This week has been filled with a bag of mixed emotions, the media is pushing the "We will never forget" phrase into our homes. Today Rudy Giuliani, "Americas Mayor" was on "The View", and children whose parents were lost in the 911 tragedy were seen in a promotion for news show 20/20 that the inimitable Barbara Walters will be a part of. People on Facebook are posting patriotic profile pictures and asking questions like "where were you on that tragic day", and posting a copy and paste "rolling" flag as their status. It was under one of those on a friends post of that flag that I read someones comment, "I can never forget, I was there!" The wording in that cut me deep. I thought yes, those people that were there will live with that memory every single day of their lives, try as they might to live their lives in some realm of normalcy, that day left them anything but normal.
I know where I was and if you follow my blog you will know that I had just been incarcerated for domestic violence. The day that I heard the news I was in a holding cell, with other women getting ready to go to court. It had just happened and the officers were in shock and at that moment they seemed more human to me, then when I had been arrested, and they somehow I think, saw us as more human. They were quieter, more reserved, and struck as hard by the image they had just seen on the Good Morning America telecast as we were listening to their second hand accounts. Immediately I thought of my daughters and wondered if I would see them again. I thought "my God I just want to feel their little hands in mine and hear their laughter, smell them and kiss them.." I, like everyone else around me felt the world would come to an end. Would I ever tell them I loved them again? Here it is 10 years later and they are growing up. I am a grandma! I was released 1 month later and from that day on I vowed to get my kids back home where they belonged, and I did. I look back on that day with the same feeling as my friend's friend, not because I was there in New York on that fateful day, but because I was already going through something I never thought I would.
His tone resonates with me...maybe some people don't want to remember, and that's not to say that out of any disrespect for the souls lost on that day or to any of the survivors or surviving family members who have carried on under the weight of their enormous loss. I just understand...wanting to forget. September 1st had come and went and I did not realize until days later that it had been the 10 year anniversary of the incident that I went to jail for. Not until I caught a glimpse of a local headline "Woman Stabs Boyfriend" in the local newspaper. When I saw that, a flood of emotion shook me to my very core and it was as if everyone around me was going in hyper speed as I stood still in their vortex. I felt anxious and sick and walked to my bus to cry. That headline had taken me back to the whole moment in time my life changed. As I write this I am flooded with emotion and feeling for those survivors of 9-11. How must they feel? Emotions so close to the surface everyday. How do they react to a trigger? An image, a sound, a smell, a word, a thought, feeling, a headline that takes them back to that day.
I will put a patriotic wreath on my door Sunday morning and I will have my moment of silence, and prayer for those lost and still living, but I will not tune in to the shows that will bombard us on the news or the net. I know most of those stories are stories of hope and survivors, but I just will not fuel the media frenzy, well meaning or not. I don't want to go back to that day, I want to live in the now. I want to go to church, hear my kids laugh, make them a Sunday dinner and sit and watch movies. Hug them and kiss them and love them. That will be how I observe 9-11.
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