Three Months in 2001
Twenty three years later, I still will never forget
It is June 19, 2001. A perfect day. My last day of finals, sophomore year. I’m 16. Young, free, invincible. After school I go over my cousin’s house. She’s my first cousin but she’s 20 years older than me so more like an aunt. When I get there she’s in the pool with my uncle and her oldest daughter. The weather is perfect. My family is happy. I wish I could take this day and freeze it in time, living it over and over again in an endless loop.
It is June 20, 2001. My parents pick me up from my evening driver’s ed class. When I get in the car I know something isn’t right. Neither one of them speaks. My mother stares out of the window, looking at nothing. I ask what’s wrong, my mind races. They don’t answer. I ask again, again. Panicking, overtaken by the silence, I scream. TELL ME WHAT IS WRONG. My mother is emotionless, she had to be because if she felt anything she would have broken apart. My cousin, the one I saw yesterday in the pool, her cancer had come back. There was nothing they could do. She had three months to live.
It’s July 2001, I don’t remember the exact date. I’m sitting with my cousin in her living room, in the modest split level house she shared with her husband and kids in a working class suburb of Boston. We were alone, talking. Or she was talking to me because I couldn’t speak. Every time I was near her my vocal cords clamped up, words formed in my brain unable to leave my mouth. I didn’t know how to talk to someone who was dying. She told me one of her biggest regrets — never going to Italy despite having multiple chances, to see the country our great grandparents were born in. She looked at me and said “and now I’ll never get the chance.” I felt my breath caught along with my words. I was a meek kid, not so much shy as scared. I looked at her, in her aging green recliner, dying at 36 years old and I made a vow to live like I would never have a 37th birthday. I would never have any regrets.
It is August 10, 2001. My parents and I are driving to south Florida, where we are moving. We made the decision before my cousin got sick, and by the time we knew there was no going back. Houses bought and sold, jobs left, schools enrolled in. We put it off as long as possible, three days before I had to start school. I sat in the front seat, blaring NSYNC and Britney Spears on the CD player while my father drove and my mother tried to sleep in the backseat. We drove over the George Washington bridge in the middle of the night — my father liked to do the drive at night to avoid traffic — and I watched New York City pass by in the distance, wondering if someday I might make it — there or anywhere.
It is August 11, 2001. We drive down the east coast, watching New York turn into the Carolinas, the glittering city lights fading in favor of the competing billboards offering “adult entertainment” and telling me Jesus loves me. I’m struck by this country, seeing so much of it for the first time, the regional differences, the cacophony of cultures, all unified under this idea we call the United States. We stop at a Shoney’s in North Carolina for breakfast and eat biscuits and grits while the waitress calls us honey and y’all in her thick drawl. We get back in the car and drive past the parade of brightly colored signs, a stereotypical Mexican in a sombrero telling us how many miles until we were at South of the Border, a perfect piece of mid century American kitsch, a memory of an America that, for better and worse, no longer existed. I realize I have conflicted feelings about the country I live in.
It is August 13, 2001. My first day at my new school. Junior year. I don’t like starting at a new school halfway through high school. I don’t like this new place I’m living, a too hot swamp of rich old people from the mid-west and the working class that serves them. The school itself is a let down. I might have read too many Sweet Valley High books, but I was expecting a warm weather paradise, a modern, open school so different from the crumbling New England dinosaur I’d left behind. I got a flat, grey prison, with palm trees. I did not want to be here. I wanted to go home.
It is September 11, 2001. It’s a Tuesday. It is, as has been said over and over again, a day like any other. A brutally hot late summer Florida day, in my grey walled school. History class first, listening to my teacher, a former corporate lawyer from Detroit who left for a slower pace of life, talk about Mesopotamia or Rome or some other distant past. English next. We have a test. The teacher, a middle aged Italian American from New Jersey, another typical Florida transplant, switches on the TV for the morning announcements. I don’t remember what they were about. The announcements end, the teacher too busy preparing our test for the day to turn off the tv. It switches to the local NBC affiliate. Breaking news. New York. One of the towers at the World Trade Center, smoke billowing out. It’s been hit by a plane. The reporters discuss. Was it an accident? Then we see it, on the corner of the screen. I suck my breathe in, sharp. We know in that moment what we are about to see, the plane coming into view. The teacher runs to turn off the tv. He doesn’t get there in time. I should look away, but I can’t, my eyes held open, some invisible clamp, a mix off terror and revulsion keeping them from shutting. We sit there, a group of sixteen year old invincibles, and watch the second plane hit the second tower. I know immediately this is that foundational moment for our generation, that single event like Pearl Harbor for my Greatest Generation grandparents, the JFK assassination for my Boomer parents, the Challenger explosion for my Gen X cousins. That moment that, as memories fade elsewhere, every second will remain etched in our brains, never forgetting where we were on that day. I finally exhale. I know I will never forget this moment.
It is September 23, 2001. I am in my room. I hear the primal scream from the living room. I don’t have to go out, I know. Three months and three days, nothing in the vast timeline of the universe, have passed by. I can’t cry. Instead I whisper: “I’ll live for you.”
It is September 24, 2001. We fly into Logan Airport in Boston. It feels uncomfortable to call it a ghost town but that’s what it felt like. An eerie quiet, a sickening silence. The place our family vacations to Disney World and San Francisco started felt a lifetime away. I watched my feet hit the ground, every step echoing with the sound of the people who had walked through this airport thirteen days earlier, the last place they would ever walk. I am, at sixteen, fully, completely surrounded by the thought of my own mortality. Death was, before, for old people. Now it was for anyone, even me.
It is September 25, 2001. My mother and I get into a fight. I think it was over my hair. She breaks down under the weight of what we’re doing that day. At the church the priest sounds like an adult in the Peanuts comics, unintelligible, pointless. All I hear is the steady thud of my 81 year old grandfather’s cane repeatedly hitting the ground. Thud. Thud. Thud. Over and over again. He has survived more than I can imagine. He was a POW during World War II, a witness to the worst plane crash in Logan Airport history. He’d seen more death and pain and evil than I could comprehend. But this was the breaking point, where he could no longer hold it in, could only hit his cane into the ground as his angry cry to God. I once asked him, years before, how he was always so happy after what he’d been through. He told me life is a sum of all of our experiences and the bad parts are just a small part of the equation. You have to look at the total and his total was, overall, good. I had barely started my own equation and it felt like the negative numbers were piling up, threatening the total. Life is, I learned, fragile and unexpected and precious and complicated and complex. And sometimes it is over sooner than we want, long before we are ready. I sit in the church, listening to the thud. I vow to live so that no matter how long or short my life is, my sum is positive.