Life Goes On, But In a World Forever Changed

The Boston Herald

It's hard to know what to do next. Even the essentials seem unessential, showering, dressing, making the bed, making coffee. The gym seems superfluous. A walk feels surreal. Morning is just an extension of the previous day. No need for an alarm. Night and day blend, all the days since Tuesday like time spent in a hospital room waiting to find out what's wrong. 

I talk to my daughter who is stuck in Los Angeles. We talk constantly, grateful for the phone but afraid of its tenuousness, afraid that it will be taken away from us, 3,000 miles a chasm now.

"What should I do, Mom?" she says. "How am I going to get home?”

I want to drive across the country and get her. I want her to get in a rental car and meet me halfway. My husband says, don't be crazy. Wait. She has an airline ticket. Things will calm down.

But will they? Will she be able to fly home Monday as planned? And will she be safe on a plane? And if she gets home to New York and to her fiance, Scott, will they be safe there? Will anyone ever be safe again?

My son's fiancee called from Manhattan Thursday. She couldn't  reach Rob. The cell-phone circuits were all busy again. He had just called her to tell her Times Square was being evacuated and he was leaving his building. Then his phone went dead.

"I know he's OK. I know it's just another bomb scare. But I can't reach him and I want him to know where I am. Can you try to get through?" she said.

She's Scottish, 3,000 miles away from her family and home. Tuesday morning, after the World Trade Center crumbled, she phoned her parents to assure them she was fine and that everything was OK. But she hasn't been able to get through on the phone since.

"I'm fine. I'm OK." That's what she continues to say. That's what we're all saying to ourselves and to one another. It's our mantra. And we are fine, the lucky among us. We see the heartache out there, the physical loss of thousands of people, every one of them someone's father, mother, brother, friend. And by comparison, we're fine.

Except that we're scared, because we're headed somewhere we've never been before, on some unknown road leading God knows where. And not only don't we know how to prepare for this trip, we also don't know what's in store, what's around the comer, and who or what is waiting for us at the road's end.

The rhythm of life goes on as it always has. Down the street Mr. Jorgenson's tree is turning orange. The days are growing shorter and turning cool. Kim is nursing her new baby. Kirsten will have her baby any day. The school buses are running. And we are driving among them to work, to school, to doctor's appointments, to somewhere.

Most things are exactly as they always were. And yet nothing feels the same.

My husband went back to Logan International Airport Thursday to pick up our luggage, which was left on a plane when we were evacuated from the airport Tuesday morning. He brought it home, carried it upstairs and placed it on the bed. Inside, were all the clothes I'd packed just three days before, still neat, still folded, incongruous now, like artifacts from a different time.

Before last  Tuesday morning when human beings were used as weapons to destroy not just America's symbols of affluence, but America's real affluence - its confidence in itself - our world was a different place. Both my daughters had helped me shop for these clothes. They'd gone through the racks, picked out what they liked, then sat on the dressing room floor, shaking their heads, laughing, giving the thumbs up or the thumbs down as I tried everything on. We were having fun, being frivolous. We were totally carefree.

Now one of these daughters is 3,000 miles away, unable to hop on a plane and come home as she has always done, as people all over this country have always done. Now there is no more frivolity, only a growing fear.

It's a different world, the old one gone. It vanished in minutes  last Tuesday. Is it any wonder we don't know what to do next?