This photo is of my two sons atop the World Trade Center in July 1997. Four years and two months later the Twin Towers of the WTC were brought down in the horrific terrorist attack upon the United States. In July 1994 we took our daughter up in the WTC. This was one year after the first terrorist bombing of the Center, and the security measures were in place to keep that from happening again. Who could ever have imagined what would occur on September 11, 2001, when commercial airliners were used to do what was intentioned in the 1993 bombing?
Today is the 13th anniversary of the horror that will forever be etched in our minds and in our hearts. I grew up in the '50's, the decade after the attack on Pearl Harbor. That infamous day, December 7, 1941, forever changed the lives of my parents and their generation. This is our Pearl Harbor.
We took our three children to the USS Arizona Memorial in Pearl Harbor when we first visited Hawaii in July 1987. When our family moved to Hawaii in July 1998--without our daughter who had graduated from college and was beginning her career in California--we returned to the Arizona Memorial. This was the first of many visits to come for us as Hawaii residents as that was always the #1 destination requested by all of our many visitors during the nine years we lived there. We went with our daughter when she visited. We never grew tired of going there, as sobering as it was. I had the narration accompanying the movie at the visitor's center memorized, but it never grew old. I remembered my mother saying, "May we never forget," and I passed that on to my children. When you see the names of the lives lost there, you get choked up, all these decades later.
In December 2008 our whole family, including our daughter-in-law and daughter-in-law-to-be, returned to New York City and visited the site of the World Trade Center. What had been two sky-scraping towers when we were there before was then a huge, gaping crater. Tourists lined that crater as they did every day. People weren't speaking. Mere words could not express the profound sadness experienced just standing there, looking, remembering.
A Day of Remembrance, that's what today is. Inevitably, people will share their stories of where they were when they first heard about the attacks of 9-11. Many of our friends had their TV's on and watched the second plane go into the second tower. We were blissfully asleep in Hawaii and didn't find out until our daughter called us from Seattle. She lived in California but was in Seattle for a few days, then was to fly that morning to Boston to care for a friend who was having surgery at the time planes flying out of Boston were hijacked and then used in the terrorist attacks. Our daughter's plane, like planes all over the country, was grounded by national order so she couldn't fly out of Seattle as planned. She called us and said, "Don't worry, I just wanted to let you know I'm okay." We knew she would be flying that morning and wondered if her plane had had an accident or something. It was impossible to take in what she was telling us over the phone. Planes flown into the World Trade Center? Both towers down? Too impossible to fathom!! We got up, turned on the TV, and sat there stunned like everyone else around the world.
As my mother would say about Pearl Harbor I will say to my children and grandchildren: May we never forget. Don't ever let September 11 become anything other than a Day of Remembrance. Today we remember, we pray, we reflect. Today I thank God anew that we were able to take all three of our children up in the World Trade Center as well as to the Arizona Memorial in Pearl Harbor. They won't forget. They have seen with their eyes. They have experienced.
Life goes on, as it inevitably does, but today we honor those who lost their lives on September 11, 2001, and we pray to God that this sort of thing never happens again.
Today, WE REMEMBER.
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