Six Years Ago

Six years ago, hijacked planes were flown into the Twin Towers in New York, the Pentagon in Virginia, and into a quiet field in rural Pennsylvania.

I was in Washington state, pregnant with my daughter, and my son wasn’t even a year old. I remember crying throughout the day and listening to NPR round the clock, wide awake through the dark and long hours of the night.

I couldn’t stop thinking about those voices in the rubble, silenced to a concrete and fiery death. I couldn’t stop thinking about the victim’s families: how they were thinking about the violent deaths of their loved ones, how they dared to hope for rescue, and how they all had to consider what the years ahead had to hold for them without that loved one.

I remember feeling sad and angry and scared for these people; I remember feeling that way for myself.

For the hours and days and weeks following the attack, my mind went to escape routes, shelters, to visions of myself protecting my children at all cost. What if I had to hole up in my house while foreign troops circled the perimeter? What if I had to flee to the hills with a blanket and a can of beans? How would we survive? On grass and berries and rabbits I’d snap in two with my bare hands? How would I even cook them?

I envisioned getting ahold of a gun, and played over scenes of violence and fury and desperation, where I went to my death protecting my children. Sometimes I was a lone sniper, picking off attackers; at others, I was stealth with a knife or a club. But none of these were safe or real options. I knew that.

I knew if I were being attacked, if my home was being invaded, my chances would be slim. I wondered if mothers in war-torn countries kept a small vial of poison to dab under the tongues of their children, and then their own, to avoid the prospect of torture. My mind went to that horror.

I don’t want to write these things, because to write that I’ve thought them is to wonder if I’d do them. 9/11 called into question my sanity, my sense of safety, my strength, and even the darkness of my own beating heart