I’ve been thinking a lot about 9/11 this week.

My daughter was just a few weeks old at the time. We were upstairs taking a nap when my husband came in and woke me about 8:50 am. He said he was leaving for a dentist appointment, and he told me that a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center.

I turned on the TV.

A short while later, I watched the second plane hit the South Tower.

Like everyone else watching that morning, including my father, who watched it out of his window in New York City, I was shocked, horrified and grief-stricken.

And then, the third plane. And the fourth.

It was such an awful day.

This year, for some reason, the anniversary hit me even harder than usual.

Over the past week, I’ve been reading stories about the people who were on the planes and the people who were in the buildings. The level of bravery and calmness of the flight crews and passengers on those planes in the face of something more terrifying than most of us can imagine was remarkable.

And humbling.

How would I have acted in those circumstances?

I suspect that even in the face of terror and the grief of knowing what was going to happen to me, I would somehow have pulled it together and done exactly what those brave souls did. Because that's just what people do.

Maybe it affected me more because it was the 25th anniversary.

Maybe it’s because 25 years simultaneously feels incredibly long and almost like yesterday.

On Friday morning, I watched part of the remembrance ceremony in New York. They were reading the names of the people who died.

After about an hour, I had to turn it off because I had a call scheduled.

They were just getting to the last names beginning with F.

F.

That really got me.

So many names.

So. Many. Names.

So many people who got up that morning and went to work. Got on a plane. Made coffee. Kissed someone goodbye. Probably thought about what they needed to get done that day.

And then everything changed in an instant.

I think that’s part of why it affected me so much this year.

I’ve had a lot of “dividing line” experiences. The ones where you remember where you were when…

There is before.

And there is after.

Losing my parents. Receiving my cancer diagnosis. The first time my husband asked me who I was. And a year ago, losing my husband after 32 years together.

Those experiences are obviously very different from what happened on 9/11, and they seem insignificant in comparison to the enormity of 9/11. But like 9/11, they’ve changed the way I understand that dividing line between before and after.

Once you’ve lived through something that changes your sense of safety and certainty, you know what it feels like to look back at the person you were before it happened and realize that she had absolutely no idea what was coming.

I think about myself that morning, lying upstairs with my brand-new baby, having absolutely no idea that I was about to turn on the television and see something I would remember for the rest of my life. Something that I could not unsee.

And I think about all of those people whose names were read on Friday morning.

Twenty-five years later, we still read every one of them aloud.

So many names.

So. Many. Names.

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