I am bursting into tears all week..

I had not had it in the front in my mind till last week when it all gelled..Not to mention the news coverage (I have turned it off)

Last week was my sister's wedding anniversary..They were both in Manhattan that day for different reasons....She had a day out with a girlfriend to see "The View" (I think that was that was the show at the time)..Her husband was off to work on the floor of the Stock Exchange...

Thankfully, both had the same instinct..get to the water...they both jumped on boats back to NJ but it was hours before they were reunited...I was on the phone with my brother in law when my sister came home and I heard their reunion...OMG..

My BIL, Jim, described the chaos, people vomiting into trash cans..He pushed his way out of a building that was trying to lock folks in, and ran to the boats...He was never the same after that..My sister said he often cried for no apparent reason.

Fast forward, Jim died of a rare pancreatic cancer deemed to be caused by his exposure..with his last breath, he signed the application to the 9/11 fund. The plan is to use the funds to pay off his kids student loans.

This last week was Jim and Christy's wedding anniversary...This next week is the wedding of Jim and Christy's oldest son (also named Jim)...With 9/11 in the middle...

Beyond bittersweet...

BeeLady, that's really hard.

I was in Japan when 9/11 happened. Because of the time difference, we had been doing dishes and then maybe we were getting ready for bed. I was brushing my teeth and Mr. SK called me into the living room. I remember holding my toothbrush and just standing there, trying to understand what was going on.

Then I starting trying to contact my parents.... There was a brief spell of time (more than a day, at this point I actually have no idea how long it was, but at the time, it was an eternity) where I was panicked because I couldn't get any international calls to go through and I was not sure where all my family members were. This was back in the "old days" where we didn't tell everyone where we would be at every waking moment. My parents were both still working and they both often visited NYC and DC for work, so I had no idea, in my mind, they could have been anywhere. I also have family in Western PA, and the Japanese news was only reporting a plane down in Western PA... I remember being so angry I wanted to break the TV. If there was internet news in Japan back then, we were not regularly using it, so the national TV news (NHK) was my only source, and it failed me quite significantly.

The weeks and months after that were horrible in some ways. I had some horrible things said to me by coworkers.

Also, it's very weird to be overseas when something like that happens in your home country...

I have far less immediate contact with victims or victims families than most people here from the East coast. That said, I find myself in a somber mood and I keep flashing back to where I was and what I was doing when I got the news.

It was a fairly hectic morning, as I was in an early phone call while trying to get my (then little) kids ready for school. The guy on the call stopped and said "did you hear what just happened"? He filled me in briefly, we hung up, and I turned on the TV. At that point it was total chaos and at least I still thought it was a horrible accident with a single plane. Within a minute or so the second plane hit (or so my memory goes). At that point I think we all realized that this was no accident. I told the kids they weren't going to school, because I just needed them to be with me while I tried to figure out what was going on. As it turned out, they stayed home all day. I was glued to the TV and played bad mom, because I let the kids watch VCRs and play computer games while I watched.

This was in Phoenix. Mr. Nina's nephew, who lived in Manhattan, went to high school in NJ and couldn't communicate with his family or come home for a day or two. Eventually I think they were OK to walk back to NYC. One of my best friends lives in NYC, and her husband worked a block from the WTC - joining the list of many with near misses. I simply can't imagine.

Back in 1993(?) when the first attack occurred, my wife was working in the World Trade Center and I was on tour in California. You can only imagine how I felt when I heard the news that her building was bombed. Fortunately, I soon learned she, like most others, escaped via a stairwell. Her company later closed that office, and she then worked at their New Jersey location.

On 9/11, I heard about the attack on the morning news. I went to my son's room (he was then 20) just to make sure he hadn't gone into "the city" for some reason; he was safely at home. We walked down to the Staten Island waterfront (about 10 min.) where you could see the billowing black smoke from the towers. People were already attaching flowers and notes to the fencing there.

In those days, I was doing office work part time for an artist couple in lower Manhattan, and if I needed to go in, I had to present a signed letter from them to uniformed guards that I legitimately had to be in that area. I worked near a major staging area for police and fire crews. There were big barriers set up in the major downtown streets to prevent vehicle attacks...some are still there. The whole area felt very eerie. The acrid stench was everywhere, even in the subways. It lasted for months. Everyone was in a somber mood.

Black smoke emanated for days from the remains of the towers.

Back on Staten Island, a great number of first responders were island residents. You had a hard time driving through the streets because there were funeral services and processions everywhere, for days on end.