I Will Never Forget 9/11 2001

I will never forget 9/11.

It was my only day off that week and I was hoovering as I waited for a film to come on the television. I was on my hands and knees reaching under the settee with the hoover. I straightened up and leant back to look at the television to see if the film had started. I got such a shock, there were the twin towers of New York and one of them had a plane flying into it. For a moment I felt annoyed because I thought that without any warning the film had been changed from the one I was waiting to see. As I was thinking this, and muttering to myself about how unfair it was that on my only day off they had switched the afternoon film, I noticed a word in the bottom left hand corner of the screen, 'LIVE' and the horror I felt..........

Needless to say all thoughts of a film went immediately from my mind. I sat back on my heels and rang my husband at work at a college.

Nobody there had any idea of the events that were happening and they all went to the principal's office and watched the horror unfolding.

I stayed on the floor, crouched, transfixed, for the rest of the afternoon. At times I cried as the further horrors of Washington and Pennsylvania were relayed across the world and to us in England. My heart froze, became paralysed with fear. My husband and I had said a tearful goodbye to our eighteen-year-old daughter as she had left us, to go to Gloucester County College in New Jersey, just seven days earlier. I was not aware of the geography then, and it appeared that she was in the middle of a triangle with the attacks happening all around her. I felt so very helpless. It was many hours before we finally managed to speak to her on the telephone. I have never been so relieved to hear her voice.

Then of course, being the person I am, I started to feel guilty, because of all the loss of life that was now being shown endlessly in our living rooms. I lost count of the times we watched the towers fall, in slow motion, with a dust skirt billowing up from the bases.

I will never forget the day four planes were hi-jacked and flew in to wreak so much death and destruction. The loss of life, the shattered lives and the many people who woke up to their usual working day and by nightfall became heroes and heroines. Many posthumously.

Everyone should give thanks for their survival, honour the victims and never forget them.

Best wishes to all those that were affected, even remotely. I am thinking of you on this fifth anniversary.

Ann Ticipation