In Solemn Remembrance

Nine years ago tomorrow, I awoke to a phone call from my dad. "Wake up! We've been bombed!" I still remember those words, and yet they still don't make sense, just as the moment I heard them. I remember trying to understand, wiping the sleep from my eyes and my mind. "Turn on the TV", he said. I wish I never had. I wish to this day that it was just a terrible nightmare and not a terrible part of history. I turned on the news, just to see the live footage of an innocent jumping from one of the towers. We had been attacked...on home soil! I remember feeling empty....not just that day, but for days...weeks....months to come. I couldn't eat, couldn't sleep, I couldn't even cry anymore. I was numb. I remember visiting NYC on October 11th, the one month anniversary. It was still smoldering, the stench of burnt bodies. Poems written to loved ones lost....Missing persons posters EVERYWHERE! I remember returning several times over the next few years, always visiting where the World Trade Center once stood; always offering my silent condolences. I remember my last visit...December of 2004. I remember seeing a child's writing on a steel beam...."I miss you Mommy and I love you!" I wept, I wept uncontrollably. I was a Mommy of three in my womb. So tomorrow as dawn breaks over ground zero I will remember....mommies and daddies, brothers and sisters, husbands and wives. All of them, someones child....someones. To all the victims of 9/11, living and passed, I do not know your name, or your face....but I will always remember. Forget 9/11/2001?? Someday I hope that I can forget. But it will be the very same day that I forget my own name!