9/11 - Article from NYC newspaper - Clemson

Sep 11, 2024, 1:07 PM

I love September in the city. Much of the reason is that September is my birthday month — Sept. 22. As an extrovert who needs no particular reason to bring people together, a birthday party is an easy sell.

And in 2001, I was planning an epic bash to celebrate my 32nd birthday.

I had been married for a little over a year at that point, and we had just moved into an amazing apartment in the Financial District. I wanted a birthday/newlywed/housewarming party that would celebrate this exciting new stage of my life.

I had moved to the city from the Deep South almost 10 years earlier, living in the stereotypical string of grungy shoebox apartments while making ends meet in all manner of part-time jobs and short-run theater gigs. But my life was changing, and I was sure we were on the verge of something fabulous.

My husband, Brian, had a promising career in finance (even though he was in between jobs at the moment), and we were living in a beautiful apartment with a 300-square-foot terrace that offered stunning views of the World Trade Center.

That party never happened.

Because 11 days before my birthday, Brian woke me up babbling something incomprehensible about the World Trade Center. I followed him out onto the terrace and saw thick black smoke roiling from the North Tower, which was six blocks from our apartment.

As we stood on the terrace, a passenger jet swooped just above our heads and took aim at the South Tower. Although I was barefoot and still wearing my nightgown, we fled our apartment in a panic, racing down 24 flights of stairs with our terrified Boston terrier. Joining hundreds of people fleeing the burning buildings, we made it to Battery Park, where we felt somewhat safe. That feeling didn’t last long.

As the ground began to shake violently, I somehow realized that a tower was collapsing. Seconds later, a mass of something hit me in the face, and sticky gunk filled my nose and mouth, covered my pajamas, and coated every pore of unprotected skin.

All around us, panicked people were searching for a way to escape, and I began to doubt that I would live to see my 32nd birthday.

But we were eventually evacuated by a ferry that had joined a fleet of boats rushing in to rescue thousands of people from the tip of Manhattan. We were dropped off in New Jersey, filthy and traumatized.

We were safe, but our neighborhood was not. Our wonderful apartment was locked in the “Frozen Zone,” neighborhoods south of Canal St. and later Chambers St. that were deemed too dangerous for humans to navigate. We couch surfed with friends and even strangers who opened their apartments to people displaced by the terror attack.

On Sept. 22, instead of welcoming guests to my amazing party, we put on donated clothes and hitched a ride to Cranbury Township, N.J., for the memorial service of one of Brian’s friends. James (Jim) Patrick White, 34, had been working at Cantor Fitzgerald in the North Tower on Sept. 11.

Brian and Jim had been fraternity brothers at Clemson University, and we were amazed at how many friends and family traveled from around the globe to take part in this service. As I looked around at the packed church, the reality of 9/11 took my breath away.

I was alive to turn another year older, but Jim and almost 3,000 others would never celebrate another milestone of any kind.

That evening, Brian gave me a hug before we hunkered down to a fitful night’s sleep. It was the only present I received that day. And it’s the only gift I have truly wanted for any birthday since.

This month I will celebrate my 55th birthday. These days, I am content with much smaller and more intimate gatherings, so I’m not planning any elaborate bash to mark my milestone.

Instead, I will spend Sept. 22 and Sept. 11 and probably much of the month of September doing what I first did on my birthday 23 years ago: wondering what Jim would have contributed to the world if he had not been cut down in an act of terror and malice. What would the thousands of others who died that day or as a result of that day have contributed to the world?

It’s a loss too large to be calculated. And too important to be forgotten.