Sep 11 2008
9/11/01 - The Only Day I Wish I Could Forget
I hope you will excuse the departure from my normal content but I am taking 9/11 off from work as I do every year, and I wanted my readers to understand why.
If there was ever a day in my life that I wish I could forget, it would be no different than the thoughts of countless others, September 11, 2001.
On that day I lived in New York City and I watched the events unfold in my own back yard, yet even having a front row seat to such a horribile scene, I couldn’t help but to somehow be caught in a sense the I was watching some movie clip.
Unfortunately those events were real and I was a very real part of them.
This photo shows the contents of a small bag that sits propped against my desk every day. It contains several local newspapers from that time period, a stethoscope that I used when I assisted with triage on the site at Ground Zero, a medical admission slip for one of the patients I worked with and a glove that belonged to one of the firefighters who lost his life while battling to save others.
That firefighter and over forty other people that I knew well and called friend died on 9/11/01, along with thousands of others.
In the aftermath of that tragedy, the world came together and in a unified voice proclaimed “We are ALL Americans Now”. Perhaps no better example I could find of this idea is shown in this video clip:
May God continue to bless us all.
Thank you for your strength writing this. Half a world away we felt the impact of emotion, I can’t imagine how it would have been to have lived through this and know people you cared about were amongst the missing and dead.
Michael, you are a strong, generous man to do what you did and see what you saw. I knew of your loss, but I did not know you were one of the heroes that sacrificed to help others. My hats off to you and all the men and women that did what you did.
Thank you for sharing this part of yourself, as difficult as I know it must have been.
~Kelly
http://www.30somethingandsearching.today.com/