I remember my impressive belly led the way down the stairs that blue-sky morning of 9/11. I had my phone in hand, and a harried husband on the line: “Turn on the TV, hon. A plane flew into the World Trade Center.”
An army of Riveras called New Jersey home, and we went through a mental roster as I switched between “Good Morning, America” “Today” and CNN. Do you know where Steve works? How about Jim? Gino? Could one or all of them be possibly at the towers that moment?
There is no better description of that morning to me that the one writer Brian Doyle penned 10 years after 2,977 people died:
“The burning and then another burning and then the incredible collapse and then another collapse and meanwhile people jumping out of windows and being crushed by concrete chunks the size of trucks and choked to death by ash so dense that you couldn’t see your hand in front of your face, and firefighters sprinting up the stairs as people sprinted down, and the picture on the television cutting back and forth from New York City to the burning Pentagon, and then there was the news of the plane that the passengers forced to crash in a field so it wouldn’t kill their countrymen, the plane in which the passengers, led by dads and college kids and a rugby player, stormed the pilots’ cabin where the murderers had slit the throat of a stewardess.”
It is Brian Doyle-speak, that one sentence. And it contains everything about what we saw and heard that day.
We sat there, staring at the TV, for two hours. Hubby went to work at Irvine Optical in Burbank, but he was sent home. Officials were afraid the Burbank Airport would be a target. Friends called as they left their offices in downtown L.A. Who knew if a plane was headed to City Hall?
I somehow made my way to the Tribune building in West Covina, but only after the twin buildings had collapsed, and American airspace was completely shut down. The three TVs we always had one wouldn’t let us escape each new broadcast, one more harrowing story, the phone calls from inside the towers, the near-misses at the airports.
At the end of that exhausting, heart-rending day, when we already knew the name Osama bin Laden and the cruel plans he unleashed, my editor Phil Drake looked over at me and asked, very gently, “How do you feel about bringing a child into this world today?”
And my hand flew to my impressive belly and rubbed there, and the answer came quick and sure: “I feel hopeful. This kid can save the world yet,” I said, already filling up with that courage that would rage through the country in the next weeks. United We Stand. Remember that?
What is a baby but hope, after all?
But still, I spent days on the couch reading obituaries in the New York Times, which they called “Portraits of Grief,” falling apart at the stories of last-second phone calls and voicemails saying goodbye, of Christine Hanson, all of 2, flying with her parents Peter and Sue aboard United Flight 175. They were supposed to go to Disneyland. Hubby would find me sobbing as I watched more coverage, even as we found out his cousins were all safe.
Gino had walked all the way home to New Jersey from Manhattan, lending his phone to strangers so they could call their families. Every year since 9/11, for 25 years, Gino’s wife Michelle would get a thank you card and $20 in the mail from the mother of one man who borrowed that phone to let her know he was alive.
Alive. I wondered what all my tears and sadness was doing to our firstborn, so immersed was he in all the pain of those early days. But he also felt, in utero, the bolstering tales of mercy and courage and kindness, and love, always that, if we look at 9/11 and dig into each story of 2,977 lives.
I found something more than horror. On Sept. 17th my grandmother Honorata Castro Cruz died at age 97. By November, we had attended two weddings, more somber than most, but still celebrations.
By December, I could stand a coffee cup on my belly and waddled around with Shrek ankles. I woke up to leg cramps and videotaped the alien-like landscape of the calisthenics my baby made on my belly.
Our baby boy was born on the morning of the 19th day of December in 2001 at Kaiser Baldwin Park. It rained that afternoon. By the time the first anniversary of that September Eleventh came round, we had filled our days with moments 2,977 no longer could have: a cupcake on his half-birthday, trips to the Zoo and the Long Beach Aquarium, a treatise on his first word (it was “Up, Papa!” so not a first word but a first sentence, yessiree, we raised a genius.)
By the time five years went by, we had added Wonder Boy to the family. Cheeky Baby came along, our bonus, in 2009.
But that Firstborn, my shield against hopelessness on 9/11, he walked across the stage at UC San Diego this June to collect his master’s degree in education. He wants to be a teacher. His empathy is his greatest strength so I know he will be a good one. He is saving the world.
One book I pick up around this time is “Portraits: 9/11/01,” the collected obituaries I cried over those early weeks. I can still only get through four or five before I have to stop. It starts with Gordy Aamoth, 32, who was just about improving his golf game. It ends with Igor Zukelman, 29, of Ukraine, a new American citizen and proud owner of his first car, a beat-up Toyota Cressida.
In between are 2,975 other stories and details of lives I want to remember right. To remember is to honor. To remember is to pray. Remembering is what heals. That’s what I’ll be doing on Friday.
Anissa Rivera is a journalist with the Southern California News Group.