My Experience on 9/11/2001

On September 11, 2001, I worked from home to write in my quiet office instead of in my cubicle at work, which was next to a boisterous team of people who spent their days on the phone. I worked as a writer of Request for Proposal (RFP) responses and I needed a quiet place to concentrate.

I liked to start my day with background noise so, I put on The Today Show on NBC. The broadcast was from their New York studio.

As I was organizing my project, I heard the report of the first plane crashing into one of the World Trade Center Towers. I stopped working and turned towards the tv. It was surreal. As a former New Yorker, I was stunned by what I saw and couldn’t pull myself away from watching the tv. I called my manager and told him what happened. He couldn’t believe it and at first thought I was joking.

Double the Tragedy

Shortly after finishing my call, I focused on the tv screen. I heard Matt Lauer saying, “there it is right there” as they broadcast a video tape from moments earlier. I watched that plane fly directly into the south tower of The World Trade Center. I called my manager back and told him that another plane hit the other tower. He couldn’t believe it.

A while later, I called him and told him that the Pentagon was hit by another plane. He thought I was joking but I told him that it was real and that it felt like the end of the world. As I hung up the phone, I thought about my mother, who worked in Manhattan.

I watched the tv for hours after that and worried about my mother but figured she was ok because she worked about 10 blocks from the World Trade Center towers. I tried calling her but the phone lines weren’t working.

I couldn’t concentrate on my work and put it aside to do it later into the night. I needed to keep myself distracted so I played backgammon online. I met a player named Mordecai who played backgammon with me for hours, as I told him about my mother and how I was worried I couldn’t get in touch with her.

She Ran for Her Life

In the late afternoon, I started calling one of Mom’s coworkers, Willimae, but her phone wasn’t working either. I kept dialing and in the evening, Willi answered her phone. She told me that she didn’t see my mother. She said that the young people in her office told her to keep moving down the stairs and made her run down the streets once they got out of the building. Willi told me that she was physically exhausted because she walked for hours. There was no way out of the City other than walking over the bridge to get to Brooklyn or to midtown New York. She cried when she told me about the people she saw falling from the sky. She was devastated.

It dawned on me that my mother worked closer to the towers than I realized. I kept trying to call her, but the call wouldn’t go through. Finally I thought to send her an email even though I knew she likely wouldn’t look at her email for days. In the email I wrote that the phone lines are down but if she gets the email she should contact me.

I sat still. My chest was heavy and it was an effort to exhale. The tv chatter in the room was ominous. I watched images of people putting photos of their missing loved ones on walls near the crash site, hoping someone might have seen them. I couldn’t move. I just sat still.

The Late Night Call

Late into the night, my phone rang. It was my mother, who finally got phone service. In more than 30 years of taking the subway trains to work, she had never fallen. But, on her way to work that morning, she fell while walking in the train station used to transfer from local Brooklyn trains to express trains to the City. She fell in an area of the train station that was under construction.

My mother is made of tough stuff. She went to work when she was partially paralyzed. She worked through five years of staying up nearly all night, every night, to care for my sister who lived with her, until my sister died. But this day, September 11th, my mother decided she wanted an ambulance to go to the hospital because of her fall. She was more peeved than hurt but she wanted to be checked out by a doctor.

In the ambulance, enroute to the hospital in Brooklyn, she and the paramedics heard about the attack on the radio. The paramedics quickly dropped Mom off at the hospital and left to help victims. The hospital anticipated a deluge of patients so they gave Mom an injection for pain and put her in a cab to get her out of the hospital area. The deluge of patients never came.

They Were Us

I remember thinking that it was awful that the victims of this attack were everyday people, civilians, who just went to work to provide for themselves and their loved ones. They weren’t soldiers. They weren’t at war. They were office workers, many of whom worked in banking, finance and insurance. They were our neighbors, our family members, our friends. They were us.

Twist of Fate

I got to exhale that night. Mom called me. She was ok. She didn’t have to run for her life like her peers did. She didn’t have to witness people dropping from the buildings to escape the fire and screams. She didn’t have to walk over the bridge like so many did, just to get home.

My mother and her peers worked behind 7 World Trade Center, which eventually was ablaze and collapsed after the towers crumbled. Her office was so close to the towers that she and her coworkers used the train station under the Twin Towers to commute to and from work.

I am so glad I didn’t know this that morning. I would have been beside myself. Instead, I was worried but not panicked. Mordecai kept my mind busy and reassured me for hours that day.

These small events changed the course of their lives. Mom never fell before or after, while commuting to work. And she usually kept on going when things happened to her instead of going to the hospital. Two company executives, with whom I worked closely, were due to attend a meeting on the 94th floor of one of the World Trade Center towers that day but rejected the invitation. That decision saved their lives. The hundreds of people who worked for the company on the 94th floor died that day.

My employer sent dozens of employees to the site of the towers and provided resources to aid those in need. The employees had to take a bus from lower Manhattan to New Jersey every night, just to be able to fax documents to our office.

Years later I worked with one of the executives, who became the President of the company, to produce an industry presentation detailing the company’s actions to aid the victims of the 9/11 attack.

From Tragedy Comes Heroism

Every year for years, I would call the executives and my Mom and remind them of how grateful I was that they were alive.

I think about the families who didn’t get a phone call from their loved ones that night. This tragic event prompted my respect of the first responders and civilians who put their safety aside to help others that day.

Firefighters climbed up the stairs as office workers climbed down. Passengers of a hijacked plane worked together, “let’s roll” as one passenger said, to down the plane to stop the intended crash into a Federal building. I learned that survival was so random that day but heroism was not.