Eleven years ago, on that bright September morning, my daughter was a freshly minted second-grader in a small school near our house. Then, as for many years that followed, my husband’s job was based primarily in a steel mill, and I worked in a library.

But you don’t need to read my story of that morning. You’ve got a story of your own, and we’ve all read or heard or seen a million different variations of what happened. Thousands of articles and books have been written, television programs and movies filmed, and radio programs created.

We know what happened.
What we can’t understand, even now, is why.
I don’t think we ever will.

Still, it doesn’t seem right to have a blog and not honor those who died, though what I have to say is merely a reminder of something someone else wrote. I wish I could find the original blog or article to cite so you could read the author’s much more graceful words, on the subject. The writer spoke about 9/11 —  specifically about the phone calls that were made to loved ones on that day. S/he ended something like this, “As far as I know, every one of those phone calls was about love…”

That sentence — which I’m sure I’ve misquoted — has stuck with me all these years, because, in my opinion, that’s what we need to remember. If we focus on the hatred of those who committed the atrocity, then they’ve won. But if we remember the love expressed in those phone calls, and the sacrifices made by the rescuers at the twin towers and  passengers on Flight 93, then all is not lost.

And in a time, when our country is so divided by so many things, perhaps today we can manage to remember that that we are all human, which makes us not only capable of great cruelty, but also great love.

In Memory of 9-11 (Photo credit: momentcaptured1)

Just for today, can we choose love?

Addendum: Thanks to my friend and fellow blogger ThreeC, I now know where those words of wisdom came from — not a blog or article, but from my favorite movie of all time(!!!), Love Actually.

In the opening scene, Hugh Grant, playing the British Prime Minister says, “Whenever I get gloomy with the state of the world, I think about the arrivals gate at Heathrow Airport. General opinion’s starting to make out that we live in a world of hatred and greed, but I don’t see that. It seems to me that love is everywhere. Often, it’s not particularly dignified or newsworthy, but it’s always there – fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, husbands and wives, boyfriends, girlfriends, old friends. When the planes hit the Twin Towers, as far as I know, none of the phone calls from the people on board were messages of hate or revenge – they were all messages of love.”