Where Were You That Blue Sky Morning?

That morning is one none of us will, or should forget. So here is one remembrance:

On September 11, 2001 at 8AM I was in a clinic waiting room in the Sylvester Cancer Center of Jackson Memorial Hospital in Miami. My husband Chaim had recently been diagnosed with terminal brain cancer, and we wanted to see the doctor, first thing.

The TV was tuned to the Today show while we waited to see the oncologist, and I watched the coverage in real time, including seeing the second plane hit the second tower.

The mood in the hospital room was strange, as many of the patients watching the attack were terminally ill and did not seem shocked by it all. There was a strange tamping down of feelings, perhaps because there was already such sadness in the room.

As my husband moved throughout the clinic taking blood and being checked, the TVs were on in all the waiting rooms. In one room as we sat, the first building fell. In the next room, the second building fell. We watched the Pentagon burn and saw that smoldering field in Shanksville, Pa. The coverage implied that the entire country was about to be hit in some physical way by still unknown terrorists.

Many of us sitting in those clinics felt a strange kinship with those who lost their loved ones in this horrific, unfair, random way. We knew that in a few months we would lose our loved ones sitting next to us. The mood was somber and empathic even more than frightening. Darkness visible.

Both of my sons lived in downtown New York, and while I sat there in the hospital so far away I could not get through to them. It was an altogether dreadful feeling.

That's my story. But each of us has a different one, a mosaic of the awful morning that changed America.

Where were you on that fateful morning, what did you feel, and what was happening around you?

If we can remember and act on our own feelings as Americans that day, perhaps we can move forward to a better decade.