Remember

I write this a few hours before I have to get on a plane for a business trip, a fact that feels especially daunting this week. All week, I've been hearing stories about loss and sadness. About how on September 11, life changed for some many people. “I kissed him goodbye, he left for the airport, and that was the last time I saw him.”

This anniversary makes us all think about where we were and what we were doing on September 11.  My experience with that day was one that felt gentle in the midst of all the horror going on around me. My daughter was just about to turn one. Scared about the ways the world was falling apart, I picked her up early during nap time at her school. She woke up and saw me and smiled a huge smile. I spent the rest of the day holding her close.

The lessons of September 11 would not present itself for months later. I was reading the New York Times Portraits of Grief section. Each day, they would run these little stories about the people who died in the Towers. Stories like, “Always believed in the Mets!” Or “Was the life of the party, adored by his 13 grandchildren.  I read each of them everyday; it felt important to.

One day, I was reading these stories and I came upon a woman who had been married for five years. She had an eighteen-month-old child. She worked full time and had recently moved to a job in the Towers. Her story talked about how she and her husband share responsibility for caring for their child. One of her responsibilities was the bedtime routine, only now their son was asking,  “Where’s Mommy?”

I put my hand over the story of a life that so closely paralleled my own life.  I had been married for five years. I had a child who was around one year old. I share this life, these responsibilities with my husband.

Only, for some reason, I got to be the lucky one. I get to live this life.

Those are the words that I have held close for the last ten years. On the dark days, the days where am not sure I have what it takes to do all that I have to do, when I and not sure I am getting it right, I say these words

I get to live this life.

I’ve thought about this woman and her family a lot over the last ten years. About the son who didn’t know his mother. The husband whose life has moved on without the woman he loved.

And I think of all that I have gotten to see, all the joy and hardships and love and goodness that I have received in the last ten years. How much I’ve had, and how easy it is to take it for granted.

This woman and her life remind me not to do that. She reminds me to see the goodness that’s in front of me. And on the days when I am really struggling, the days where nothing is making sense, I feel a hand on my shoulder and hear a different voice in my head, she’s whispering

You get to live this life.

And I remember. I remember to thank God the simple fact that I get to put my feet on the floor to start another day.




Photo by Saul Blumenthal