9/11/01 Where were you when you heard the world had changed?

I was sitting right where I am now. I was checking my email once last time before I left for work. Then, the phone rang. An online scrapping friend was calling to tell me that a plane had just flown into the WTC. I quickly hung up the phone, put on the TV and dialed dh's number at work. Dh's phone never rang. There was no busy signal. There was no all circuits are busy sound either. There was only silence. I tried it again to be sure. Nothing. Absolutely nothing. I called his cell phone and left a long message. I called my office and told them I might be late. The WTC had been hit by a plane and I was waiting to hear a "hello" from dh before I left. I was sure he'd call any second. Then, in the midst of these calls, I watched the second plane hit live.

We have both DirecTV and a big satellite dish. I set every TV in the house on different stations and set the big dish to get live news feeds. I ran from room to room. I just needed to see people leaving the buildings. Dh did not work on a high floor. I knew that if people were leaving the buildings, then he would be OK. I can feel the stress building as I write this now. No one was showing footage of people leaving the buildings. All they were showing, over and over again were the planes hitting the towers, the fires, etc. Not even the live feeds showed people leaving the buildings. It was quite some time until they showed people.

My sister was in Alaska, about to leave on a cruise. She called to see if dh was OK bc she wasn't going to go otherwise. She used the word "widow." She wasn't going to go if her sister (me) was a widow. Hated that. Makes me tear up all over again thinking about it. My SIL came over. She too made me scared bc I was confident my dh was coming home to me in one piece. She was so scared, she started throwing up in the bathroom. I couldn't deal with that. I was glad not to be alone, but I needed optimism. I am an optomist at heart. Always. Thinking of the opposite was unbearable.

In the meantime, my mother was getting calls from friends, including my friends, asking about my dh. Mom told them he must be OK bc I didn't call her and that's the first thing I would have done if I was worried. Well, the truth is we didn't have call waiting and I wasn't going to chance dh getting a busy signal. I wanted to call her, but couldn't.

Finally, the agony was ended. My mother called over 2 hours later. SHE had a call from my dh. He thought I would be at work and wouldn't be home. He thought I wouldn't even know what had happened. He was on a train headed HOME! He had left the building after the first plane hit (was told to go back in, did so and went out another exit where there were no firemen or police yet) and was standing under the glass overhang of the Millennium Hotel when the second plane hit. Close enough to see the scratches on the windows. He had to borrow a phone on the train bc he left his cell phone in the building. (When he did get a new phone---thank you Sprint for sending a new one overnight after we called--- my voicemail was waiting for him. You can tell when the second plane probably hit.. it was cut off suddenly).

The train he was on never should have left NYC that morning. We figured out later it was the 9:37. It left after the trains, buses, bridges and tunnels were closed. There's more too.. every subway and train he was on went directly where he needed to go. Every connection was there waiting for him. It was the fastest commute he has ever had. He came home and truly, he did not really know the extent of what happened. We went out to lunch. It felt so strange.. kept looking around and wondering if everyone else kew the world had changed or not. Fighter planes flew over our heads several times. We picked dd up from pre-K. The teachers were amazed and shocked to see dh. Sadly, the nephew of one of the pre-K teachers never came home that day. He never called either.

It was 2 full days until dh understood that the buildings were gone. He left before the collapse. He heard about it on the train but assumed that it was just the top of the building. It wasn't until his manager called and talked about returning to the building that I had to stop him and show him what was going on. They had been working non-stop to re-program the worldwide trading computers (I probably said that wrong) and did not know. It amazed me that they were right there but did not know.

I know life has returned to normal when I don't take the time to listen to dh breathe at night. I spent every night afterwards for months just listening. I started it while watching the continuous local coverage of people searching for their loved ones. Because I knew just easily it could have been me, I felt obligated to watch each and every person on camera looking for a loved one. When I'm reminded of this day late at night, I still stay awake and just listen to dh breathing.