9/11, Ten Years Later: A Photo Worth a Thousand Stories

Nancy Peske pulls out the photo.

Steady and deliberate, she makes sure to grab it with two hands, as if it were a fragile sheet of glass.

She's a much different person than she was, say, 10 years ago.

Ten years ago, she couldn’t bear to look at that photo, let alone hold it.

Looking at that photo of the World Trade Center in New York City after Sept. 11 would have been like looking at a ghost, she says.

The hundreds of photos of the missing that lined her New York City block were reminder enough. She felt compelled to examine each and everyone as she walked past. She said it would be wrong to not acknowledge your fallen neighbor.

That was roughly a week after the attacks.

Peske wasn't in town when terrorists smacked those two jumbo jets into the Twin Towers one decade ago, but when word came down that the coast was clear, and the air fair enough for breathing, she’d return to a place unfamiliar.

“When you come home from vacation, you see the skyline, and you know that you’re home,” Peske said. “But, there are plumes of smoke where the towers use to be. It was such a shocking thing.”

Such a shock, in fact, that Peske would have to endure nearly four years of therapy to combat the fear and anxiety the 9/11 attacks put in her. She already had mounting stress, and along with the alarm of 9/11, the mindset that terrorists would target New York City again would prove to be too much.

It's not about the event itself, but the lessons learned, she says.

“It was such a life-changing event,” she said. “(But) I wasn’t going to let the terrorists have me live in terror.”

Remembering Sept. 11

Martha's Vineyard is about six hours east of New York City. Peske, a self-employed book editor and ghost writer, and her husband George left their New York City home a couple days before 9/11 for the affluent community off the south of Cape Cod in Massachusetts for a week's vacation at a friend's home. On that morning, Peske and her husband decided to venture to the beach for the day. But, before they took off she decided to check with her cousin who lives in New York City, because she wouldn't be able to use her cell phone due to a lack of reception.

“You don’t have a TV up there, do you," her cousin asked.

"No, why what's up?" Peske replied.

By that time, the first of the two planes had already crashed into the World Trade Center. Peske didn't know what to say, so she didn't talk. Her husband tuned into ABC News via radio.

"As we listened to the radio, I can remember hearing my cousin scream, as the second plane hit," Peske said. "We ended up listening to the radio all day."

She said she remembers when the first tower went down, ABC News anchorman Peter Jennings asked three times, "do you mean the facade went down?"

"Let me get this straight, the tower went down?" Jennings asked again, Peske remembers.

Peske and her husband would have to wait a week before returning to their home. Then, New York City officials said the air quality was OK, so the couple returned to a city that appeared to be foreign.

The couple wouldn't endeavor to the World Trade Center — that is, until a week later when they had to travel five blocks away from Ground Zero to report for jury duty. So, they decided to visit the site.

"Like idiots, we go down for jury duty without any masks on. I got an immediate headache, it smelled like burned plastic and cement and I could feel powder on my tongue and in my nose," she said.

"The destruction was unfathomable."

A constant reminder

“If you lived in the city, it was a non-stop event,” Peske said. "Everywhere you went, there was a reminder."

Originally from Shorewood, Peske moved to New York City in 1987 to start a career in book publishing and study at New York University. The current Shorewood resident and self-employed book editor called New York home for about 18 years — and would meet her husband and bear a son — before returning to Shorewood in 2005.

On a chilly February night in 1988, Peske was on her way to the World Trade Center to venture to the top and take in the view. The cold pushed her into Daryl's Fun Antiques, a New York legend by Peske's account, and the shop her husband owned. It was the only time Peske would step foot in the World Trade Center, but the experience is forever embedded in her mind, she says.

"When I saw the video of the attacks on Sept. 11, I just remembered that lobby, and going in there to buy tickets," she said.

In the days after the attacks, Peske said there were fliers posted on every lamppost and lining every wall of every hospital. The fliers were of all the missing in the city.

She had to make a trip to the FedEx store in the week after she returned.

"I just remember noticing that I and everyone else was stopping at every lamppost and reading and examining the fliers," she said. "How do you just walk past that?"

She said a mentality of never wanting to be alone grew within herself and other New Yorkers. People moved in with friends and were scared to leave their homes.

"In those early days after, you'd wake up in a panic attack thinking, have they attacked? My anxiety was so severe. I thought, I can’t function like this,” she said.

She became a CNN junkie, because if she had more information, she would have certainty.

"What I eventually realized was it was just feeding the fear," Peske said.

Peske would have to start cognitive behavioral therapy to battle her fear and anxiety. She'd have to learn techniques to manage her anxiety. Deconstructing her thought process woke her up to the fact that she was talking herself into being fearful.

The constant images of 9/11 and fear the TV media sells forced her to stop watching.

Most importantly, she says she learned not to focus on the trauma, but instead on the lessons learned and the great things that came out of that day.

“What you have to remember is the merchants in Chinatown, who handed out cheap slippers to women that had to walk home to Brooklyn and Queens. The bike shop owner that handed out rental bikes and said ‘Just get it back when you can,’” she said.

Ten years later

The overwhelming feeling of community is what she misses most about New York, but she enjoys that fact that Shorewood is so walkable.

Peske works out of her Shorewood home, ghost writing two to three books on spirituality per year. She says she's not religious, despite the pictures of Jesus that line her home office.

That photo of the two towers reaching far into the atmosphere protected by the plastic sleeve is more important than anything hanging on her walls.

“Now, when I look at that photo, I’m proud.” Peske said.  “I’m proud to be a New Yorker. Even though I don’t live in New York, I will always be a New Yorker. 

"I’m proud of the way I chose to live my life. It really woke me up to the reality that I have to live my life fearlessly, everyday.”