I was here, on Free republic. Was getting ready for the day, having just gotten the kids off to preschool, husband was off to the base and I read this exact headline. Reading it again tonight made me jump.
I read on and as the realization of the situation set in I went downstairs to turn on the TV and I watched the second plane go in.
I watched and as the buildings went down I shook.
I tried to get through on the phone. Five siblings, grandmothers and aunts, my brother, who had worked there, but not then.
The phone was so dead. It wasn’t like in a storm when the power goes out. It was dead.
I finally got in touch with my fabulous and tough great aunt, whose late and senior husband had worked on Wall Street since 1910.
She asked, “what the hell kind of a world is this you kids are inheriting?”.
Later I spoke with another Aunt whose two sons had witnessed it from two different points. I told her my legs were just giving way. She said she could see the smoke from Rumson, way down the coast of NJ.
Then my sister, whose husband, a lawyer at City Hall, who was on his way back home out on Long Island, having called her to tell her he was turning around, “something very F U’d was going on”.
Other worldly things also happened.
Then, a few days later, I got in touch with a cousin, of the firefighting side of our Irish family. He said he was there when Pres Bush came onto the scene and, “what a shot in the arm that was! What a shot in the arm”, he said.
Then he said he’d have to buy a new suit. He’d have about 15 funerals to attend in the next week.
My brother said they weren’t saying if anyone was dead. Many families waited weeks finally giving up and sending the second son to go retrieve the car from the train station.
And that’s where it gets sad.
My sister told me that our/my boy next door was missing.
He was so full of life. Perfect family, wife, home, sons.
Two weeks later they gave up and sent his little brother up to the station to get his car.
We had twenty-two funerals in our parish, of the Catholic school we had grown up in.
Father James had to hold 22 funeral Masses within two weeks.
Never heard a peep from hubby til around 6 PM. Comm out. From the moment the planes hit, the Ari Force was in. Not a plane over my backyard for the first time ever.
That quiet was eeriest of everything.
In Hong Kong it was the evening.
I was watching a Singaporean comedy with my wife
Thanks for your story. I really couldn’t state mine so eloquently. I will say though that the funerals part really hits home. Between our two neighboring parishes there were around 150 of them. They had to close down the kids basketball program to make use of the gymnasium for the overflow.