Only a chance change of job kept me from being at the World Trade Center site on September 11, 2001. Shortly afterward, my spouse and I began to talk seriously about having a child.
I will always remember, as will many of us, where I was the morning of September 11, 2001.
I was a vice president at Merrill Lynch. For a year, I had been commuting on the PATH train from New Jersey to the World Trade Center, arriving around 8:45 a.m. every day. I then took an escalator, sky bridge, and elevator over to my office at the company’s headquarters on the top floor of Two World Financial Center, the building next door.
On Monday, September 10, 2001, I started a new position in the company’s Princeton, New Jersey 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 first sign that something was amiss was when my NPR signal went out. (WNYC had a transmitter on top of 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 were close to those who were. My heart goes out to them every time I think about it. The tragedy affected me, though, in more ways than I realized at the time. Soon afterward, I began to seriously ponder starting a family, after more than eight years with my partner (now spouse). Two close relatives had also started a family earlier that year, and seeing their infant was also a contributing factor, but what pushed me over the edge, I think, was realizing just how short our time in this life could be. Unseized opportunities took on new immediacy.
Yes, it gave me pause, wanting to bring a child into a world where “detonate” is a reflexive verb. But when we lose our faith in the future, those who wish to sow fear and discord have already won.
In many ways, though, it feels like our world has not made progress towards peace since that fateful day. If we take anything away from today’s memorials, may it be a renewed commitment to work in whatever way we can for a safer, more peaceful world for our children—and children of all countries, faiths, cultures, and racial and ethnic identities.
(The tall building with the flat black top just to the left of the WTC in the photo is Two World Financial Center, where I worked.)