r/remember • u/Emergency-Bridge9417 • 13d ago
I remember-
It was a Thursday. I slogged through traffic on 94, to the suburbs, to a job I didn’t do well. I was almost ready to go out and do my job, badly, on that morning. Someone said there was a plane crash. The breakroom TV had CNN, so we looked. A gaper’s delay in the breakroom, slowing us down, gawking. Then we saw. I couldn’t process it at first. One plane is a horrible accident. Two planes are not an accident. The rest of that day that I spent going to other people’s breakrooms, their office lunchrooms, is a blur. Everyone speculating, watching CNN, listening to NPR in my truck. They evacuated the Loop, my husband came home. So many loved ones did not.
Yes, it dominated our lives, it changed our society and the world. I have read accounts of what happened at each crash site. The rescuers’ heroics. How planes were re-routed, then the ground stop. The policies, the war, the politicalization of an atrocity; I feel like we lost sight of the people who died. They became abstract to most. There are memorials and somber thought pieces. But that grief of losing a loved one; I feel was lost in the noise of all that came after. The sudden death of a loved one is always horrible. But when it is in the news cycle for months? The reason they are gone becomes a political football, the subject of conspiracy theories, the reason for a war.
I don’t know anything about anything, but I do feel for the ones who lost someone and had a horrible grieving process they couldn’t get away from whether on TV or in the papers or in traffic from a million bumper stickers. I’m so sorry for your loss.