 | By Peter Catapano Senior Staff Editor, Opinion |
It is a bond among New Yorkers. We all remember where we were when the planes struck the towers that morning 22 years ago — the room and the odd details, the half-empty coffee mug or the dumb song on the radio. We recall the shock of comprehending what had just happened, the panicked logistics of locating our friends and loved ones, and the uncanny sensation of doing one mundane thing after the next in a world whose frame of reality had just been shattered. |
Perhaps most of all we remember watching and learning of the unspeakable suffering of the nearly 3,000 people who lost their lives in those cataclysmic hours, and the innumerable friends and family members left to mourn them. |
Most of us didn't mention how or what we felt that day in the months or years after because so many others had it so much worse. Did we even have the right? |
This was the logic inside which Gabriella Ferrigine, a 25-year old freelance writer from Red Bank, N.J., held her experience of the Sept. 11 attacks — first as a 3-year-old girl, watching on live television, wondering if her mother was inside one of the towers, and later through the trauma of her mother, a close witness to the events, from which she barely escaped with her life. In her guest essay, Ferrigine explores growing up hesitant to share her anxiety and dread, and the difficult moment in which she decided to talk frankly with her mother about what she, and all of us, had gone through. |
"Why am I so emotional, about this," Ferrigine asks, "if I wasn't there?" |
I was 15 miles from the attack that day and was unharmed. The trains from Brooklyn were still running, and I rode one over the Manhattan Bridge to the Times building for a late shift, watching through the window of the subway car as smoke billowed upward in enormous columns at time-lapse speed from the burning rubble and craters in the ground — as it would for the next 100 days. I could not imagine the grief running through the survivors among my family and friends, some of whom were active or retired firefighters, police officers and other emergency workers who lost children, friends, brothers and sisters in the attacks. What could I say to them but that I was sorry? |
I think, and hope you'll agree, that Ferrigine's account is evidence to her generation — affected by Sept. 11 as very young children — that their experiences matter, and that healing is still possible. It might even be read as a reminder, in this fractured time, that we live not in political or ideological camps but in communities — families, neighborhoods, towns and cities, even nations — and that what harms or heals one of us harms or heals us all. |
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