My 9/11 story . . .

I wrote this several years ago before we ever dreamed of moving to New York City. It still resonates today - and I still feel the loss of my Daddy every single day. Now that we live here, it is even more real.  

Everyone has a story about 9/11.  Maybe that’s why I want to share my remembrances – it’s a collective memory that is meant to share.

Mine? Well, it’s a bit complicated.  My Dad, Quentin, (in case you wondered where my name originated) died on the Friday before 9/11, after fighting his battle with heart disease for more than 24 years. We had his funeral on Monday, Sept. 10, 2001, in a town of 2,000 people in western Kentucky, where the sign leading into town says, “Welcome to Hartford, Kentucky; Home of 2,000 Happy People and a few Soreheads.”  The day before, more than 700 people – roughly ten percent of the people in their 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, my husband, Larry, and our two daughters, Dana and Jennifer, were in the air at 6 a.m. – roughly the time the planes were hijacked - flying Delta back to Gainesville from the Nashville airport.  There was no time for them to stay in Kentucky to mourn; 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 my daughter 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 Hartsfield International 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 had Father’s Day brunch at Windows on the World just three short months earlier or that her Dad had grown up in the Bronx and considered himself a New Yorker for life.

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 and 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 is difficult to mourn the loss of my father.  Instead, my loss was – and is today – wrapped up in the loss the collective country felt.  I wonder. Are 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, able to separate their loss from the whole? I can’t. 

My Dad – who landed on Omaha Beach 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 Dad didn’t live to see this day.”