This year, 17 years after the fatal attacks, the tradition continues. Never forget.
‘It took us a second to realize this firefighter was walking the flights of stairs as all the firefighters did on 9/11. It’s little things like this that make you stop and think.’
‘I immediately saw a tower had been hit. I opened the curtain and could see the smoke as I looked at lower Manhattan out the window.’
“When I woke up, I heard the shower going. Then I heard someone leave the apartment. I rushed to Mike and Elena’s bedroom and hollered for him. No response, so I kept hollering, ‘Mike, Mike are you in there?'”
‘I bent down to pick my baby up and felt something snap. I dropped my baby in his crib and heard my toddler screaming in the other room, but I couldn’t move.’
“I remember beginning to feel different, very sad. I felt like driving off a bridge was a good idea. All of my inhibitions were out the window. I called my doctor and said ‘Something isn’t right.'”
‘There’s nothing we can do.’ My week-old daughter had Stage 3 brain cancer. Terminal. No life expectancy.
“I was lying on the operating table, 18 years old, a first time mother, asking God to let my girl live. My daughter was going to die. We didn’t know exactly when, but we were told she would and to expect it soon.”
‘This is miscarriage. The belly that still looks bloated and pregnant, but isn’t. The headaches and cramps still left over from hormones that haven’t yet gotten the memo.’
“The waiting room where now 6 times I have had to embarrassingly walk by other waiting patients, puffy, red and with mascara dripping down my cheeks.”
‘While he’s so young, I want him to remember me. So he can be sure how very much I love him.’ Dying mother leaves gifts, notes behind for her son through his 21st birthday
“Personal effects like my notepads – so he can see what my writing was like. Or the perfume he helped pick out for me earlier this year so he’ll remember my smell.”
A family member said, ‘Oh, this is just awful. I was praying you would not have to get a C-section. Nobody wants a C-section.’
“The floodgates broke, and I sobbed uncontrollably. Was I less of a mother because of how my baby was being delivered? It was the worst thing that could have been said to me.”
‘She is 5, her curls draped around her cheeks. As she straightens her crown, she finds the reflection of her gray hair and sad eyes staring back at her. She is dressing for her fourth funeral this year.’
“Looking at her reflection she is forced to blink to see clearly. Her gray hair is set in curlers. She is thinking about all the friends and family she has outlived. She considers bending down to fix her knee-high stocking, but instead, sighs deeply.
‘This time last year, I wrote a suicide note. I hated myself and believed I was better off dead than being ‘gay.’’
“I remember laying in my bed, crying, and asking God why He would make me if He was going to send me to Hell.”
‘I had a panic attack before I posted it. My body has fat, it has rolls, it’s got stretch marks from before my pregnancy. But that doesn’t make it any less postpartum.’
“The first few weeks of motherhood felt very lonely. I felt so uncomfortable in my body and was searching for someone, anyone, to relate to. I saw other moms celebrating their postpartum bodies, but I could never find another plus size mother who was celebrated in the same way.”