Reclaiming September

I don’t expect that I will ever forget waking to the news that my workplace had been flown through the side of someone else’s, resulting, naturally, in the fiery destruction of both. The memories of the ensuing hours and days of fear, uncertainty, and What The Fuck? are equally vivid, more so this year than in some years past. As ultimately benefited me enormously in September of 2001, I am trying to avoid as much of the still-sensationalist media coverage of the arbitrarily significant tenth anniversary of these events as I can. The horrifying and spectacularly visual outcomes of these hijackings have themselves been hijacked and used primarily as excuses. By my company, whose executives gleefully started cooking up their record-breaking bankruptcy scheme that very afternoon, with thousands of their employees and tens of thousands of their passengers stranded in all corners of the world, their aircraft still smoldering on TV. By single-minded, fearful bigots whose personal brand of “religion” drives them to preach the persecution of a vast swath of the people of the world based on these and similar actions of an equally single-minded, fearful, and bigoted few. By the government, who launched as many ill-conceived tangential wars of revenge as they could get away with and who continues to squander its fortune along with the lives of its sailors and soldiers in the name of… well, nobody’s really sure what. It is right to try to honor the people whose lives were taken or rent asunder on September 11th of 2001, but, despite myriad new heavily funded, poorly researched, invasive layers of so-called security at the world’s airports, anyone who wants to can still carry a box cutter aboard an airplane. We have learned nothing, and changed even less. It could happen again, rendering every death on September 11th even more pointless, which hardly seems possible.

I did not know any of the flight attendants who were used as weapons that day. I am not ashamed to say that my primary reaction to the sickening list of names that one of our union reps read into the phone was relief; I went weak in the knee under a great flood of gratitude that none of my friends was among them. Many of my friends, especially based in Boston and Newark, were forced to endure a horribly opposite experience, and it is for them that I continue to grieve. I try to honor the memories of our flying partners as best I can, especially each year come September, without getting bogged down in a self-congratulatory, garment-rending grief to which I have no claim. I also still mourn the precipitous and permanent decline in the quality of our work lives, which fell victim not to wild-eyed raving terrorists, but to appalling individual avarice masquerading as “corporate greed.” With barely even the most token recognition that its employees that had not just been sacrificed to a mad man’s box cutter while the world watched in horror may have been impacted by what just happened to those that had, management began immediately to slash and burn, hacking furiously away at jobs, pay, and benefits, flagrantly pocketing every penny of “cost savings.” Ten years later, the richest executive suite in the industry has given nothing back to its front-line employees, going so far as to refuse even to pay to replace a weatherbeaten American flag that flew in memoriam at the Newark departure gate of United 93.

The first part of September is emotionally taxing for me every year, and I think it is right to remember my co-workers who were killed in the line of duty that morning. The first victims of the September 11th hijackers, and the only ones actually murdered with box cutters, were flight attendants, and if other flight attendants don’t honor their sacrifices, virtually ignored by the media, they will soon be forgotten. It is also my right to grieve for what was taken from me and my co-workers in the aftermath. But it is my choice whether to wallow in misdirected fear and pointless resentment. This year as I meditate around my September 11th experience and emotions, I am focused on the lessons on serenity and the circle of life that an extraordinary bale of sea turtles imparted to me that same day, and on the celebrations of renewal in my own life in the intervening ten years. The three women with whom I was “stuck in Hawaii,” for want of a more elegant (and less oxymoronic) phrase, have all (or will, in November!) become mothers, welcoming new life into the world and nurturing it along its way. Hating my job ⎯ or, at least, hating all the petty and demeaning ways the company keeps trying to make it worse ⎯ helped me to shift my focus to my life away from work. I have cultivated new and rewarding friendships, and sought to reinvest in valued old ones. My niece and nephews came into a post-World Trade Center world and will learn about what happened on September 11th as History. Through them, and through my concurrent relationship with my husband, I have been reborn as an artist, and been gifted a life of inspiration, creation, and celebration. I see that I have much for which to be grateful, not least the purpose and the peace conferred by gratitude itself.

As the honu taught me, we are lucky to be in this world, however long our particular book stays open. It is natural and right to mourn what you lose, beautiful and healing to find ways to carry your loved ones with you after they move on. Loss is but a part of the cycle of renewal, and there is much to celebrate in new life, new love, and new discoveries. This year, as every year, I strive to honor the memories of the crews of United flights 93 and 175, and of American Airlines flights 11 and 77, and the difficult journeys of their friends and families. And if I’m hit again by one of those floods of gratitude? Let it carry me away.