare anyone to see it as an abstraction after reading all the entries there.

I remember two years ago, going back to work on the afternoon of Thursday, 9/13/01. They needed people to go through the lists of names of people to confirm who was safe and who was not. I spent two weeks, including weekends, looking at the names of people I had known for years. I had to learn to put aside the pain while doing that in order to get through it. I knew that the work was important. I knew I could do it. So I did.

I took some time off from work on Saturday, 9/15/01, to volunteer in the crisis center our company had set up. By that time, I had accepted that anyone we hadn't confirmed as safe was dead. I just did not believe that many people could have survived in the rubble that long.

We had lost so many of the senior managers in the technology department that they needed anyone who knew the victims to talk with their families. As I was speaking to them and hearing the desperate hope in their voice that their loved one was still alive, out there somewhere, I felt so badly. What could I say? What could I say to the mother who was convinced that her son had been on the subway at the time of the attack and was still alive in the subway tunnels; that it was only a matter of time before he was rescued? Soon enough, she would have to accept the truth. But I wouldn't take away her hope. Not then.

I still have never seen footage of the towers collapsing. I have consciously avoided it. One day I may be ready to see it, but today is not that day. We worked in the North Tower. The plane only hit the corner of the North Tower. We know that some of our colleagues survived the impact. There were text messages and cell phone calls. That is still what bothers me most. People I knew were still alive when the towers collapsed. I am not ready to see that.

I know a lot of people are angry, and I understand why. They have every right to feel angry. Even two years later. But I don't feel much anger. I can't be angry at a faceless enemy, a group enemy. I can be angry at a specific person, like Osama bin Laden, and I am. I just can't be angry at an abstraction. I don't think I'm wired that way.

But I can be sad. Sad for the people I once knew. Sad for all the victims, for the families of the victims.

I can be happy. Happy for the people who survived. Happy that I survived. Happy for the memories I have of the people I once knew.

Today will be bittersweet. I will remember my friends and colleagues. The happy memories I have of them will be laced with the sadness that there will be no more happy memories made of them.

Today I will remember that I am lucky to be alive. That I can still make happy memories of other people; other things. That life goes on.