Twenty years

I don't want to add a lot to the sadness of the day, just to note it, and move on.

We all lost a lot. The country lost the illusion of safety. Thousands of people lost their lives. My losses were collateral damage, minor in comparison. I live in commuting distance of Manhattan, it's close.

I had a flourishing, long established, home pet care business, until that morning, largely with clients who were constant travelers, in the finance world, with bookings several times a month.

Many who worked in the Towers, did not survive the day. Those who survived were transferred out of New York. Most business travel vanished. 

I was in my sixties, too young for Medicare, too old to be seriously considered as a job applicant. Remaining income too low to live on. So I restarted the art workshops, loyal friends wrote me into grants, to piece together an income, and I survived. Great thankfulness for that. But great sadness for the lost clients who always became friends.

My local train station was filled for days with the cars of commuters who never came home. Neighbors straggling home, filthy, office clothes ruined from escaping the debris. Stories of two days trying to get rides, ferry, whatever was available, since  public transportation was shut down.

I'm writing as the hardest time is coming up, the moments of the strikes. I was on the way to deliver artworks to a group gallery show.

Without even conferring, we all decided we would still deliver the paintings because art is always needed, and we wouldn't give the terrorists the win.   

Handsome Partner, a friend only, no longer a partner for many years, called frantically to try to stop me from catching the pictures unawares on television.

Because the New York strikes were so close, we decided to spend the evening together, with Handsome Son, at my condo, in case it was our last. 

We had no way of knowing if our vulnerable water supply could be attacked, the many industrial plants, the electric grid. Or who was responsible. And we couldn't know if and when the attack was finished.  This is true of many catastrophes, that the people caught up have no idea what's happening and when it will end. We forget that, when we look back at them as historic events with an ending.

Handsome Partner and I decided that day that life might be too short to spend apart any longer, and were never separated again for the ten years till his death. 

Remembering the young lives lost that day, the jobs destroyed, the sad, illogical, upsurge of anti Muslim rage, the rush to bad laws by a panicked Congress. We're still trying to repair the damage. We survivors owe that to the lost.

Part of that, I think, is living as well as we can and treating the earth and each other with care.

Peace, all.