[BrandyHagz]

Monday marks the fifth anniversary of the most tragic day in US History, September 11, 2001.

Almost everyone remembers where they were the day they heard the news of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and The Pentagon as well as the hijacking and crash of United flight 93 in the field in Pennsylvania.

We’ve had five years to reflect on the changes this has made to the fabric of our country and our families, but today, we remember and celebrate the lives of the victims who lost their lives on the horrible morning of September 11th.

You can read a special tribute to each September 11th victim by visiting 2,996 - where more than 2996 bloggers will honor a victim via blog posting.

Please feel free to post and discuss your thoughts about today’s 5th year anniversary here.

[Janet Heath]

Brandy,

Thank you so much for posting this.

[intladoptionblog]

I will honor this by posting this information on my blogs.
Thank you.

[SchmennaLeigh]

We sometimes forget that children were lost on this day five years ago. Children.

One will always hold a special place in my heart. His tribute is written here: Sparks from the Anvil: In Honor of David Reed Gamboa-Brandhorst as part of the remembrance project.

He was three years old. He had two dads who loved him to pieces. And he was an adoptee from birth.

It boggles my mind and breaks my heart. Keep David's family, all members, in your thoughts and prayers as we go through this fifth anniversary.

Know more adoption stories attached to 9/11? Share them with us.

[angelkisses0102]

The Trade Centers played such a role in my life pre-9/11...without them I would not have met my DH(he worked in TWC at the time)...I would not have changed jobs and homes so I could be closer to DH...to work in 'The City.' I used the Twin Towers as my reference point each and every time my dierctionally impaired self got out of the subway. I would walk through the lower levels of TWC and shop and people watch...to this day I still have a cactus dish garden that DH bought me at the open air market there one day after work and lovingly carried home, on Metro North (the train,) to me.

The last time I was in the Trade Center was May 2001...I was in a training class in a nearby building, I knew we were leaving the city soon...so I walked out of my way and just took in the Trade Center...got some cash from an ATM...and walked away. A few short weeks later...as we drove away to our new lives in Florida...I turned around one last time and said goodbye to the city that I had grown to love...I watched those towers until I could no longer see them.

On September 11, 2001 I was just starting a new job...I went back to the lunchroom to grab a cup of coffee...the TV was off...it was shortly before 9am when I heard my new boss scream out 'OMG Karen turn on the TV' and to my horror I saw the burning Tower...I got on the phone and called DH and in a memory forever etched in my head I saw the second plane hit. I, as so many of us were, was forever changed in an instant...innocence now lost.

Friends, family, and former coworkers we all impacted. We did not lose a family member but...there were many who we knew or who had an immediate family member directly impacted. DH's stepmother worked in an adjecent building...but was on vaction in Las Vegas...or she would have been one of those faces we see so often running out of the city...eyes wide, covered in the ash. She is a changed person...

Shortly afer 9/11 a story was published in our local newspaper about a young widow and her 1 year old son...who's husband worked for Cantor Fitzgerald. They had moved to our area after the tragedy...to be closer to her family. A quote from her struck deep into my soul. She talked about her new beautiful dream home...about how she was trying to build a new life for her and her son and she said something like...'I am living in the home of our dreams, the dream that we shared and worked for. But the only reason I am living this is because my husband died on 9/11.'

Shortly after 9/11 DH did all the research for pursueing the adoption we had talked about but had not done much about...we were busy living our new lives and enjoying our days...little did we know that our baby girl was born just 5 weeks prior to 9/11and would bring us so much hope in the face of a new world that were suddenly forced to live in.


We moved to our new house in August 2002...with the baby girl we would not have had if 9/11 hadn't happened. We met our new neighbors...all of us recently reloacted from the greater NY area...most of us with younger childeren....including that young widow with a now 2 year old son...living in her dream house...without her husband who had worked at Cantor. Our kids played together...we played together and we learned so much about living from her.

To M & A and of course E...because of you...we will never forget.

Blessings to all who were impacted by this day 5 years ago. May we never forget.

[dpen6]

I didn't want to remember the sadness. I didn't want to watch the 5th year rememberences. I didnt want to remember.

I was not personally impacted. But I did have neighbors who were.

I did watch the remeberences. I am so glad I did because we can NEVER forget.

[specialk4b]

Let us not forget the worst act of war on American soil. On that day, America lost her innocence and our lives were changed forever.

Let us not forget those who died in the attack.

Let us not forget the first responders who answered the call. Some gave their lives, some still suffer the effects of that day. These were the first soldiers in the war on terrorism.

Let us not forget those still fighting that war and the sacrifices made by them and their families.

Let us not forget...

[MicheleB]

It is hard to watch, but we need that reminder, we need to remember, so that those people did not loose their lives in vain...

Not only did several thousand loose their lives, but the Institute for Trauma and Stress at the New York University Child Study Center is tracking 700 children who lost a parent, or parents in 9/11. 700! Here is the article I read about these children five years later:CNN.com - Children of 9/11*old enough to ask about Daddy - Sep 11, 2006

I will continue to say a prayer for these families today!

[jenn2004]

This has been on my mind all day, My heart goes out to everyone who lost a dear loved one on that tragedy day, so sad!

[Quesita]

I guess it was about this time last year that I was standing outside watching the smoke rise up from what used to be the towers. The wind blew the smoke down to Brooklyn the first two days. On Thursday, the smoke envoloped my neighborhood, Jackson Heights,...a stink of burning plastic, metal particals in the air... so thick it was hard to walk and breath.

I wrote a piece on the effects of 9/11 on the immigrant communities that I serve. I think I am allowed to include the link (MicheleB will take care of it if it is against the rules ).

http://www.911digitalarchive.org/objects/1324.pdf#search=%22kc%20williams%20immigration%20% 22

The first piece... Fear, Desperation and Hope is mine. It is quite long, and quite partisan... but I thought some of your might be interested in it.

[SchmennaLeigh]

Thank you for the link, Michele.

On the first anniversary, I watched a 20/20 special with Jane Pauley and the children born on and after 9/11 to fathers who had died in the attacks. I sobbed so incrdibly hard at the end as they panned across the children born in those 9 months after 9/11... and played the song by Lonestar, "I'm Already There."

He called her on the road
From a lonely cold hotel room
Just to hear her say I love you one more time
But when he heard the sound
Of the kids laughing in the background
He had to wipe away a tear from his eye
A little voice came on the phone
Said daddy when you coming home
He said the first thing that came to his mind

I'm already there
Take a look around
I'm the sunshine in your hair
I'm the shadow on the ground
I'm the whisper in the wind
I'm your imaginary friend
And I know I'm in your prayers
Oh I'm already there

I still can't handle that verse. I just can't. To step back from my own busy life in this past five years and realize that these children are now old enough to ask about and understand on a five year level ... where daddy is.... kills me.

[Saya]

I just posted this on the Guatemala board, but I thought it would make sense to report it here and be a part of this conversation.

I am a New Yorker. I grew up in Manhattan and I currently live in Brooklyn. Since 9/11 there is rarely a day that I don't think about it in some small way. I ride the subway into Midtown everyday, and everyday I have a pit in the bottom of my stomach, and a voice saying "what if today is the day it happens again?" These days, 5 years later, usually the pit is shallow and the voice is quiet, but this morning it was loud and my heart was in my throat.

On 9/11 I wasn't even here. I was in Chicago visiting my brother and was supposed to fly back that afternoon. I couldn't get home for 5 days. All I could think the whole time was I need to get home, I need to be able to cry and mourn with my city.

There was a short piece in the New Yorker this past week that I felt captured some of the sadness I feel - not just about all the innocent people who died so horribly, and not just about the wound that my beloved city will never recover from on some level, but how our country is inexorably changed. It's called "Old Country." This is an excerpt:

"Those of us in our eighties or late seventies can still remember when this was called a young country (it was said all the time in school) and, if we lived in New York, retain the vision of earlier iconic towers—the Empire State, the Chanin Building, the George Washington Bridge—going up, week by week, to prove the point. The Depression and Pearl Harbor and Guadalcanal and Dachau and Hiroshima aged and toughened us, to be sure, but perhaps not as much as the History Channel would have it. In the early sixties—in our forties, that is—we suddenly cheered up when some historian noticed that the late, Massachusetts-born, white-mustachioed Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., who had served on the bench into the nineteen-thirties, had in his long lifetime shaken hands with John Quincy Adams and also our new incumbent, John F. Kennedy. How young we were, after all!

None of us, no one in the world, holds such a notion today. Our United States feels as old as Tyre. Also anxious and bloodied; also short of sleep. What’s a shock, as this special September comes along, is that 9/11 is only five years back. Boys and girls born that spring and summer are entering kindergarten this year, and before they leave elementary school will have learned and tucked away the date in about the same place as Antietam and the typewriter and the Great Plague—that is, if they’re paying any attention at all. We worry about them, as elders do, but what we know about them that they don’t is that they are the older generation. Even while this ancient, inescapable irony dawns, we think back more often to a deceased parent or to a friend gone too early, to a favorite teacher or poet or departed doubles partner—anyone who died before September 11th—and wish ourselves that free again, and that young."

I don't know why it moved me so much - I guess because I feel I lost my innocence on 9/11 and I still mourn that. Thanks for letting me share.

P.S. - KC, thanks for the link to your article.

[mj77]

I am a Christian blogger on Adoption.com's sister site Families.com where I wrote a blog from a spiritual standpoint, in remembrance of those we lost on 9/11 5 years ago:

Our Own Terrorist Aboard

Not everyone here believes as I do. I want you to know I respect that, I just felt it an appropriate reminder to those of us who are of the Christian faith of the spiritual terrorist in our lives as well.

Blessings,
MJ

[EmorysMamma]

I woke up this morning with a heavy heart. September 11th, 2001 was such a horrible day. A part of me didn't want to think about it, but a huge part of me thinks it's important to think about all the people who lost their lives whether they be the victims or the heroes who gave their lives for the greater good of this country. My heart goes out to everyone affected by those attacks.

[Sniffles]

I posted these in the adoptee support section. I am reposting them again over here.

http://abcnews. go.com/US/ wireStory? id=2415716


http://www.twinciti es.com/mld/ pioneerpress/ 15476714. htm

No matter what we will never forget.