9/11, and Hope

I will always remember, as will many of us, where I was the morning of 9/11. A lucky change in job kept me away from Ground Zero at the time of the attack. For a year, I had been commuting on the PATH train to the World Trade Center, arriving around 8:45 a.m. every day. I then took the escalator and sky bridge over to my office at Two World Financial Center. On Monday, September 10, 2001, I started in a new position, out of the company’s Princeton, NJ office. At 8:46 a.m. on Tuesday, when the first plane hit, I was pulling into a parking lot in suburbia, not in a crowd of panicked commuters underneath the WTC. The “could have been” occupied my thoughts for weeks.

I don’t want to overstate my experience versus those who were killed, injured, or knew those who were. It affected me, though, in more ways than I realized at the time. It is perhaps not coincidental that shortly after 9/11, my partner and I began to talk seriously about having a child, after more than eight years together. Unseized opportunities took on new immediacy. Yes, it gave us pause, wanting to bring a child into a world where “detonate” is a reflexive verb. But when we lose our faith in the future, the terrorists have already won.