Remembering 9/11 in the Midst of a Pandemic
Life can feel steady, predictable, even concrete, until all at once you realize it isn’t
On the morning of September 11th, 2001, I woke up in my apartment in lower Manhattan. I got up, showered, got dressed, and left for work, walking through the bright sunshine to catch the train to my office in midtown.
As I started that day, I had no idea that in a few hours a friend would call me to say that a plane had hit the World Trade Center. I had no idea that I’d see a fixture of the famous New York skyline crumble before me, that I’d be in the presence of such panic and devastation and loss of life, that I’d never again live in the apartment I had just left, or that in a month, I’d no longer be living in New York at all.
Life is like that. It feels steady, predictable, even concrete, until all at once you realize it isn’t.
In the twenty years since that awful day and the sad and blurry time that followed, I’ve never forgotten it. But I’ve also probably never thought more about it than in the last year and a half, as all our lives have been transformed by the pandemic.
After 9/11, I read that one definition of a traumatic event is when something happens outside of a person’s understanding of what is possible. That always rung true to me because, of all the things twenty-four-year-old-me was worrying about when I left for work that morning in 2001, terrorists flying planes into buildings blocks from where I lived was not one of them.
Similarly, in March of 2020, when my daughters came home from school on a Friday afternoon, and news of a new respiratory virus was starting to circulate, it never occurred to me that they wouldn’t go back to school on Monday. Or for six months. Or that when they did go back the following year, it would be only for two days a week and they’d be wearing face masks and staying six feet away from their friends.
It never occurred to my daughters either. Over the course of the last year and a half, they’ve learned the lesson — at the ages of ten and eleven — that I learned in New York twenty years ago: that life can change in an instant and there’s nothing you can do about it.
As parents, we try, above all, to keep our children safe. From the day you bring that baby home from the hospital, your number one priority becomes caring for and protecting this tiny, vulnerable human being. My goal in life has always been to give my children the kind of childhood I was blessed to have: stable, filled with unconditional love, and absent a whole lot of worry. To let them be kids. I struggle knowing that, despite my best efforts to protect them from the world for as long as possible, this pandemic and all its sadness, uncertainty, isolation, stress, and fear will be a defining experience of their childhoods.
On the morning of September 11th, as the attacks were underway and panic was starting to spread, I got a call on my office phone from my mother. She was calling from Massachusetts where she was watching things unfold on television.
“I’m coming to get you,” she said.
I explained to her that she couldn’t do that, that the roads and bridges and tunnels into and out of the city were being closed, and anyway, she was four hours away and I didn’t know where I was going to be in the next four minutes.
All these years later, I think of that call, of the primal impulse my mom had to just come get me, bring me home, keep me safe. To shield me from the dangers of the world she knew about and those she never could have imagined.
Laura Shea Souza is a freelance writer whose essays on motherhood, mothers and daughters, and relationships of all kinds, have appeared in The Boston Globe; The Boston Globe Magazine; NPR/WBUR’s Cognoscenti forum, where she is a featured contributor; and in a variety of other online and print publications.
Laura is also an award-winning communications professional with extensive experience in public relations strategy and execution in a variety of industries including technology and higher education.
