The 9/11 Time Anchor by Tina Erwin

There are those shattering moments in life that define time and space. We all have them. These moments anchor our memory at certain points in our lives. We connect memories to them like pearls on a necklace. The energy of those moments may affect us indirectly and yet directly because after each of them, we are never the same. We change because the world around us changed.

I was in 8^th grade English class in Greensboro, North Carolina on November 22, 1963 when President Kennedy was shot. I remember that the PA (public address) system came on and they interrupted class and made the announcement. I remember Walter Cronkite’s voice cracking as he pronounced the fate of the Kennedy family, the changing course of a nation and the reality that our illusion of living in a safe world was forever shattered.

On January 28, 1986, I was a Lieutenant Commander in the Navy, stationed in Norfolk, Virginia. I was home with the flu that day. I was resting when the news came on that Challenger blew up. I could not fathom such a disaster in the macrocosm being witnessed by the world and in the microcosm being witnessed by all of the astronaut’s families. My husband was Captain of a Submarine Rescue Ship that could perform salvage operations. He volunteered to immediately begin search operations with his ship. His ship USS Kittiwake, (ASR 13), eventually recovered that damaged ‘O’ ring that physically caused the accident. Looking back, I find it so strange to be connected to this event in its aftermath. Yet, in a thousand subtle ways, we are all connected.

I was sound asleep on September 11, 2001, when my sister called me from Virginia Beach. California is three hours behind the East Coast, so she was sure I would be asleep. Her frantic voice penetrated my sleep as I listened to the horror in her words. I rushed downstairs and turned on TV. My husband was at sea. I started calling my friends and neighbors. My friend Karen Ward came over and together we watched our world change again, and again, as each new piece of information came hurtling to us that not just the twin towers were hit, but the Pentagon as well and possibly the White House was next. There was a fear that one of the planes was headed to the West Coast to crash into some big building in Los Angeles.

Karen and I watched all the channels on television for most of that day. It was as if our world came to a halt. I will always be grateful that Karen shared that moment with me, that neither of us was alone watching this. The companionship of a wonderful friend or family member, helps to mitigate the initial trauma of any powerful event.

When any of us watch real life horror, we suffer trauma, to greater and lesser degrees, depending on who we are, where we are in relation to the event and how we approach life. Bad things happen to good people. The indelible memory is forever etched in our brain as well as the date, time and place of a national trauma. This becomes a time anchor. We will remember other events in our lives in relation to that time anchor.

Perhaps one of the hardest things about national traumatic events is the blunt reality that we are never really going to know for sure what actually happened that day, whether it was ‘that day’ in 1963, 1986 or 2001. If we are wise, we reserve judgment for the whole story is seldom what we think it was. Unlike the Tsunami of Dec 26, 2004, where we do know the cause was an undersea earthquake, the other events are man made. Maybe that is the hardest part. Natural disasters as bad as they may be are part of the ‘act of God’ scenario that we know we have to accept. But when one person deliberately harms another or is negligent then there is a huge sense of injustice.

In the end, the only way to balance the illogic of injustice is to remember that karma balances everything, whether we can perceive it or not. So today, the time and place anchor that is 9/11 will remind us where we were, who we were with and how we felt when our world stood still.