Anger and Sadness from a Survivor's Wife As 9/11 Anniversary Approaches

It felt today as if someone had taken a load of bricks and thrown them onto my chest. Tomorrow marks the 12th anniversary of the attacks on the World Trade Center. My husband, who walked out of Tower One 11 minutes before it fell, still is with me. He's alive to help me guide our two boys to adulthood, to make awesome chicken wings, and to coach middle school basketball. So why did I cry - no why did I sob - so many tears today?

I'd like to say it is for the families of those who lost loved ones. I'd like to say it's for the 25 friends and colleagues who died. But today, for me, is not about other people. It's about my family, a family who survived trauma. Through the years I have learned that mourning comes in waves and finds patterns in my heart. Always, on Sept. 11, I mourn the souls who perished, I pray for them and I pray for the loved ones they left behind.

But on September 10, I relive the shock of the attack, the way that day ripped though our family's lives and shook us to our cores, the way it tore out our little ones' innocence, and turned a trusting little boy's first days of kindergarten into whirlpool of anger and sadness and confusion. I remember how the attacks destroyed his fifth birthday, which was the very next day and has made subsequent birthdays so bittersweet. He just could not understand why anyone would try to kill his kind daddy. Neither could his parents.

You see, I remember today what life was like before the attack. Those memories sear me.

That boy is a young man now, a happy high school senior busy with AP classes, college visits and cyclocross races. Yet, this particular anniversary, this particular day before, I felt the weight the trauma has held on the trajectory of his life.

Many people have trouble understanding the trauma of enduring the attacks, and then the trauma of surviving them.

A Wall Street Journal reporter's called our home on Sept. 13. His call began with a cheery "Congratulations!" to me on Greg's survival and a comment that he knew Greg. (He probably did, but he was no friend). The reporter sounded like he were smiling, as if he thought we were popping champagne when in fact I was trying to figure out how to maintain calm routines for our two sons while my husband worked 18 hour days in Jersey City. Another call that same day came from a former newspaper colleague, a woman my husband had mentored, who now worked at the Washington Post. She drew me in with assurances she was calling "as a friend only," and then, once I felt relaxed, tried to grill me about what happened.

A neighbor down the street was puzzled that week about why we weren't celebrating my husband's return home; why was I so stressed when we had so much to be thankful for?

That Sunday at church a woman in front of me shushed me at Mass when I could not stop my quiet sobs when singing "A Mighty Fortress is Our God," with my five and not-quite-two-year old sitting beside me.   remember feeling sad that Mass had not provided me with the sanctuary I had sought.

I still can't stand it when I tell someone my husband is a World Trade survivor and they just go on about say how they had been in Lower Manhattan three weeks before or how they had watched the whole thing on TV, or how their cousin had survived too; he had watched the attacks from his apartment window in Brooklyn. Seriously?

Yes, we are all witnesses to history, and we all survived that day. But nothing compares to the experience of walking down 68 flights of stairs into an uncertain future.

Every day since Sept. 11 I have considered how blessed - how undeservedly lucky - we are that Greg survived, that I get to be married to him still and that, since then, he has witnessed since so much beauty unfolding.

But today, I feel sad and angry that our little world, and "Daddy work" was shattered. I thank God we have been given so much time for prayer and therapy and healing. I thank God we have this new life. Even if the wider world forgets and neighbors stay clueless and journalists see us as nothing more than a quick quote on deadline, the four of us forever will understand our hard, lonely and beautiful journey.