September 11, 2001, Remembering
Submitted by My Garden Spot Blog
Dear Friends,
Eight years ago, our world changed. Or, more precisely, our perception of the world changed. Things…Important Things…didn’t change. Honor, Love, Joy, Courtesy, Kindness, Generosity, Courage…didn’t change.
But, that day, Sorrow, Grief and Fear reigned supreme. We shared that experience, those feelings, and in sharing them, we came together. It changed the way we looked at one another and circumstances. Such all encompassing emotions, all mixed together…we each felt the towers fall…we still feel them fall when we look back at the pictures. Their fall echoes throughout our lives, every time we take off our shoes at the airport, when we stand at the top of a tall towering building and look down, when we look up at an airplane fly overhead.
Perhaps, in this time of division, when everyone seems to be on one side of an issue or the other, it would be a good time to remember that we are still together. To remember what it felt like to feel as if, at any time, the unthinkable could happen, because there are those who are thinking about the unthinkable and planning to make it happen. Those who would do us harm are still in the world… and they make no distinctions between us. We are still….together.
I remember how… quiet… that day and the days after it, seemed. It was if all the noise in the world were concentrated in three places. The Pentagon, the World Trade Center… and in a small field in Somerset County where a group of passengers had made the decision to take back the manner of their deaths, and, in so doing… possibly prevented that plane from hitting the Capitol building or the White House. That was a victory and the only one we had that day. All else was a frantic, hopeless search for anyone who may have survived.
Today, I’m memorializing three people. The first is one I’ve written about before, Kevin McCarthy. His tribute is one I am reposting, with minor additions. I proud of that post, and it can stand alone. The other two people…women…will be connected. These posts are some of the longest I’ve made, and I hope you will read all three. Not because I wrote them, but because they deserve remembering, to being included in your prayers tonight, along with their families who miss them, still.
Thank you,
Nancy France
