I was thinking that there are so many stories like yours.. I am also wandering how many of us DID loose people we know that day, but people we have lost tract of over the years. The longer we live :& more we move, the longer that type of list is. There is an emptieness and sense of being cheated, something was stolen from us.
I have never been to NYC.. and feel cheated that the buildings that ohters loved & visited can't ever be in my future there..It may seem silly, but that is how I look at it.
It is sad to know you can't visit a place with the same features you've known about and anticipated seeing. (Glen Canyon is a good example - it was flooded in the 1960s to create Glen Canyon Dam, and created Lake Powell, causing countless landforms to be covered in water, and wildlife to cease existence in their former home.) I'm not an Enviro-Nazi - I just think that this was unnecessary.
I visited New York City twice in the 1970s. A lifelong resident of the Chicago area, and very familiar and enamored with our Gem On The Lake with all its architectural glory, old, modern, and brand-new, I had no feelings that New York would be all so wonderful. My first flight in, I looked out the porthole window at late dusk in October and my first impression of lower Manhattan as we curved by it, lowering our altitude, on the way to LaGuardia, was my surprise that it looked like a very elegant, tall, lit-up cake from some high-society party! It was a big statement of a big city. I was very impressed. Among those building were the Trade Towers, and I must admit they looked rather plain to me at the time, and not much more than tall cracker boxes all lit up!
I never gave them another thought, and unfortunately, my college friend whom I visited never thought to take me there to see them. They signified big money and industry, and we were still hippy-like, anti-mainstream people who disdained big business! (OH, THE MISTAKES OF BEING IN YOUR TWENTIES WHEN YOU THINK YOU KNOW EVERYTHING!)
That first visit to New York was in the middle of the Garbage strike, and mountains of garbage were along all the streets! Yecch! (As Alfred E. Neuman would say.) Unfortunately I never got to see New York after Rudy Giuliani cleaned up the town - of garbage and punks.
I don't know about my friend anymore - we had a falling-out in the late 70s, and I think we'd both be astounded by our differences these days - haven't seen her in 30 years, and I'm sure we'd disagree with a lot of things. I do know that she left NYC for Pennsylvania and got married to a lawyer.
In any case, I'm glad that New York is "New York" and not "New Amsterdam", which was one of the town names attached to the settlement early on.
There may be many stories out there, as you nention, and some of them are foiled by not knowing married names to go along with maiden names. This has been my bugaboo in trying to search for past schoolmates over the years.
Well, hope you have a peaceful evening, though watching the ABC program will likely stir up things a bit, but it NEEDS to be, in the majority of our population according to recent polls.