A Moment of Silence Seems to be Far Too Little

I remember what I was doing at this very moment 5 years ago. I was laughing. Someone had stopped by my cubicle to tell me that someone had flown a plane into the World Trade Center. We were laughing because we thought “What kind of idiot accidentally flies a Cessna into a building that big?”

A few minutes later, someone else came by to say that a second plane had flown into the World Trade Center and we stopped laughing because suddenly we understood that it was not a small plane and it was not an accident.

The rest of the day went by as a frighteningly detailed blur. At first, I couldn’t get home. Flight 93 was over Cleveland airspace, downtown was being evacuated and both the airport and downtown were between me and my house.

By the time I did get home, later that afternoon, my only thought was to flee. I was afraid of what would happen next and I only wanted to pack my children in my car and make a mad rush for my parents’ house, which, being in the middle of nowhere and next to a cow farm and cornfield to boot, I figured was the last place anyone would want to attack.

That day, I took no solace in my garden because nothing could console me.

And here we are 5 years later. I still cry, which seems a little silly because I knew no one that died that day. But I can’t help but feel that those people died for me and they never had the option to decide not to make that sacrifice, so I still cry for them.

Today, I can take solace in my garden. I can look at beautiful flowers and taste the unbelievably good food that grows there and think that the world can’t be as bad as that day made me feel that it is. But I am angry that I must use the beauty in my garden to convince myself of this.

I could go on about how I feel on this all day, but that would be selfish. Here in the USA, we all have feelings about it and I should not supersede your personal memorials with my own. I just thought that today I should make note of what happened. Today, the world is not about my garden. It’s about 4 separate moments of silence, which will forever seem like too little.