Seven Villages, Janet Joakim

I was taken off guard today.

I was home working and had the Today Show on in the background. The morning news show has added an hour and the show from about 9am on seems to mimic a Martha Stewart show, demonstrating all the latest products and fashions for the woman with a thick wallet or talking about good skin care and the latest diet. 

Looking for real news, I switched over to MSNCB and was caught off guard.

 They were showing the actual footage of the live reporting from that morning 6 years ago.

                                               September 11, 2001.

My mother called me a little after 9am that day.  I ran in to get the phone from the garden where I was picking tomatoes.  She was in tears because a very close family friend had died the night before of a fast moving virus that we always refer to as “similar to the one that killed Jim Hensen.” I had left the television on and saw what was happening while we were on the phone. We both did. It was the beginning of a horrible day for all of us.

 There are so many overused phrases  to reference that day.  One that we hear over and over, “we will never forget,”  is often used to reference the brave fireman and policemen who died that day.  We talk so much about honoring the heroes that went in to save people only to die as the towers collapsed, as we should.  But, we also must never forget that there were many more who were lost, and who were heroes only in that they got up and went to work that beautiful September day and died in a horrible attack against our country.

 A close family member lived across the street from the World Trade Center, and worked nearby.  He lost several close friends, including his brother-in-law married to his sister and father to sons who were in college, and a childhood friend who had been his best man. 

On November 11, 2001, I went with him and his wife to New York City to pack up the apartment. The building had been declared uninhabitable, and the word was that they had to pack up and move out.  I don’t believe it would have mattered, he wasn’t going to stay in that apartment regardless of the condition of the building.

We had been told that because his windows were open, the dust that had come into the apartment would make beds and furniture unsafe, most of the furnishings had to be thrown out. The apartment was not on the street side of the building so it did not directly face the towers. An apartment down the hall had handwriting on the door, “blood,” “jet fuel,” and more- stating what had been found as evidence in the apartment- it faced the Trade Center towers and the windows had been shattered.

Once in their apartment we went to the windows in the side bedroom and we all saw the hole where the towers had been, for the first time.

“That is where they all fell from the sky” one of them said.

I had brought cameras, but felt uncomfortable about taking photos and videos, it seemed almost voyeuristic.  But, they both wanted me to.

One of the their closest friends who perished that day was someone I had gotten to know over the previous 15 years.  He was handsome and fun to be around… He had three daughters that he was so proud of, the oldest heading off to college as a star athlete.

My last image of him was when we were all at a pool in the summer and he was smoking a cigar and laughing.

He worked on the upper floors of tower 1 and he was identified many months later by DNA taken from a piece of bone.

That story is one of pure tragedy. A broken, shattered family, and a story that goes much deeper than what I can share here, in a brief essay.

 We must salute the brave men and women in uniform who served that day, but “we must never forget” the hundreds of people whose lives were lost, who just went to work that day.

I believe that that image of a handsome young father, smoking a cigar, is an image of a different kind of hero.   And, I will never forget.

November 11, 2001 View from BPC apts, 23rd floor