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Remember When We All Came Together?
The first eight months of 2001 had not been great. My dad and brother had both gone into rehab, each for their own personal poison. In July, I’d abruptly been fired. One moment I was sitting in my quiet office at a national magazine, the next an HR woman was at the door with papers to sign. Five minutes later I was carrying a box of notebooks and photos through an empty hallway, my coworkers all intentionally clustered in a conference room far from the action.
That same night, after I’d arrived home, my oldest friend called to tell me her 30-year-old husband had cancer, and not just in one spot. In August, after surgeons cut most of it out, he developed a blood clot that traveled to his lungs and nearly killed him. In early September, he started chemo, the same week I learned that another good friend back in California had been found dead in her apartment from a heroin overdose. No one knew whether it was intentional.
That’s where things stood on Tuesday, September 11, in the small Pennsylvania town where I lived. I was awake but still groggy, having no job to get me up and going, when my husband called from his office in a Philadelphia high-rise.
“Turn on the TV,” he said, and for a few short weeks, we were no longer alone.
We are suddenly acting in unison: staring mute at the television, trying to make…
