Under It All

Each September 11, reading accounts of that horrific day in 2001, I’m sucked into a vortex of emotion that takes me straight back into that time and place. Two decades vanish like dream stuff, and I’m right there again.

I was then working at Agudath Israel of America’s offices at 42 Broadway, just blocks from the Twin Towers, and that Tuesday morning I started in toward Manhattan from the Rockaways on the A train until it ground to a halt at a stop in lower Manhattan.

We all filed out and emerged from underground, into a strange new world. I never got close enough to Ground Zero to have to run for my life when the towers fell; I just wandered around dazed, like everyone else, and made my way to a hospital to try to give blood for what everyone thought would be thousands of survivors in need of transfusions. Eventually, I walked across a bridge into Brooklyn alongside thousands of others, where I managed to board a train bound for Kew Gardens. There, my wife was waiting to drive me home on an eerily deserted Van Wyck Expressway.

This year was no different, and yes, I was ineluctably drawn right back there again. But this year I read a different kind of account about someone for whom that day never ended — true for so many people in different ways. There are those who are no longer here, for whom that day became a ticking time bomb of disease that eventually went off within them. And there are so many who live every day with the loss of a part of themselves — a child, a parent, a spouse, a sibling, a dear friend.