On One Small Lesson Learned

Six years ago, I had a hangover.

I had been out to late with the then-husband and my best friend. We had enjoyed a wonderful dinner of olives and pasta and far, far too much wine. I woke up the next morning tired and dehydrated with a brain batted in cotton.

It was a glorious morning, the kind of early autumn day that seems as though it were colored out of a 64 Crayola box onto newsprint by an incredibly beautiful second-grade child. I unceremoniously deposited myself into my car to get to my dead-end job that I truly, deeply, disliked.

I don’t know at what point the news from NPR began to penetrate my post-drunk fog. Somewhere on the drive; at some point before I parked, I noticed that Bob Edwards (I think he was the Morning Edition host at the time) sounded completely, totally, confused. Lost. Bob Edwards was, in the coolest and most professional way possible, freaking out.

I walked into the ground floor of the building where I worked. There was a third-rate radio station there, one that got its news directly from some wire. The people in the booth looked gobsmacked; the woman had her hands over her face. The men gaped.

And that was when I realized we were fucked.

I am certain that everyone has a story that is, to a greater or lesser extent, similar. Where they were. What they were doing. What they thought. I remember being unmoored; like I didn’t know the world. Given my visceral, blood-thirsty reaction, I didn’t really feel like I knew myself. As I said at the time, it was like I couldn’t imagine a world without crying in it.

I don’t know that I’ve ever managed to make meaning out of September 11th, 2001. I don’t know if one really can. Maybe there is no meaning that can be made of 2974 dead. No meaning. Just a glass to be raised; a candle to be lit; a prayer to be said.

And, for me? A life to be lived.

Because after the shock of 9/11, I came to and realized that I was only going through the motions of my life, and that I was not doing a terribly good job of it. Once the shock of the attacks wore off it occurred to me that it was inexcusable for me piss away my life in the most mediocre way possible, when 2974 people had abruptly, suddenly lost their lives and couldn’t do anything at all with theirs.

Since then, I have struggled and won and lost and fallen out of trees and hit-every-damn-branch-on-the-way down and hit the ground and dragged myself back up. I haven’t written the great American novel. I haven’t created some great work of art. Hell, I haven’t even cut my grass in weeks. But I haven’t settled for miserable. I haven’t decided that just hanging on is enough.

I don’t think my small life is any, any kind of monument to their lives lost. I do think, though, that my small life would have been incredibly smaller without the remembrance of their unwitting, unwilling sacrifice.

2974 lives wasted is 2974 more than too many. It taught me not to waste one more.