Published September 9, 2021

When I finally was able to settle down enough to go to bed 20 years ago on the night of September 11, or maybe it was in the early hours of the next day, I closed my bedroom door. Although I was an adult, I felt like a frightened child. So, yes, whatever evil lurked outside my Baton Rouge apartment would have to open an extra door to find me on that night — and for many nights after the terrorist attacks of that unexpectedly world-changing Tuesday in the United States of America. When I think about that closed door, I laugh and I cry.

Twenty years later, I spend even more time than ever behind closed doors on a daily basis. What’s out there can easily kill me, and I’ve known this for more than 18 months. Once again there are too many deaths to wrap my mind around, just as there were in 2001, just as there were four years later with Katrina, which came during the first summer after the incomprehensible death toll and the horrifying images of that earthquake and tsunami in the Indian Ocean.

This weekend, we will continue to remember 9/11, but for some, the pain pile-on will just be too much. I know because my friends have told me so, and I am borrowing Michele’s phrasing here and in the headline because it says it better than I could have.

I can’t think of a time in my life when I’ve been more aware of the holes that are left in our world when tragedy strikes and people are suddenly gone from us. It’s as if someone turned on a machine that punches you in the gut and then walked away without turning it off. At a certain point, that trauma piles up to where, as Kris Kristofferson wrote, “You stand there like some old fighter, taking punishment you don’t even know you’re taking.” One day, those of us who survive all of this will wake up with more PTSD than they probably ever thought was building up amid COVID-19 and its variants while the social contract collapses around us.

In bits and pieces is how I am able to remember and to grieve right now. That’s the best I can do. That is how it is whether I am grieving the loss of one person or millions.

There was not a year before 2001 that confronted me with my own mortality like that one. Early that year, my mom underwent surgery to replace a heart valve. She survived to enjoy a big, round-number milestone birthday in May. That summer, I spent two weeks reporting on the national Senior Olympics, meeting and telling stories about people overcoming many obstacles to be able to compete in athletic competition in their 70s, 80s, 90s and beyond. One of them, an archer whose most recent big, round-number birthday had been 100, stood up out of a wheelchair and, while one of their children held their shirt, let the arrow fly. I spent weeks pondering why some people live that long and others do not, and 20 years later I still wonder why I am here and so many people I have known no longer are. Like my mom, I had a big, round-number milestone birthday in 2001, which means there is another one this year. The 2001 birthday was a few weeks away when the planes crashed into the twin towers and a day of madness and tragedy unfolded.

I’m writing about 9/11 because it feels appropriate to honor the dead, including the heroes who ran toward the danger rather than away from it, and I’m publishing this two days before September 11 to get out of the way before more thoughtful stories arrive. If I were a cellphone and not a human being, the icon at the upper right of my home screen would show that I am operating on about 25% power right now. Not quite running on fumes, but close. When I decided to publish a post about the terrorist attacks of 20 years ago, I considered a lot of possibilities to include. Amid the end of our 20-year war in Afghanistan, I’ve watched documentaries and listened as men who enlisted after the attacks wondered aloud what their service was all about in the end.

“There is a part of me that died in Afghanistan that I’ll never get back,” one of them said. Another recalled grappling with what we mean by freedom in America, and in a guard tower in Afghanistan, he ultimately concluded that it’s “the freedom to pretend. We feel entitled to our fictions, and when you go to Afghanistan, all of it, it’s like the curtain comes down.” A historian called 9/11 as clear a dividing line as we have between the 20th and 21st centuries for the U.S., saying, “The biggest thing that 9/11 did was it made America afraid.” A soldier, walking in uniform in Afghanistan, remembered realizing that he embodied the gap between so much of the conversation immediately after the attacks and what was left 20 years later as we were preparing to leave Afghans to fend for themselves. “No one even, like, really mentions 9/11 anymore, and to me, that’s the whole reason I’m over here.”

When I decided to write this, I promised myself that I would tell you only what you didn’t already know about 9/11. The preceding two paragraphs are as close as I want to let myself stray from that promise. They barely touch on the pain that piles on and ripples out after such tragic loss and as logical extensions of how we sometimes collectively respond.

After 9/11, I did so much crying, so much numbing out, so much staring off into the distance, a whole lot of reading and watching and listening. Eventually, I hit a wall. Then one Friday night in 2007 in the press box at the Vanderbilt University baseball stadium, I looked out at a gorgeous spring night as a favorite Bruce Springsteen song blared from the loudspeakers. Sung from the point of view of a firefighter rushing up the stairs of one of the towers, the song nonetheless has a power independent of its narrative. It was that power that took hold of me that night, and I suspect that it’s so for many people even today. And yet, if you listen carefully, you can be struck all over again by waves of emotion over the enormity of the point in time it marks from the perspective of a single person.

The last time I had been at that stadium, my mother was alive and didn’t know what was coming later that year to mark the beginning of the end. This time, there was a big hole left behind by her death the year before. As I let myself surrender to the power of the song, there was no one else around me, no baseball diamond in front of me, no deadline to meet, and no attention to the song’s connection to 9/11. I was tapped out on mourning all of the losses. I rocked out, sort of — motionless except for my pen drumming on a page of my baseball scorebook.

Don’t feel guilty about whatever limits you might have today or tomorrow or on 9/11/2021 for remembrances of death and evil and all things frightening. You can be respectful of those still mourning loved ones and of those more actively commemorating 9/11 and still protect yourself from the ongoing pain pile-on. You are allowed to care for yourself, whether that means hiding under a blanket fort, double masking, staying home yet again or watching videos of cute cats or puppies. Me? There are only so many times I can videos of people falling from a burning skyscraper, only so many stories I can read about families unable to be with a dying loved one in their final moments, only so many clips of health care workers all but broken by what they’ve seen again and again and again. I see so many people saying this on social media — New Yorkers, people near COVID-19 hot spots, and many others — and I am reminded that I am not alone in having limits to how much I can continue to process.

Take care of yourself. Another pandemic winter is coming. There will be no shortage of days of mourning.

Aerial photo of 9/11 Memorial park by Nick Starichenko/via Shutterstock.