The BusyEvent Blog

A Prayer for Our Loss
#eventprofs #911

I was driving to an early morning meeting in downtown St. Louis.  From West County, it’s about a 30 minute commute.  On that day, when I got the phone call, my commute suddenly ended – along with the rest of the world’s.

I was laughing about something JC was saying when Sheri told me that a plane had flown into some buildings – in New York.

For a few minutes, I couldn’t understand what she meant.  As a former flight instructor, I couldn’t comprehend what was happening, or how some student would have gotten so lost that they would have flown into a building.

Even before anyone knew what had happened, I started thinking about my friends ‘up east’.  First Tracy and Kerry whose family lived in nearby New Jersey and whom I’d flown the corridor with on one of those classically beautiful New York days. Then, Michael and Claudia who I knew were living in the city, but where?  My friend Pinhead who had just started a job on Wall Street and was so excited for it.  And of course Kathy; where she was I didn’t know, but I knew that New York was her kind of town.

You have to understand that, while I was thinking about my friends, I wasn’t worried, yet.  Until I started hearing the horror, initially from CBS and then as I reflexively punched button after button on the radio.

From the moment I got Sheri’s call, until the second plane hit the Tower, I had traveled about 1/4 mile. It seemed that if everyone commuting that day had suddenly stopped caring if they got to where they were going.  I could see everyone listening and calling and listening some more, just trying to figure it out.

And of course, I called Sheri back and we talked about what to do.  It was her calm voice, visualizing for me what she was seeing on TV, that helped me make sense of it all. And, after less than 3 years of being married, it was comforting to hear her, knowing that I could count on her to be strong for me so that I could be strong for our family.  We talked about the girls; should I get them from school (no).  We talked about our friends; should I try to call them (yes).  We talked about our family; had we talked with all of them (not yet).  We talked about the people in the planes and in the buildings and on the ground . .. and we talked about our country and what all this meant.

This was my “President Kennedy” moment. And I was fortunate to be sharing the horror of it with my friend, my touchstone, my wife.

But for so many of the people that we knew – and didn’t – they weren’t spending it with someone they loved.  Instead, they were spending those moments of terror, horror and confusion with the memory, or the voice, of someone they loved and were about to lose.

My heart still aches when I think of the loss of that day.  I get mad when I think of the wasted opportunities and distractions that the following years would bring.  I pray that our leaders are smarter than the rest of us and are doing what’s right to cure the hurt, secure our lives and prevent this from ever happening again.  And I hope that the voices of derision finally realize what’s important and what the right thing to do is.

But mostly, on this day, I pray for the loss; the loss of the families who have still not recovered, the loss of the people who were assassinated and the loss of our innocence that has been tested again and again.

I join you in praying for those that we have lost and in the hopes we all have for our country.