That day the presumed safeness of our lives in the U.S.A. died.

It was a gorgeous day, the air was fresh in a turquoise sky; an ordinary Tuesday in September. I had taken the children to school, went back home and was about to get out again to run some errands when my husband called from the Financial District. There had been an accident: an airplane had hit one of the Twin Towers. His office was across the street from the towers and he didn’t want me to worry in case I heard of it on the radio. I turned on the TV and, like the whole rest of the world, witnessed the horrors of that day.

All communications were dead and I couldn’t check on my husband’s whereabouts. When the second tower fell engulfing the whole area in a huge cloud of dust and debris despair engulfed my whole being*. I saw my life crumble in front of my eyes. What now? What about our children? I needed to be with my children! NOW! Like I could soak up some comfort and hope from their embrace.

My Goldilocks was in grade school and her siblings in middle school. A dear friend of mine with children in my middle schoolers’ grades offered to go pick them up while I went to get my grade schooler. Once I finally was reunited with all my children I learned that the morning had been a deeply traumatizing experience for the middle schoolers. For some truly incomprehensible reason the children with parents at Ground Zero, including mine, had been separated from the others. My kids unleashed their debilitating fear and spoke of all the terrorized children in the room with them; some were crying uncontrollably, some were praying, others hugged each other for comfort.

Somebody who had walked uptown for miles and was finally able to use his phone called in the early afternoon saying that he had seen my husband who, like everybody else that had been able to eventually leave the devastated area, was aimlessly ambling like a mosca senza testa (a fly without head) somewhere in midtown.

The afternoon was going by and I didn’t get any other news until between 6 and 7 pm my husband made it back. Always thoughtful, not to scare the children he had managed to somewhat clean himself up a bit. My bottled up dread and heart wrenching emotions of the day finally exploded in a tearful, “If they didn’t kill you I will!”

It was a most terrifying day that has left deep scars on all of us, but we were the lucky ones. My heart goes to the families who didn’t get their loved ones back home, to all the children who lost a parent, to all the first responders and rescuers who died or got sick while saving lives, to everyone who’s life was destroyed without hope of repair that day.

*Not being able to see and breathe my husband was suffocating and the thought crossed his mind that he might not be able to get out of there alive. It’s an unlikely and convoluted story of somebody who, after the first tower was hit, helped to evacuate his office building and was walking towards uptown when he was contacted by a frantic mother who asked him to look for her son who was staying at the downtown Millennium Hotel. My husband was back at Ground Zero when the second tower fell. The guy he had gone back to look for had safely been at a shoeshine.