I'm surprised and honestly a little disappointed that so few forum members here didn't take a minute today to post to this thread acknowledging their remembrance of this dark day in US history and really the history of the world. I expected this thread to be 4 or 5 pages long by now.
I hope it's just because they missed/overlooked the thread and not apathy...
I was looking for an old post of mine, which I did not find.
It was a very painful time. Everyone from where I came from either knew someone, or knew someone who knew someone.
DH's co-worker was in one of the Towers, but made it out. He told DH that he could feel the building twisting and the firefighters had to know they weren't coming out.
He met my DH (they had Nextels) and they walked over the Brooklyn Bridge together. I couldn't reach my DH for most of the day. My DH was in a nearby building and watched from the roof. He took photographs of the towers which I subsequently took away from him and threw in the trash. I had co-workers who had appearances in NY Supreme Court that day, which was in the vicinity. They also made it out via the Brooklyn Bridge.
Our parish had so many funerals (firefighters). The children in my sons' high school lost something like 19 parents. My office manager lost her sister - she was waiting and waiting . . . My chiropractor lost his sister (a Court Officer who went over to help).
People were walking around here in a palpable, overwhelming, surreal haze of grief.
Almost all conversations came back to where were you when . . . who they knew . . .
My bosses at the time owned the office building where we worked and took in the employees from a small insurance company which had been displaced until they finally got back in their building. Once in a while we heard a "happy" story. People who ran late for work that day; one of the attorney's wives, who worked in a tower, was in that latter part of her pregnancy - called in sick. . .
I would not walk by ground zero for the longest time, but finally went to pay my respects.
No, I did not forget.