We Are One
I leave the house earlier than usual to have bloodwork done at my physician’s office at 8:15 am, before work. My son, who plans to move to Virginia soon and came down for a job interview yesterday, is driving back home to New York this morning. We agree to meet at the Redwood Restaurant for breakfast about 8:45.
He is already there when I arrive, inside drinking coffee. The waitress pours mine, steamy hot, just as I join him. We order – he, steak and eggs – me, pancakes and eggs – and talk while we eat - about the nice weather today, the hay he will help his friend harvest tomorrow if the weather holds, and about Asian pears. Then, outside again in the parking lot beneath the warm Virginia sunshine, we embrace, grateful for the visit and looking forward to seeing each other soon. We get into our cars, I hold up my left hand in the sign language gesture that means “I love you,” just as I did when he was small and getting on the school bus, and we drive off in our separate directions.
I arrive at work about 9:50, walk back to my tiny office, greet Shirley with a smile and ask how she is. “Not very good,” she replies dourly and her eyes move toward the radio. NPR has already announced that both towers have been hit, then the Pentagon, and then a tower collapsed.
I surrender to this surreal world slowly. I drop into my seat and stare at my black computer monitor as the story unfolds, a radio drama that is incomprehendable. My eyes keep welling with tears and my heart and gut swell with fear and pain until I think they will burst. Suddenly I want my son back, to be near him and listen together to this horrific news, to hug him one more time. My body wants to jump in my car and catch up to him on I-81N, yet I remain frozen to my chair. I begin to think about the rest of my family, which is spread from New York to Florida.
My daughter, Polly, is in Rochester… she’s asleep right now because she works late into the night at the newspaper. She should be far enough away from this, but who knows what will happen next? My God, now a plane has crashed in Pennsylvania. Is that a coincidence? How could it be? But why did it crash? Polly’s okay…. I won’t call her and wake her up – yet.
My youngest daughter in Florida… is she okay? I think so. She’s at work, just started this new job today and I don’t know the phone number yet. But she’s okay. Yes. I’m sure Susan’s okay. She has to be.
Then I think of Mom and my sisters, 70 miles from Manhattan, out on Long Island. Can I get through by phone? I dial and, amazingly, the call goes through as if nothing in the world is wrong, Mom answers after two brief rings. Her voice is shaky. At 85, she’s frail yet enduring well. She is weepy. “I had to turn off the tv. I can’t bear to watch it – it’s so terrible.” Her voice breaks. We talk briefly, to touch base, to reassure the other that we are both okay, and promise to talk more later.
I begin to listen again. The radio gives me no visual images yet I know that many people’s lives have exploded, in one brief gruesome instant and then another and then yet another, from life to death. Gone. Forever. In a split second. The lives of everyone who loved them are forever changed. I feel with each new crash that I have slammed into concrete. I become more and more numb with each new announcement until I feel that I am not really there at all – in my office listening to my radio.
Yet fresh tears well up in my eyes with each new announcement. And then I find I have slipped back three decades and connected to the unbearable pain of the sudden and unexpected death of a man I loved so much. And a few years later, my young son’s death. I realize that the anguish and pain and despair I felt then for my own losses is the same as the anguish and pain and despair I feel right now for each person taken from us today.
We are all interconnected. What each mother, father, brother sister, child, friend, lover, spouse has lost today – we have all lost. I do not know their names or faces yet but I ache and I mourn as if each was known to me and deeply loved by me.
In the midst of this crazy, upsidedown and terrifying world, my heart and my arms reach out. We are all one.
Last updated: 09/16/01