I'm reading Lisa Beamer's book, "Let's Roll!" about United flight 93 aboard which her husband Todd Beamer died September 11. To say this book is having a profound effect is an understatement. Just reading it brings September 11 back to me so powerfully that I feel like September 11 was only a few weeks ago, not 3 years ago. It is strange for me to be effected so strongly by a book. It surprises me how much I have gotten on with life and have left the events of September 11 behind. But I have not forgotten. Never.
For the past few days I've felt like September 11 was only 2 or 3 weeks ago, but I do not feel like I really felt then. When September 11 really was just 2 or 3 weeks before, I still felt different, the way September 11 made me feel. It seemed that something fundamental to reality itself had changed. I don't just mean that our eyes were opened and we were forced to realize that it can happen here. To me, reality itself felt changed somehow. I have never been able to put it into words. Life itself, every waking moment, continued to feel fundamentally different in a way I cannot describe, until December. In December 2001, the startup I was working at -- my favorite job, the best job I've had in my career -- started to go under. We had our first (of 3) rounds of layoffs. I survived the cut, but that situation snapped me back into reality. It took a personal event of that scale -- a threat to my job, a job I really liked -- to make the world feel again the way it did before September 11.
I had my own almost "close call" with September 11, though it really wasn't that close. September 9 my wife and I were returning from Europe, a vacation in Munich and Paris. Late afternoon September 9th we went through Dulles on United. Just two days before, really about a day and a half, we went through one of the airports Al Quaeda used, on one of the airlines they used. Less of a close call because it was American flight 77 that left from Dulles and hit the pentagon. Still, this was all too close for me.
As soon as October, we flew again, this time to Hong Kong. We'd planned it before September 11. I told myself that even if airport security had not really been improved, September 11 could not happen again because like on flight 93, the passengers simply would not allow it. The days of hijacking a plane, landing it, holding hostages and making demands, were over. Everyone knew that any plane hijacked now would be a flying weapon. I knew that I and my fellow passengers would simply not stand for another hijacking, and I knew Al Quaeda knew it too, meaning a September 11 style attack would no longer work. They aren't stupid, so they would not attempt it again. I told myself flying was safer now if only for that reason alone.
I'm about 2/3 of the way through the book now. The first part was the most difficult -- Lisa Beamer describes her morning of September 11, when she found out what was happening, how she tried to figure out what flight her husband was on, and how she found out her husband was dead. The rest of the first half of the book is a tedious description of their good Christian, goody two-shoes, overachieving childhoods and family lives up to that day. Skip to the middle of the book if you want to get back to September 11, but the reading gets difficult again. Right now I'm in the middle of Lisa's reconstruction of the events on flight 93. Fascinating, heart breaking, and surprising.
At some point after December 2001, the horror of September 11 somehow became "history" to me. I was somehow able to accept that this unfathomable tragedy had happened and get on with life. This book has restored the sense of shock and utter disbelief, and now I can't see how I ever was able to accept it. It's like it was just a few weeks ago.
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