My 9/11 . . . and 9/10 story

The anniversary of these next two September days are always difficult for me to get through. Even now – 14 years later – these dates weigh on my mind, play with my emotions. Each year, I try to make sense of Sept. 10-11, to make clearer what is still a fuzzy, foreboding, overwhelming, dreadful feeling. Everyone has a 9/11/2001 story.  Mine starts the day before. And this year, my 9/11 story resides with me in New York City.

My Dad, Quentin, (in case you wondered where my name originated) died on the Friday before 9/11, losing his fight with heart disease, a battle he had won for more than 24 years. We had his funeral on Monday, Sept. 10, 2001, in a small town of 2,000 people in in the heart of western Kentucky. The sign leading into our hometown says, “Welcome to Hartford, Kentucky, Home of 2,000 Happy People and a few Soreheads.”  The day before, more than 700 people – roughly a fifth of the people in this rural county – visited the funeral home to pay their respects.  We greeted these folks for more than nine hours. On Monday, my Mom – married to my Dad since she was 17 – guided the casket out of the church to the song, “Battle Hymn of the Republic.” 

On the morning of 9/11, Larry, Dana and Jennifer were in the air, flying Delta back to Gainesville from the Nashville airport.  There was no time for them to stay in Kentucky; there was school to attend for the girls and Gator games for Larry to work.

Thankfully, we didn’t have the television on in the family room of my Mom’s house that Tuesday morning.  Instead, my brother and I were talking with my Mom, planning the day ahead.  We still had legal issues to address and final payments and arrangements to settle with the funeral home.  So when Dana called to tell me they were stuck in the Atlanta airport – which I immediately assumed was because of the incompetence of ASA – I never envisioned that Atlanta was as far as they would fly that day.

“No, Mommy,” Dana said.  “You don’t understand.  Turn on the TV.  Planes have just flown into the World Trade Center.”  She didn’t need to go on and say what I could hear in her voice: that we’d just had Father’s Day Brunch at Windows on the World, three short months earlier, that New York City was a second home to our family.

Suffice it to say that Larry and the girls finally made it home that day, thanks to a UF student from Atlanta who was on their Atlanta-to-Gainesville flight and after realizing no one was flying back to UF that day, asked her Dad to drive her, her new friend and his daughters back to Gainesville.  

Me?  I had a rental car in Kentucky (gold in those early days after 9/11) that was due in Nashville Thursday morning when I was supposed to fly back to Gainesville.  Instead, I drove it 11 ½ hours back to Gainesville on Wednesday and upon delivering the sedan to the Budget Rent-a-Car counter at the Gainesville Airport, said “You know that car you THINK is going to be in Nashville tomorrow.  Well, instead, it’s in Gainesville today.”  Budget didn’t charge another penny: no additional drop-off fee, no additional mileage – and to this day, if Larry and I have a choice, we rent Budget.

The toughest thing of the entire 9/11 experience for me?  It was and still remains today: it was difficult to mourn the loss of my father.  Instead, my loss is still wrapped in the loss the collective country felt.  Whether it was the families of those people who died that day, or the citizens of the cities of New York and Washington, D.C., where life will never be the same, or for those Americans whose sons and daughters have died overseas in places most of us will never view, I can’t separate my loss from the whole.  My Dad – who landed on Normandy on what we believe was D-Day+5, would have been devastated to view 9/11.  The first words my Mom uttered after we turned on the television that Tuesday morning shortly before the first tower fell was, “Thank God your father didn’t live to see this day.”

This year will be especially poignant. Larry and I have moved to our adopted city. Just yesterday, Larry sent in our membership to the 9/11 Memorial and Museum. What are the membership benefits? We get priority tickets to view the plaza and museum. While we’ve been a couple of times to see the monuments, we have yet to gain the courage to enter the museum. I hope this fall, we’ll be able to.

So let’s all send our love to the courageous first responders from 9/11, to those soldiers who have fought around the world for the past 14 years, and to our nation’s police officers and firefighters who today are fighting a different, domestic battle.