My 9/11 Letter to Teresa

I was at the World Trade Center when it fell. I write about it every year on 9/11. 

When I’ve kept a gratitude journal I’ve always had in the back of my head: this is not good, I need to add all my not-gratitude. But I have been able to see that the exercise of being grateful in one area of my life makes me more grateful in other areas.

So I decided to thank people I’ve had in my mind for a long time but never really thanked. One of those people was A., the woman I was working with on 9/11. Read more

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Playbook for stage xx cancer

It might be cancer. I have two more doctor appointments on Tuesday and maybe even more after that. My mom is coming to Boston to go with me so I am not going alone. My brother comes three days later. Read more

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9/11: What’s still the same

I still have not seen a video of the towers falling. But I started reading commentary about it this past year.

I have never stopped thinking about the people jumping from the towers. Maybe because after the second plane hit, my brain couldn’t comprehend anything really, it was all abstract and unreal. But when my coworker told me “People are jumping from the building!” that’s when I understood it was real. And I followed her to go see. Read more

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My 9/11 post: Why everyone should watch the Queen’s funeral live

My 9/11 post: Why everyone should watch the Queen’s funeral live

People watching the moon landing on television at a cafe in Milan in 1969

My son told me they read a study about the unreliability of memory in his psychology class. He said people who were at the World Trade Center when the Twin Towers fell reported they learned about the towers falling from television.

I asked him what is unreliable about that? I told him even though the first tower literally fell on me, I thought a bomb had been dropped. I was completely covered in dust and no one thought I had mental capacity to know more about what had happened. I didn’t learn that the towers fell until the evening of September 11. I didn’t learn about it on TV only because I had gauze covering my eyes and someone had to tell me what happened. Read more

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What we learned from 9/11 about quitting work after life-altering events

A majority of people in the US are considering quitting their jobs right now according to the New York Times. This is obvious to me because in the months after the towers fell, my world was my recovery support groups — and in my groups, the conversations were all about who is going back to work. Read more

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The 9/11 post where we reunite

I was at the World Trade Center when it fell. Each year I write a post on 9/11. Here is the archive. Here is my post for today:

When Nino came back to live with us he came back in stages. We had been spending a few weekends together for a long time, but we hadn’t lived together in twelve years.

At dinnertime, we talk about when CD-ROMs were invented and there was no content to put on them. The kids ask us to tell the how-we-met story again. Read more

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What zoomers think about 9/11

Have you heard the term zoomers? It’s what Generation Z calls themselves. I remember resisting using the term millennial because I thought it was absurdly self-aggrandizing. But now I see that the moniker is perfectly aligned to Millennial thinking.

Read more

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17 years after 9/11 and I am still surprised


I have been writing a post about 9/11 every year. Maybe because 9/11 comes right around the Jewish High Holidays, I treat my archive of posts a little like a prayer book. I read my favorite – the first one – because it’s still incredible to me that I was at the World Trade Center when it fell. Read more

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My fascination with resilience starts with 9/11

After the World Trade Center fell, those of us who were there were divided into therapy groups. Sorted by trauma. People who lost a parent in one group. People who escaped down a stairwell in another group. I was in the group of people who got hit by flying body parts. Read more

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My 9/11 fifteen years later

My 9/11 fifteen years later

In case you don’t know, I was at the World Trade Center when it fell. Here is the piece I wrote for Time magazine on that day.

Here is an archive of the posts I’ve written every year on 9/11.

Here are my two biggest problems today: Read more

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