Never Forget, Fight to Remember

September 11 has always been this very odd thing for me – simultaneously abstract yet starkly, heartrendingly REAL.

I wasn’t home, not even close. It was an hour that was in that confounding span of incredibly late or incredibly early, depending on which hour bed had beckoned. That particular night before, the night of September 11, 2001, was a late one.

Did you catch that? This is where my rabbit hole surrealism comes into play. My September 11, 2001, was a beautiful, sunny day. I was staying with a dear friend for a few months. She’d gotten up on the morning of the 11th, gone into work at her job in airport security, and I’d lounged around for a bit, playing with the cat and checking in on friends and family online. I did laundry, thankful that, for once, I hadn’t flooded the entire house in the effort, and took a load out to hang on the line out back. The temperatures were warming up slightly, and I likely hummed as I listened to planes fly overhead. Rachael come home, fixed dinner, and we ate as we watched a few episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (she was desperately trying to convert me to a Buffy geek) and had a couple of glasses of wine before turning in for the night. She turned in earlier than I did since, well, she had work in the morning, and I stood up and futzed around online for a while before heading to my room after midnight, my September 11, 2001, tucked nicely into my pocket of wonderful days spent hanging out in Lower Hutt, New Zealand.

So now you see, the September 11, 2001, that I lived was a completely normal day. It wasn’t until my mother phoned just after 2 a.m. on the 12th that my world tilted on its axis. On her side of the globe, in the eastern time zone, it was around 10:20 a.m. on September 11.

The first tower had just fallen. All hell was breaking loose in my homeland.

After Rachael thrust the phone at me with much sleepy frustration (she may have even pitched it at my head), my mother implored me to turn on CNN, and I grumbled about the hour and tried, on an hour of sleep and a couple of glasses of wine, to explain, “Mom, we have a different CNN here. The same thing that’s on THERE isn’t going to be on HERE.”

“Just. Turn. It. On. This will be on. We’ve been hit.”

My brain immediately went to a nuclear attack. Who had bombed us? Had we bombed back? What was going on?

Whatever was going on in my head was obviously coming out of my mouth, because I remember the tone in her voice when she said, “Well, there is no more World Trade Center. The Pentagon…and now they’re saying the state department has been bombed.”

I turned on the TV and, sure enough, it was the same CNN. As my brain fought to figure out what I was seeing, the second tower collapsed. I know at some point, Mom and I disconnected, though it was certainly not the last phone call exchanged that day.

Around 4 a.m, Rachael, who, as I said, worked in airport security at Wellington’s airport with Air New Zealand (who trains with El Al’s security teams), got dressed. “I’m going to go on in,” she told me. “Maybe I can get off early if I go on in, since they know you’re here.”

It didn’t work that way. She made the 40 minute trip to work only to have the remarkable people she worked with tell her to go home. She had an American there, and that was where she needed to be.

As New Zealand woke up, the phone in the bungalow began to ring. People I barely knew calling to check on me – was my family alright? Was there anything they could do? Even the landlady, whom I was never sure knew me from Adam, came by to see how I was. And Rachael’s parents, who lived a few houses up the street, opened their arms to me like I was their own.

I remember watching TV. I remember being comforted when I found a channel that was carrying Tom Brokaw’s broadcast. And I remember venturing out later in the day. I’d been away from the states for 2 months; I wanted to put my eyes on something undoubtedly American. I asked Rachael to drive me to the American Embassy in Wellington.

This greeted us at the end of her street. I heart Anglicans.

Now, I had been in New Zealand, a country still under British Monarchy, in ’97 when Princess Diana died. I remember the reactions from then. What greeted me at the American Embassy nearly brought me to my knees.

In the guard hut, there were posters left by school children and other Kiwi well-wishers.This, for my country. My home. It was incredible and completely humbling. The prayer and memorial service I attended a couple of days later at a huge Anglican church in the Hutt is something I will never forget – so powerful, so gut-wrenching. I sat in the front row, tears rolling down my face, the only American in attendance aside from the U.S. ambassador’s wife, who spoke, grateful and elegant. I have yet to this day ever heard “The Star-Spangled Banner” played like that big pipe-organ played it that night, to a packed house, haunting and ethereal and deep.

These are my memories of the ubiquitous, terrible day known as September 11, skewed by the odd knowledge that my September 11 had been completely normal. I watched TV for days on end, riveted and trying to make it real in my head. I blogged, I culled headlines from around the world, researched, buried myself in information and knowledge to help myself reconcile where I was with what was going on at home.

It was 12 years ago and a half a world away. Every year, it becomes a more distant memory, made more difficult to hold onto by virtue of it being so incredibly different from the experiences of every other American I know. But on this year, ever year, I rededicate myself to remembering. I have to. I have a daughter now, 4 years younger than the events of that day. I have to fight to remember so I can make sure she understands, that she knows what happened and why we must remember.

And so that she knows that, even 9,000 miles away from home, it’s possible to find people and places that can feel like home when there’s nothing you want more to be at your home, in your bed, holding your family. That, despite the terror, the incredible, insurmountable bloodshed, there can be good. Oh so much good.