Twenty-one years ago today, at exactly this moment, I was glued to the television: September 11th, 2001, 8:07am PST.
It was a sunny Southern California morning and I was at home alone with my two-month-old infant watching Good Morning America in stunned silence. Underneath the horror of watching the first plane hitting the first tower and the confusion of trying to process Charlie Gibson’s words, I was struggling not throw up or cry – or both.
But I was also feeling grateful. Deeply, deeply grateful.
My husband was in the cockpit of the only Boeing 767 from Boston to Los Angeles that didn’t get hijacked the morning of 9/11. I would later learn that he had seen the planes of American Flight 11 and United Flight 175 on the ground when they were parked at the gates, had heard the voices of their flight crews on the radio as they were taxiing before take-off. Once in the air, he also saw United Flight 93 off in the distance before they crashed in Pennsylvania. These are images burned solidly, permanently, into his memory.
But Dave, and all the passengers on his Delta Airlines flight, landed safely that day.
They landed in Cleveland, not their original destination of Los Angeles. As they communicated with the air traffic controllers and Delta flight operations people to redirect the flight, he and the captain were aware that several planes had crashed and several others were unaccounted for. At that point, nobody was sure whether they had been hijacked or bombed. So, as Dave and the captain descended and prepared to land, not knowing whether they might also have a bomb or a hijacker on board, my husband pulled out a picture of our newborn son.
Will he have to grow up without me?
By the time I became aware of what was happening that morning, I already knew my husband was safe. He had called and left a message on our answering machine while I was still asleep: “I’m okay. I’m on the ground. I’ll call you when I can.” That message was followed by many others from family and friends: “Is Dave okay?,” “Do you need anything?,” “Please call me!”
I initially had no idea what was going on. It was the first morning my son had slept in – the phone repeatedly ringing, the answering machine clicking and clicking, and the muffled voices of people leaving messages is what woke me up. Groggy, I had gone right to the machine and played back the messages before I turned on the TV. That’s how I found out something serious had happened, but that my husband was okay.
It took a week for him to finally find a way home from Ohio to California. Those days were endless – I couldn’t believe everything was going to be okay until Dave was back. A friend, who was also an airline pilot, and his wife came to stay with me until Dave arrived. They babysat, shopped, and cooked as we worked through our shock and grief together. The attack hit everyone in the airline community hard.
This is the first time I’ve written about this experience – it’s taken over two decades for me to feel ready to translate the emotional echoes of that day into words. In the ensuing years we learned from a credible source that Dave’s flight was supposed to have been hijacked on 9/11, too, but for whatever reason those men didn’t make it onto his plane. We also learned that the military believed Dave’s flight had been hijacked, and there were fighter planes following his plane ready to shoot them down if they deviated from their landing instructions.
I wonder if I’ll ever be able to think about it without getting chills.
Today my heart goes out to every child who has had to grow up without a parent, to every spouse who lost their partner, and to every parent who lost a child that day. But for a twist of fate, my son and I would be among them. For me and my family, September 11th is and always will be a day of shared grief – and, paradoxically, also a day of deep gratitude.
Amazing, terrifying and wonderful story, thank you so much for sharing Lori. I can imagine it still shakes you.. Sharing in your gratitude today!