Thoughts on 9/11

This is the Pearl Harbor of my generation, the day that we lost our innocence. We felt removed from all the violence, separate and above it all. Terrorism was something that happened somewhere else in the world, across the ocean, well beyond our view. Until September 11, 2001, when it happened here.

When I walked into the lobby of the medical school this morning, there was a poster for the lecture they give every year in honor of the young woman, a PhD candidate in immunology, who was lost on 9/11 along with her husband and three-year-old daughter. They are the faces of 9/11 to me. I can't say that I lost my faith, because I never really found it in the first place, but whenever I think that there might just possibly be a caring God within my reach, I think of them. I don't want to have any kind of faith in a God who allows young families to be killed in his name. If God didn't intervene on 9/11, why would God ever care about my petty and insignificant pain?

In July of 2001 I brought my two younger children to Washington, DC. (Older son had a job and couldn't join us; besides, he'd gone on a school trip in the eighth grade, one that was no longer given by the time my daughter reached eighth grade. Younger son was going into eighth grade that fall.) We visited the Capitol, the Treasury, the Smithsonian - all the high points. We had a wonderful and memorable time. And in the days after 9/11, my daughter said to me that she was so glad we'd gone then, because it'd all be different now. She was thinking of the added security, I think. She now attends graduate school in the DC area; we visited DC last summer, and it really wasn't any different from the way we remembered it. (We didn't go to the Capitol or White House.)

And maybe that's a good thing. The world changed, but we can still lead normal lives with bright spots in them. I still can't watch any of the 9/11 movies or TV specials; it's much too soon for me. I'm a depressive (gee, have I ever mentioned that here?), and it's all too easy to send me into one of the dark places in my mind. But a couple of years ago, I put my daughter onto a plane bound from Logan Airport to Los Angeles - the same trip the planes that hit the World Trade Center were making - and nothing unusual happened. The world changed, yes, but it didn't end. Planes still fly. People still laugh. Gardens bloom, and trees turn bright colors in the fall. Children grow up, and more are born every day. We don't forget what happened, but we learn from it, and we try to assure it will never happen again.