My mom has worked for the state department since before I was born. It’s how she met my dad. It meant me and my brother lived in a lot of foreign countries and we attended international schools. Along the way, I made a lot of friends that weren’t American. Don’t get me wrong, they knew what 9/11 was, but they didn’t understand it in the same way most Americans do because it doesn’t mean the same thing to them. As a kid, this shocked me — especially when a friend of mine asked what the big deal was with 9/11. She didn’t mean to be harsh, she just genuinely wanted to know. Even now, as someone who was barely two months old when it happened, someone who can’t remember the event at all and, logically speaking, should be somewhat more detached, I still had no words to explain the feelings I had grown up with toward 9/11. There was no explanation for the loss and the fear felt on behalf of those who can actually remember, of those who lived it and were there, running in the streets. And of course, there was no explanation for the ones who died.
A few years ago, my mom told me that she was sitting with me on the couch in our old townhouse in Alexandria, Va. She was watching the news when the screen cut to breaking news. She watched as two planes flew into the World Trade Center and the towers crumbled.
I asked her why she was telling me this and she replied, “So you would know that after they fell, the first thing I did was write you a letter.”
She told me she wrote me that letter to say that the world would never be the same. She wrote me that letter in order to make sure I knew what had happened. Because as much as she might try, there were no words that would ever be able to do it justice. She would never be able to explain to me as well as she might at that very moment.
I’ve still never read the letter. By the time I was old enough to read it, I was still too young to read that letter. By the time I was old enough to cope with the words she wrote down, we had moved countries three times and the letter had been lost, most likely ending up somewhere in our storage unit that waits for the day we stop moving. So instead, my mom told me about the letter. She wanted me to know it existed, even if I never saw it. But I know that one day I will read it.
I think about that letter every year. I try to imagine sometimes what she wrote, how she might try to explain to me what it felt like to watch that on the news and know that somewhere in real-time the towers were truly falling and people were falling with them. I wonder what it felt like to know that everyone around her was feeling the same thing, watching the same thing. I wonder what it felt like to know that there really were no words that could explain it, and I wonder what it felt like to try anyway.
My mom wrote me that letter in honor of all those who died and those who tried to save them despite the odds. And one day, I’ll read it for the same reason.