My father died in the spring of 2001.

On the surface that probably doesn't seem very related to the tragedy of September 11, but it was the first thing that I thought about last night when I heard the news that Osama Bin Laden had been found and killed.  Because those two events...my father's death and 9/11, bookended the summer that effectively ended my childhood and shaped my adulthood.  I was 23 years old that summer.  An only child, I was extremely close with both of my parents.  I was also very close with my paternal grandparents, as on that side of the family I was the only grandchild that they knew as well.  And when I went home from school to celebrate Christmas in 2000, we all got to celebrate together.  As it turned out, for the last time.

My father had kidney failure as a result of a long-term battle with diabetes.  He had utilized dialysis for seven years, but it was losing effectiveness and he needed a kidney.  As his only child I was a natural choice to be tested as a donor, but I was in high school when he began dialysis and he had always flatly refused to even consider the possibility of me giving him a kidney.  He didn't want to weaken me in any way.  Same story held through college...he wouldn't even hear of it.  But finally, in the fall of 2000, I approached him again and convinced him that I was an adult and that I couldn't think of anything in the world I would rather do than to help my father survive.  We took all the tests.  We were a perfect match.  The transplant was scheduled for June of 2001, immediately after I was to have completed my Master's degree.  Instead, he died of complications resulting from an infection in his dialysis catheter on the last day of March.  My mom always says that it was his ultimate way of refusing my kidney.

It messed me up.  I'd never experienced pain on that scale before, and I didn't know how to respond.  I left school in the middle of the semester, later thankful that my professors allowed me to take incompletes instead of just failing me.  I broke up with my long-term girlfriend, the woman who is now my wife, because I just had to escape feeling anything.  I didn't want to do anything, then I went the opposite way and threw myself as much as I could into my work so that I didn't have to think about it anymore.  But as hard as it hit me, it hit my grandparents harder.  My dad was their only son that they had regular contact with, as they were somewhat estranged from my uncle.  It was my father that would go see them on a regular basis after work.  My father that essentially took care of them as they neared their upper 80s.  My father who was the light of their lives.  My grandma took it especially hard, and we've always felt that his death was a blow that weakened her in a way that she never recovered from.

But 9/11 was the straw that broke her back.

On the morning of September 11, 2001 my grandma was getting out of her seat in front of the TV (we always jokingly referred to it as her throne...where she held court in her effervescent, constantly-talking way) when the news broke in to say that an airplane had struck one of the towers.  My grandpa says that she took a step forward, then a step back, then fell backwards into her chair.  Already weakened from her son's death, the shocking horror of the mornings events sent her to her bed for the day.  She felt sick, and cried through most of that day and night.  The next morning was market day, and she got up and tried to put a positive face on to go with my grandpa to the store.  On the way to the store, my grandpa said that she suddenly got quiet and slumped over in her seat.  She was gone before he could get her to the hospital.  He has always blamed 9/11 for taking her from him just a few months after he lost his son.

But at the time, I didn't know any of this  Because by that time I had completely subsumed myself in my work.  I was back at school, having completed my make-up classes from the previous semester, and in the midst of taking my qualifying exams that would make me a Ph.D. candidate.  Those exams are always extremely difficult...they are meant to be, as the last major hurdle to prove someone's readiness to earn a doctoral degree.  But for me, that summer, they were both torture and salvation.  I couldn't concentrate on school...not really...but working was the only thing that allowed me to not remember for minutes at a time that my dad was gone.  During the week of September 11 I was right in the middle of my quals.  I had taken the first two written tests and was in the process of working on some take-home essays that I was supposed to turn in on the following Monday.  September 11 was a Tuesday morning, though, and for the lab that I worked in that was the time for our weekly lab meeting.  And it was on the way to that meeting that I first heard the news that an airplane had struck one of the Towers.

I had stopped at the bagel place across the street from my apartment to grab a snack before lab meeting, when a lady came into the store and said, in a somewhat confused voice, that she had just heard on the radio something about a plane hitting the World Trade Center.  To this day, the most shocking thing about the story to me is that it completely didn't register.  I don't know how to explain it...I guess my mind was just so wrapped up in my world that nothing else could really sink in.  To be fair, no one in the store really reacted that strongly...I guess a stranger's puzzled comments weren't visceral enough to make us realize the horror of what had just occurred.  I remember that I just got my bagel, and continued on to the lab meeting without really thinking much more about it. 

We went through our entire hour-long lab meeting as usual...no one there had heard anything about the terror attack, or if they had then, like me, they never said anything about it.  It wasn't until after the meeting, when I went back to my apartment and found my roommate sitting on our living room floor in his underwear with all of the TVs in the apartment blaring that it finally hit me that something huge was going on.  He looked up at me when I came in with a haunted look on his face and said, "Dre'.  It's another Pearl Harbor," then got up and went into his bedroom.  After that, like pretty much everyone in America, I was glued to the TV for the rest of the day.  Stuck in shock and horror as the news repeatedly showed the Towers fall.  One after the other.  Then news coming through that the Pentagon had been hit.  Then, rumors that another plane was headed for the White House.  In one morning, everything that we thought that we knew about our safety in this world changed.  And life would never be the same.

Now, 10 years later, Osama Bin Laden has finally been caught.  In the last decade I have gotten married, and had two children.  I have completed my Master's and Ph.D, and am two months from the end of my post-doctoral work.  We have had two presidential elections, including one that introduced the first African-American president in history.  Gas prices have gone through the roof.  Our nation has been in armed conflict in several Middle Eastern countries.  Increased airline security has become a fact of life...we no longer even notice that we aren't allowed anymore to wait at the gate to welcome our loved ones when they come to visit.  We have to wait outside, or in the baggage claim, because we want to minimize the number of non-ticketed people who might have access to the airplanes.  And thousands of families have gone on for years  trying to fill the gaping holes left from the death of a loved one...whether it be someone that died in the Towers, that died on one of the airplanes, that died while trying to effect a rescue, or even that has died in the resultant fighting in the years since.

I'm not from New York.  I didn't personally know anyone that died in the 9/11 tragedy.  But I am an American.  The events of that day have played a large part in who I have become.  So this morning, though I am at work, I find that I just can't stop thinking about the events of a decade ago.  I can't stop thinking about my dad, about my grandma, and about who I used to be.  And I can't stop the tears that keep spontaneously running down my face as a part of me...a part that I didn't even realize was still holding its breath...finally gets to exhale just a little bit.  God Bless anyone who took the time to read my account.  I know that you have your own as well.  We all do.  God bless us all.