Remembering a Child's Response to September 11: 'You Have To Live Your Life'

Eleven years ago it was a phone call that alerted me to the terrorist attacks under way. My daughter had gotten a ride to school and I was taking a nap when the phone rang.

“Are you watching TV?” my friend, Chris, asked. “Turn it on.”

One tower was in flames as I watched the second plane fly into the second tower.

Next came the Pentagon, then the crash of United Airlines Flight 93 in Pennsylvania.

I watched in profound astonishment — and horror — as both towers crumbled to the ground.

To process my thoughts demanded attention to my daughter’s, who was a student at Progress Village Middle Magnet School in the Greater Brandon area of Tampa, Florida.

I drove to the school and asked to see her. I was told that the students had not been told about the day’s events and that there was only one period left to go, so I should wait. I said I would wait, but first I wanted to see my daughter.

They called her to the office, I met her in the hallway, and it was readily apparent that she had not yet heard of the day’s events.

That would come during the last period of her day, in those 40 minutes I left her to volunteer read in another class, and I will never forget the words she said to me as I joined with her in the hallway, following the dismissal bell:

“Is the world over as we know it?” she asked.

In turn, I asked her what she knew and she told me her teacher had told them about the terrorist attacks.

I thought back on my own childhood, when the teachers at Manetto Hill Elementary School n Plainview, L.I., wept openly about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, and derided us for cheering in the hallway after the announcement that there would be no school the next day to mourn his death.

I thought about the teacher at John F. Kennedy High School who told us years later that President Nixon never would resign or be impeached because, if that were the case, democracy as we knew it never would survive.

Such grandiose statements, but neither of my teachers’ statements were as poignant as my seventh-grade daughter’s reaction to 9/11.

In the car, on the way home, I asked her what she knew and what she wanted to know. She told me she knew of the attacks and that she wanted to know if her grandmother in New York was okay and if her aunt, uncle and cousins in Washington, D.C., were okay.

I told her they were and I should have left it at that.

But I didn’t.

I followed it by saying that thing that adults like to tell kids when the adults themselves don’t understand if things ever will be right again: I said, “Don’t worry, it’s going to be okay.”

“No, it’s not,” my daughter said in a flash of maturity that belied her age. “No, it’s not and it’s not ever going to be okay. It’s going to happen again, and it’s going to be worse. No one can stop it.”

I guess you could say in that moment a large chunk of my child's childhood innocence went with it.

That in that moment, a terrorist had won, by instilling in our minds the fear of uncertainty, the fear of fear itself.

And so I asked my daughter, because I truly wanted to know for myself, “If you feel that way, then how can you go on?”

Her answer, short and simple:

“Well, you have to live your life.”

And that is what I think about today, on the 1^1th anniversary of the terrorist attacks on American soil. And, frankly, what I think about  every year on the anniversary of 9/11, and on lots of days in between, and during all those times I've reported on ways Americans have remembered 9/11 and Patriot Day ever since.

I'll always remember, "You have to live your life."